Bitchy McBitcherson's Blog

Tag: people

  • it takes a village

    Today we left the house.

    *shudder*

    We were driving along and passed a street called Friendship Village Rd.

    kid: Do you want to go to Friendship Village?
    me: No.
    kid: But it sounds nice and friendly.
    me: I want to visit Mind Your Own Fucking Business Village.
    kid: THAT really wouldn’t be a “village” then.
    me: Mind your own business.
    kid: *silence*

  • I am not a social caterpillar.

    I keep trying to write something about my weekend, but I am still too tired to manage. It kept trying to turn into some large thing about introversion, which wasn’t what I actually wanted to say about the weekend.

    I am antisocial. I am an introvert. These two things are not the same. I have always been an introvert and have no reason at all to expect this to change. There have been studies which show differing brain activities between introverts and extroverts. This lends credence to the fact I was simply born this way, and will continue to be this way, short of a serious head trauma.

    Main Entry: an·ti·so·cial
    Function: adjective
    Date: 1797
    1 : averse to the society of others : UNSOCIABLE
    2 : hostile or harmful to organized society; especially : being or marked by behavior deviating sharply from the social norm

    Main Entry: un·so·cia·ble
    Function: adjective
    Date: 1600
    1 : having or showing a disinclination for social activity : SOLITARY, RESERVED

    Main Entry: dis·in·cli·na·tion
    Function: noun
    Date: 1647
    : a preference for avoiding something : slight aversion

    Today I will just look at antisocial in the first definition provided by Merriam-Webster. I am not always unsociable. This is a learned behavior, and is affected by my moods. There have been times in my life when I was not antisocial, there are times when I am less and more social. Being social always drains my energy reserves and I always need time to recuperate. However sometimes I am much more open to that, and sometimes I am even less enamored of social interaction than I am right now. I know many introverts who are much more social than I am, either by choice or simple function of their chosen career or significant other.

    There are many factors that play into my general antisocial nature, but probably the biggest one is that I just don’t tend to like people. Liking somebody is a big deal to me. This is not the same as hating everybody. I am not sitting here feeling intense hatred for everybody I do not actively like. I do not have enough energy to be bothered with that. Most people fall into the vast sea of indifference. If forced to look directly at them I might briefly feel something else toward them, but it is of little consequence.

    Admittedly this likely has ties in to my introversion. I have a friend who is an extrovert. Her assessment of people, if we speak specifically about them, is very similar to mine. She dislikes the same sort of behaviors and is very easily annoyed or disgusted by things. However her overall view of people, while not actually more optimistic than mine, is warmer than mine. I am convinced that this is because being around all those people, who are essentially in her sea of indifference, still gives her an energy boost.

    I know another extrovert who is so much an extrovert I actually believe it is pathological. It is basically impossible for him to not like somebody, no matter how much of a real and true complete asshole they are, because he simply gets such a big ass high from being around people. Literally the more the merrier for him. So much so, that he drives away people that are supposedly closer to him because he invites anybody he can think of to anything, even people that ones close to him have real reasons for disliking. He can sit through a party and do nothing but have a fight with somebody, and he is having fun. It is almost impossible for him to grasp that maybe the person he is fighting with is not enjoying it just as much. He feels like all human interaction is good. This is not a conceptual thing, it is real and physical for him.

    Since being around people drains me, I prefer to do it, either for work, or with people I really like, and I don’t seek out a lot of interaction with the masses. I know introverts who like a lot more people than I do, it is not solely a symptom of introversion, not at all. I also happen to have a very long and detailed memory. I don’t make an effort to hold a grudge, I just can’t help it. I still feel exactly how I felt when whatever happened, happened. I can hear the sounds. I can smell the smells. I probably know exactly what I was wearing. Plus the older I get the less tolerance I have.

    Now I find myself tempted into launching into something about friends, but I am way too tired for that as well. I also happen to be antisocial according the the second definition provided by Merriam-Webster, but that is also a post for another day. Today I am just going to stick with this.

  • Seriously?

    Somebody just forwarded me an email with 3 attachments, a pdf, a pub and a wps.

    Can you open these? I can only open the pdf file. I have no idea what to do with the others.

    I opened the non-pdf ones, created pdfs from them and sent them back. Not a huge deal.

    Here’s the thing. Also included in the forward was the email, a portion of which says:

    If you have any trouble opening any of these let me know and I will see if I can fax it to you or send it in another format.

    Why exactly is the first impulse to send ME an email telling me about the trouble opening them? I can imagine that they might think getting it in another format won’t go smoothly, but I know for a fact that when this person is sending me an email they are sitting right next to a fax machine.

    Also, the original sender is a business, trying to get a new customer. Why are they sending their information out like this? Not only are they sending three different documents (each one page only) in three different formats. They have also named them full sentences with spaces and periods, as in an extra . before the .extension. Surely this creates problems fairly often for the people they send them to. Why don’t they ask somebody what they should do instead? They totally overcharge for their services, they could afford to learn how to do it correctly.

  • One More Thing I Don’t Understand

    We went out for lunch today at a quick casual restaurant. There were five of us. When we were finished ordering and wanted to pick a table, we had a difficult time. There were a lot of tables and booths available. They were all for three or four people. Every single five or six person table or booth was taken. All but one of those was taken by only one or two people. One was being used by a party of four. What makes a single person think that they should take up a six person table? It just would not occur to me.

  • No Thanks

    It’s just not that magic to me.

    At 17 I got my first job in retail. Being trapped inside the mall for the entire holiday season, both the purchases and returns, was, let’s call it “unpleasant”. Working with the general public was not something I enjoyed on a normal day, but during the holiday season everything went to extra utter shit. The number of temper tantrums increased tenfold. There were people fighting with strangers over who was getting the last of some dumb piece of crap.

    Even on sale, it is an ugly damn sweater ladies. If you don’t both stop yanking at it you are going to ruin it, It will then be my job to damage it out, and since I already have more than enough to do today cleaning up after you fucks, it is really not going to make me happy. Merry Christmas.

    The closer it got to the big day, the longer my work hours and the shorter the shoppers’ tempers. Best of all, school was out for vacation so most shoppers were dragging along all form of snotty, fussing, writhing, complaining, demanding, brat with them.

    People could talk all they wanted about the magic of the season, but I saw what they were really like, and the overwhelming majority were not swept up in tides of joy, nor did they feel goodwill toward mankind. They felt aggravated, rushed, pressured, frantic, crazed and entitled. It was just like the rest of the year, only amplified. In my book giving some canned peaches to the food drive does not even out treating everyone at the mall like shit.

    Giftmas

    It all comes down to the gifts. I’m not opposed to giving gifts and I am not opposed to receiving them. I am a firm believer in the saying “It’s the thought that counts”, but I don’t interpret it the same way most people do. I do not think that just any gift will do because at least it shows they thought of you for a second. That is what a card or a phone call or an email is for. A gift shows what they are thinking of you, and if that thought is “Oh shit! I forgot to get you something and I really think I should because it is X day tomorrow. I was already in line when I realized this, but here is a random piece of crap set near the register lines for exactly this purpose.” I honestly don’t want it. I also really don’t want to give gifts like that.

    When I am out and about in the course of my life (or sitting on my ass surfing the web, as the case may be), and I stumble upon something that makes me think of a particular person, that is a gift worth considering. I don’t want to not buy it because there isn’t an X day until 9 months in the future. I don’t want to buy it and hide it in my cluttered closet for 10 months and find it after X day has passed.

    My father was never much of a gift giver, so when I was a teen I began to do the Christmas shopping from US. My action + his money, both names on the card. I’d start early and put thought into each and every gift, but I was a teen and not overly in touch with a lot of people on our list, so I probably had more misses than hits. As the time grew closer and I’d remember the people we’d left of the list, I would scramble to get *something*. I understand how it happens. I just hated the way it felt. If I didn’t know somebody well enough to buy a gift for them that they would actually like… If they weren’t on my mind enough that I remembered them when I put together the list… Why exactly should I be buying a present for them anyway? Because they were going to buy one for me? This was only of benefit to the retailers.

    This much is being spent on this person, so this much should be spent on that person. More expensive is *better*. They spent this much on me last year. The Christmas advertisements started at the beginning of November (they now start at the end of September is some stores). I was saturated with the commercialization of Christmas and I just wanted to wring it out. I did not feel holiday cheer, I felt holiday stress.

    This was what I was going to raise our family on? Yes, children LOVE Christmas. Children are selfish creatures. Humans are selfish creatures and the young ones have learned to hide it less. People pile tons of presents on them and that makes it an enjoyable holiday to them, and they want more. It wasn’t exactly a traditional I felt gung ho about passing on.

    If I am going to a person’s house for dinner, I bring along a bottle of wine or some other consumable I know they will actually use. If I am a house guest, I make sure to take them out to a nice meal. I am all for manners and thanking people by treating them to something. I’m just not that into providing a wrapped item because of a certain date on the calendar. I try to make sure the people I care about know it every day. If they need a certain amount of money spent on a certain date to know it, they probably don’t know me well enough that they should be expecting a gift from me anyhow. If I am going to attend a wedding or birthday party, then I will make a point of having a gift in time for the event, or I don’t attend. Like I said, I am not anti gift or anti manners. I just don’t want to be part of frenzied gift exchanges.

    None of the memorable gifts I have gotten showed up on Christmas. Many of my favorites showed up out of the blue, just because somebody happened to be thinking of me. It might be the gift giving season, but please, nothing for me.