You can't be as productive a teammate, as present a friend, nor as pleasant an acquaintance.
(I have never met her, though I had a very pleasant e-mail acquaintance with her late husband, John Gregory Dunne). She has never published a word of nonfiction that I have not liked, and she has almost never published a word of fiction of which I can say the same.
But, he said, "my heart compels me to say some things that will not be pleasant for some of my Jewish acquaintances: I have a large family in Gaza.
Has someone ever asked you your weekend plans and you thought, "I don't want to think about my weekend plans... do I really have to answer that?" Most people prefer easy questions, like "what are you up to today," or "is school killing you these days?" Ideally, acquaintances would have a pleasant time answering your questions.
Although I am a member of the LGBTQ community, my relationships with trans people before Sumaya were mostly acquaintances with whom I had pleasant but trivial exchanges with.
A couple of years ago, for instance, a pleasant young man who was showing us around a winery owned by an acquaintance of mine in New York State mentioned that, as part of his final year at the Culinary Institute of America, he had gone to Davis for a six-week wine course.
Like so many others, those acquaintances are baffled by the beliefs that drove these apparently pleasant, hard-working people to commit meticulously planned suicides.
Friends and political acquaintances say he is a competent manager, skilled in finance, the pleasant man he seemed during the campaign -- if without the personal charm or media savvy of Mr. Orban.
Two old acquaintances relaxed on Christmas Eve in Pete & Shorty's Tavern in Clearwater, Fla., the conversation pleasant and benign for the first hour.
