by Rojas Oliva, entertainment editor

I want to tell you: in English one day someone made an insensitive comment about how honors/regulars kids wouldn’t be able to understand transcendentalism, and I was prepared to write an obvious and preachy personal column about gosh, how mean, unfair and ironic that type of generalization is and so forth. But maybe there’s something way more heedful hidden in such a comment, something we’re all guilty of.

We all have our little pretensions, whether it’s a question of taste, appearance, ideology, hip shoes or whatever, and it’s hard to see them in ourselves since they’re one of easiest and most universal of human habits to fall into: separating them from us. We’re “free” to try endlessly to put barriers between us and the inescapable knowledge that we are, all of us, human and thus grounded by a lot of the same primal needs to be loved, un-alone, and feel good and dignified about our lives.

Now, I really doubt this type of pretentiousness comes from genuine-deep-down-tummy feelings of superiority and tangible differences, and if on top of that we can all, from a distance, sort of agree that this type of mindset is socially repulsive, then why does it seem like we can’t avoid it?

Maybe we need a self-serving reason to fear it. So what might end up being the really insidious thing about this type of blind pretentiousness is what lies just underneath the type of cruelty that can only exist when people become things to each other: loneliness. Not just because it’s so unattractive that people will actually not be able to stop themselves from slapping you and no one will ever be your friend, but because of a way more intense and loss-of-anything-remotely-human-in-your-world type of loneliness.

Part of growing up is realizing we’re way blurrier a bundle of hopes, fears, and needs than most of us pretend to be. And somehow we have to create an image of even our closest friends from these tiny little pieces of them that manage to slip through all the noise and boundaries of hip irony and self-consciousness that communication requires in our generation, all while struggling to find and create whatever it is we think of ourselves as. It’s a question of how well you think you know other people, and how accurate your perception of anyone really is.

Maybe it’s not so metaphysical as all that, maybe it’s just biological. If we’re alone inside our own brains with no way to ever know what’s actually going on in anyone else’s head, can we still justify passing judgment and confining them? If we’re so sure we know who and what people are, and don’t take the time to even consider other possibilities, then we’re living in our own perfectly horribly lonely creations. We become just faces in the crowd to each other. Any hope of breaking that biological barrier and feeling things like genuine compassion or empathy disappear, as those lame shoe-toting people become not individuals, but vague collections of generalizations and abstractions. Things.

Now obviously, the type of awareness and hopefulness that is needed to avoid this is painfully uncool, naïve and exhausting, but the alternative, a world where I simply refuse to try and see other people beyond whatever is easy and convenient, seems ridiculous in a life as short and deathly serious as ours (also it just feels deep-down-tummy-better to be kind).

Like George Harrison, our heads are full of things to say, and given how hard it already is to find anything earnest to mean in the nebulous world of pre-adulthood, can we really afford to pay less attention to each other? Can you wait forever?