At the beginning of Lord of the Rings, Bilbo makes this speech, “I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”  Which confuses all the hobbits at his 111 (Eleventy-first) birthday, because they can’t work out whether or not it’s a complement.

I can’t either, but I think I finally get something of what Tolkien was talking about through Bilbo.

Most of my life, I have had three categories in which I categorised people; People I liked, People I disliked, and People I didn’t know.  Recently a fourth has been insisting itself on my admittedly clumsy attempts at sorting people out: people I want to like but can’t and I don’t know why but it frustrates me dammit!

Does this happen to anybody else here or is this just me?