Saw The Host tonight with Jenna and Patty. We missed the very beginning — frustrating — but the rest of the movie was pretty good: witty and beautiful and occasionally, but only occasionally, shocking.

In retrospect, this was clearly a movie to see with a different, higher-energy kind of crowd, i.e. my mysteriously absent fun horror movie friends. Well, but they'd have to be OK with subtitles too.

At his worst, an extrovert probably thinks of his friends as numbers to add to some grand total. At my worst, I start thinking of my friends as tools, each type of friend best for a specific situation. You know how Iron Man had that room of suits? Yeah, like that.

Had an argument with Jenna today in front of company... Hamlinites seem to function on different social rules sometimes, or maybe it's just my own upbringing. I know I've been in situations here where what I thought was polite has been considered totally weird, even rude. Even the actual argument came down to a different understanding of social rules.

(Well, maybe not ultimately, but to save a few hundred bucks a month I'm... willing... to steer clear of certain hornet nests.)

That said, I let the argument go forward because I feel I've become too milquetoasty of late. I need to start standing up for myself again, and here's the important bit: I need to do this on whatever playing field I'm given.

I realized today at work that I've been apologizing every time I talk to someone from another department. Excessive politeness used to be a bad habit of mine in high school, and I've since learned that an over-abundance of politeness, of deference, leads to being pushed around and taken advantage of.

It's harder to act on that knowledge... to think your way out of overthinking.

Fun fact: I suspect that there's a connection between my over-politeness and my paranoia. From in here, it seems like most of my life can be extrapolated from a few dominant character traits.