And I Wasted All My Time Waiting Up For You to Make Up Your Mind

So I'm sitting at this baseball game about a year back, and the girl I'm sitting next to is seeing one of the players. They aren't officially dating yet, but it seems to be heading that direction. She doesn't know much about baseball other than the uniforms make everyone look better, so she asks me what I think about the player of interest. I tell her he has a couple of strengths that will carry him for a little while, but that his biggest problem is that he performs poorly under pressure. He simply wasn't a clutch player. If he was coming up with two outs and runners on in a close game, I was heading for the concession stand to get my meal because he's making the third out. Like Willie Mays under a flyball or Lou Gehrig with the bases loaded, it was just going to happen.
Turns out, one time she was talking to him about baseball and for whatever reason, she decided to share my comments with him. Thankfully, I don't think she credited them to me, although if she wanted to, I would gladly say I was their author (I thought about this, and although it would remove some of the humor of her passing off astute observations as her own, it would make the relationship a little better. I just like to see those things work for people). It came as a shocker to her that he became visibly upset at this. She couldn't understand why telling someone that they perform horribly at their job when it matters the most would make that person upset. (Oh and future reference, telling any guy they don't perform under pressure in any circumstance is a bad idea. It's just emasculating from so many angles.)
This brings me to what I really wanted to address in the last post, but wound up laying down a challenge. I'm a free-wheeling guy. I take chances and sometimes those don't work out. I take risks that would give Mike ulcers (for all I know, him simply knowing my actions, or lack thereof, might weaken his immune system prepatory for an ulcer). But I do so with a degree of foresight and maturity that makes those choices understandable. I have come to realize that all people do not act this way, but rather still walk around the proverbial New York City with dollar bills dangling from their pockets, expecting not only that people will not take them, but that people will actually add to them. Yes, it sounds a little crazy when couched in those terms, but I've seen it.
I spent a couple days around people who seemed to live in the world, but acted like they were better than the world. It was a little arrogance, mixed with a little success, mixed with a skewed paradigm on things. Stir it together, and it becomes immaturity. It's what you feel when someone expresses a superiority complex. It's what you taste when you try and start a conversation and they have no interest in that topic, or any other you propose. It's what you hear when their talk is centered on their life and their accomplishments. And it's ugly.
I'm going to stop there. I have to catch myself from time to time and wonder how many of these things do I embody. I'm ashamed to say that I notice them in myself more than in my friends, and I know this is the truth for the most part. However, I have little doubt that if people were to ask if I were mature or immature, I would be the former and if there were to be a spectrum with mature being 80 and immature being 0, I would be upwards of 65. Good enough to make the bigs due to the high scores in other categories, but something that would be beneficial for me to improve.
What I'm getting at is, it's amazing how immaturity can completely alter the way a person is viewed. They can go from A-list to D-list in a matter of moments if immaturity is found. Obviously, we're not talking about people who are 16 or so, because for the most part, the ability, or expectation, of maturity is not there. I don't expect 13-yr-olds to be gauging how there actions will effect not just them or their friends, but other people in the area. I do expect it from anyone who has graduated high school.
Yes, we all make mistakes and sometimes say things that simply shouldn't be said. It happens. About a month back, I made a comment in a group of people that getting engaged on valentine's day was cliche. Then I made the faux pas of saying that getting engaged on New Year's Eve was cliche. Did the girl just behind the guy I was talking to just get engaged that past New Year's Eve? Of course. I quickly conceded that it might not be cliche given the right circumstances. (Side note: Under most circumstances, I still think it's a little cliche to get engaged on either of those days, but if the relationship is at the level and those events do come, you either have to propose on those days or before those days. You can't wait until after because that would ruin those holidays, as the girl is probably expecting it to come and if it doesn't, then she'll start to wonder why, and having a girl wonder about the seriousness of your relationship is never good. Ever. Ever.) The key is to make those instances happen less and less, and when they do, be quick to correct them. This is what adults do. Or at least this is what adults worth talking to do. Word.