Shadowing the Enemy

'Tis the season to be annoyed. In the brief weeks between Thanksgiving and winter break, most of us are so swamped with schoolwork and other obligations that we scarcely have time for ourselves. And as the semester grinds to a close, we often find ourselves in a constant state of being annoyed with people. There is temporary annoyance, when lack of sleep or too much pressure leads us to see everyone around us as getting in our way. Then there is annoyance as an attitude toward life, when we see everyone around us as getting in our way all the time.

But what is most common among us is annoyance at particular people. As we go through our days, we encounter certain individuals who, quite frankly, drive us nuts.

We all know who they are. They're the professor who can't get enough of himself, the girl in your class who never shuts up, the person from across the hall who always comes in to say hello and never seems to leave. On good days, we avoid them. On bad days, we silently curse the day of their birth. But is it at all possible that we are not giving them the benefit of the doubt?

During a typical day, we cross paths with so many people that if we were to try to tally up the number of lives that have brushed up against ours in the last 12 hours, we wouldn't be able to do it. Sure, you might remember a day's conversations. But what about all the little interactions, the unintended ones? A person is unlikely to remember the guy whose toes he crushed as he squeezed his way into lecture late, or the girl who groaned behind him in the lunch line as he carefully selected individual strands of spaghetti, or the student he interrupted to make a comment in class. Yet to each of those people, he has just defined himself as inconsiderate, selfish and irritating. And if he interrupts the same student again, or if the same person lands behind him twice during his little spaghetti ritual, then he is branded as obnoxious, rude and "annoying."

But imagine for a moment that, through some sort of Career Services-style "externship" program, you could pick out that annoying guy and "shadow" him for a day, without him knowing that you were there. In your quest to explore his life, you follow him back from class to his room, where he sits around and cracks jokes with his roommates for a while before calling his mom. Over dinner, you listen as he talks with a friend who just failed a test, managing to convince her that it's not such a big deal. Later, you read over his shoulder as he writes an e-mail to a high school buddy about the things he likes and dislikes about this semester, and you watch him suddenly panic when the phone rings and he finds out that his sister was in a car accident (but only broke her leg).

And if you could somehow read his mind, you might be surprised to find within it a genuine passion for some idea or person, a feeling forged out of a depth and sincerity that his irritating comments in class would never have revealed. The pressures of college life often lead us to dismiss people too quickly, when the truth is that they simply aren't that bad. If we took the time to see who they really were, we would discover the incredibly deep pool of personal integrity that lies just below those little things that make us write people off as not worth our time.

Is it really true that most people have a deeper, better side than what we usually see? It's tough to prove. But as a slice of evidence, consider the "blocking" process, in which first-years select the people with whom they expect to live for the next three years. Despite the College's efforts to create complimentary rooming groups, countless uncontrollable factors make rooming placement for first-years more or less arbitrary. As a result of this randomness, one might expect a mass exodus from these contrived rooming groups by sophomore year as students chose to live with people who shared more of their interests. Yet every year, when blocking season rolls around, the vast majority of first-years choose to continue living with at least one of their current roommates.

Why? Some students might argue that they chose to remain with their old roommates because they knew what it was like to live with them. But this excuse becomes weak when we consider that most students who abandon their original roommates would give exactly the same reason. Others might claim inertia, but since when do students around here do things out of laziness?

The real reason that most people decide to remain with their roommates is that their roommates are the people they know the best--and the people they like the best too, despite the fact that they were randomly assigned. Chances are you would have hated your power-hungry roommate if you knew him from a student organization, or your loud-mouthed roommate if you overheard her in a dining hall, or your grade-grubbing roommate if you met him in a class. But when we live with these people, "power-hungry" becomes "dedicated," "loud-mouthed" becomes "outspoken," "grade-grubbing" becomes "conscientious"--not because we're blind to these people's habits, but because we understand the motivations behind them. The better we know people, the more opportunity we have to see through their annoying tics into the person below who makes them great.

I am not arguing that our reasons for disliking people are always illegitimate. Few of us would choose to block with Saddam Hussein, regardless of how well we got to know him our first year. I'm also not arguing that living with a person for a year will guarantee friendship--some people are just difficult to live with, and that's that. But most of the time, our judgements of people are based on little more than a lack of patience.

There are moments in our lives when the exceptional qualities of people we know shine through and surprise us. Sometimes tragedy alerts us to the goodness in people. When a familiar person dies unexpectedly, our criticisms of that person suddenly look very petty in the face of what we are forced to summarize as the contributions of his or her life. Sometimes goodness comes out in a crisis, when the most unexpected people astonish us with unpredictable compassion. And sometimes, it shows at those moments when you happen to stumble into the deeper part of other people's lives--when they confess a secret love or ambition to you, or when you see a beautiful birthday card lying half-written on a desk, or when you catch them alone crying or in a moment of private prayer.

But if we were more generous with our judgements, perhaps we wouldn't have to wait until someone died or until something else dramatic happened to see the more meaningful side of people. As students, we are trained to be careful critics of everything, never to open a book or newspaper without an eye to its flaws. Yet if we looked at the people around us with a concerted effort to discover the best in them, might it be possible that they wouldn't seem so annoying to us after all?

In the remaining days of school, as we get more and more on each other's nerves, try to smile at that annoying kid in your class. And if you see me on the lunch line, tap me on the shoulder and say hello. I'll be the one in front of the spaghetti.

Dara Horn's column appears on alternate Fridays.