com·part·men·tal·ize
To separate into distinct parts, categories, or compartments
I have a friend whom many would recognize by name, but whom many will never meet in real life. He's a true example of compartmentalizing. Today he sent me an email that said "Our worlds collide" and contained a Word of the Day definition for *compartmentalize*. A true oxymoron.
ox·y·mo·ron
A rhetorical figure in which incongruous or contradictory terms are combined
The Rancid Goat examines the need for compartmentalizing your life (something he does very well, in fact. He refuses to allow me to meet any of his other friends), but I think I have the opposite problem. I need more compartmentalizing. Todd says that mixing different sets of friends is "like mixing dark and light liquors together, a potential devastating combination". I'm starting to agree with that. It creates a sort of sludge pile from which you can't seem to pull out anything that hasn't been tainted by another. A lot of people, like Kim, only eat one particular thing at a time. Potatoes first, chicken second, bread last, for instance. Perhaps that's how we should model our lives. I mean, if you just throw it all in there together and mix it up, you've got some strange bready potato that tastes like chicken. Keeping a nice wall between each allows you to partake of the true flavor of each particular dish.
So what I'm really saying is that friends are like chicken. With compartmentalizing, you could introduce a friend from Group A to Group B and it would be like dunking chicken into special sauce. Extra flavoring. Spicing things up a bit. When you allow everything to run together, the sauce is only going to dilute the mix.
What in the world am I talking about? I should really stop talking.
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3 comments:
No, I understand. But it always depends on exactly which friends, you know? Like there's pb& j, and celery goes great with peanut butter, but not with jelly. So Todd is peanut butter, we're jelly, and his "blue group" is celery in this case.
I have a few different groups of friends and for the most part, don't intersect.
Mmm. Mashed Potatoes!!
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