Tuesday, March 12, 2013

More About Myself

I get unreasonable in my dealings with other people. I am, on the whole, more sociable than I ever have been, setting aside the stretches where I hole up to recover from one physical ailment or another. That is not to say that I am so very good with people, because really I am terrible by any sensible standard. There are a whole host of issues I have, and I deal with them more successfully sometimes than others. You'l pardon me if I've said all this before, but it hasn't gone way yet.

I am momentarily seized by a fit of rage any time someone indicates that they could not hear me the first time, and I must overcome that in order to repeat myself. I just say to forget about it any time that feels possible, because I'd rather sacrifice something I thought was worth saying than to say it again. Often enough what I have to say proves unworthy anyway, so why fight to get something out there? When I think that the person will insist on hearing my words again, then I bother.

It makes me awfully upset when people fail to connect with my references to pop culture or history. This really is unreasonable, because I'm not the sort to name-check the celebrities who make People Magazine or to listen to Top 40 hits. When I ran the Nature Lodge at summer camp, a team-building exercise I conducted was to give each staff member a celebrity and dispense clues all summer until they guessed it. They were fourteen and fifteen years old, and I was giving them "celebrities" like Pablo Escobar and Ambrose Burnside. Imagine my chagrine when they couldn't guess those.

Even when it's not a question of someone having the same cultural reference points, I get mad. If they don't know something, my first feeling is not delight that I can enlighten them, it's frustration that I have to. I would be a lousy teacher. Even if they only could have found out from me, I am displeased that I have to tell them. Someday I will have this stuff figured out. Probably it will happen sometime shortly after the last person willing to listen to me dies or runs out of patience.

1 comment:

Beverly said...

I am not certain of the situation, but remember, some people are hard of hearing. Others have short attention spans and when they get the tail end of the story, it may interest them.. and then they ask you to repeat what you were saying.

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