It branched off a conversation among me, E, and T.

E first stated how he lived on his own tight budget and tried to earn money from work and not financially be dependent on his parents. E then stated he wanted to go to McDonald's because he was hungry and (more importantly) he craved it. I offered to make him a sandwich, but he rejected. I said, "a more money-saving solution to 'being hungry' compared to going to McDonald's is to stock up from CountDown and make your own sandwiches". T disagreed with my point, and he told me how he thought I was "not getting the point" which is "E just wanted to have McDonald's".

Yeah, all the discussion between me and T were "hypothetical"; yet it still tells me something about myself. T made the example of two persons - one is an "A+ average" type of person who spent all his time studying, and the other is a person who got involved in heaps and heaps of "people activities". These two persons were imagined to be attending the interview for a same position at a certain company. T suggests that the "peoples person" in the situation above are more likely to get an offer for the job; and despite T emphasizing how the character in his example are 'hypothetical', I can feel obviously that I am being modeled by the study nerd type. Up to this point, I would presume that T based his statements on other given information, e.g. I am a younger person than him, I take AP, English is my second language.

The problem comes in here. For perhaps any way I express, due to the difference of the way the listener interprets, I could almost always be interpreted in different ways. It's like parsing the same bit sequence using different encoding tables - another encoding table would give you another decoded content. In the actual case, which I think T wouldn't know unless I told him specifically, "telling E not to go to McDonald's" is (or to T, "might be") exactly what I had in mind of doing - McDonald's is not essential; as someone who has a bit of difficulty keeping to his budget plan, he should not be eating at McDonald's. In the actual case, even if I understood that E really just wanted to "go to M's" instead of "deal with (?) being hungry", although which I'm not sure whether or not is the case, I would still have said the same thing. If T (confidently) expect me to be able to get E's point, then T would probably interpret my saying as in the "even if - would still" case. For me, experiencing this difference between my expression and how it was interpreted seems to suggest that I'm one more step ahead than before - which is good.