Several years ago, I moved to a new state far from home, and started the arduous process of attempting to make friends. I met someone, I’ll call her Gertrude, who seemed great at first. She was nice and friendly and chatty, and we started grabbing lunch every once in a while. Unfortunately, by the time I spent enough time with her to figure out that Gertrude was smug and narrow-minded and relentlessly negative, those lunches and texts and hangouts were routine, and I was stuck. […]