Monday 17 January 2011

it must be a Monday

The pig-goat-god thing of Trenthorst


I am constantly astonished at how little time it takes for people to manage to dampen enthusiasm and squash initiative. Instead of seeing the positive applications to take only the negative and act thusly. I am also deeply suspicious when people start sentences with this statements like "I don't do/say this to make you feel bad but..." In my experience if you begin with this statement you already know that what you have done or said has probably hurt someone's feelings or made them feel bad.

As someone who likes to A: help and B: tends to see a hole and likes to fill it I regularly find myself on the wrong end of the stick. I remember clearly a time when I was waitressing at a small hotel in the middle of nowhere where I tried to "help out" by offering some of my experience from working with a huge catering company. This was met, much to my surprise, with jealousy and resentment. Instead of making things go smoother which they needed to do, my other co workers were pissed off. I was 22 or so, so probably I barged in like a know it all and upset the apple cart completely but I meant well and instead of actually talking to me and explaining what I had done wrong, people just treated me like crap, I eventually quit the stupid job and we were all happier for it.

I like efficiency. Just ask my team leader at work. I like to organize stuff so that it runs well without much work and I don't like to waste time. I also like to fill a niche, hopefully without causing too many ripples to do it but sadly that's almost impossible. There's always someone some where who gets upset about something no matter what the original intention was. It happened to me at another job I had where I learned to be ultra prepared to the point of anticipating my boss's every whim and move. This got me a lot of flack for being a brown noser but what people didn't understand that in being prepared and having stuff ready I avoided getting yelled at, stuff thrown at me and possibly fired. I did this out of a sense of self preservation, not to get a raise ( which incidentally didn't happen.) I don't talk these things here to come off like the victim I'm not. I make my own bed and I am well aware that what I do has consequences but what I think other people need to be aware of is that my actions are not always done for reasons that they believe and that people should look deeper than the surface to see what is really going on. Or just ask instead of assuming they know it all. Trust me, we never know it all.

The only trick I know against upsetting people is not to bother doing anything which kind of makes being in clubs where volunteering is a must for the club to survive difficult. We have run into this time and time again with all the various hobbies we have been involved in. Eventually no matter what you do, you will step on someone's toes or cross some invisible border and manage to piss another person off. There are still groups of people I know who can't bear to be in the same room as each other because of some toe stepping that went on many years ago.

It's kind of sad really.

Nowadays I just try to walk away when territorial spats occur. Unless I really screwed up and went overboard I have come to realise that I am not responsible for other people or what they feel. Someone once told me "No one makes you feel anything, you do that all by yourself. How you feel about any given situation is up to you and you make the choice all on your own. You need to accept responsibility for your feelings, life works a lot better that way."  It took me a very long time to understand how correct this statement was. I was the sole owner of my feelings and it was my choice what direction to take them in in any given situation. So now when someone says to me "You made person X feel like this" I question it instead of instantly taking on the guilt.

As a thinking human being I know when I've fucked up. Unless you are psychopath you know when you've messed up and usually I act accordingly and apologize or try to undo the mess I have made. When this is not the case I think Madonna sums it all up very well when she sings "Don't put your shit on me."

Other than that it's a Monday. I'm not particularly well today but I'm ignoring it ( mostly). I tend to read a lot of endometriosis forums on days like this and I spend a lot of time crying at the computer because it's hard to read some of the terrible things these women go through and I go through them too. It's also cathartic and it helps to know I'm not alone.

I'm tackling the mountains of laundry and trying to get the majority of the downstairs cleaning done. It's been too long and the house feels dusty. I like a clean house and spring is coming. We'll also have people in the house on Wednesday to fix the toilet in the master bathroom. I'm kinda curious to see how that's going to go what with the tank being built into the wall an' all. But having the guys from Kritsch come in is enough to spur me into housecleanmouse mode. I don't mind my own mess to a certain point but I don't need strangers seeing it. :P

So now it's back to vacuuming and mopping...it keeps my mind occupied which today is a good thing because otherwise I'd be even more down that I already am.

So...Be excellent to each other.

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