When it comes to interacting with others, I know I can be an ass. I know that even as I try to avoid this tendency, as I try to be a nice person, people tend to think of me with ill regard. I don't mean kind, charitable people; rather, I mean worldly, do-it-on-your-own people, the types who are subject to their daily changing personal whims.

This all flies in the face of the kind of persona I try and think I exude. In spite of my easily offended nature, I think of myself in terms of being a thoughtful, considerate, jovial person. I go out of my way to offer the types of common courtesies to my coworkers I hope they'll offer in return. I am more patient and forgiving than most. I almost daily seek to initiate conversations and interactions that will promote and build on common ground.

So I take severe exception to people who appear to take long-term offense to me or my behavior. I cannot help but take it personally, deeply personally, when others shut themselves off to me under the guise that I am impossible to work with, especially when they do so without so much as attempting to seek a common ground or understanding themselves.

Of course this rant all has relevant context. Excluding the drama of my problems with C. some months back and dismissing the ongoing but (I hope) improving problems with the K.T., I feel embroiled in yet another growing misunderstanding between S. and myself, which would be bad enough by itself but it's spreading to the reasonable, stable half of that partnership, G.

And I'm faced with the same problem I always encounter in such situations: should I act and proceed as though I don't care, that it doesn't bother me, and as if I'm completely ignorant of the change in the other person's behavior or should I instead confront the problem and, in this instance, the dreary, tedious, dull, reactionary, contrary, small-minded, frumpy, borish perpetrator of said problem?