Total Perspective Vortex
What really happened to Trillian? Theories abound, but you can see what she's really been up to on this blog. If you're looking for white mice, depressed robots, or the occasional Pan Galactic Gargleblaster you might be better served here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/hitchhikers/guide/.
Don't just sit there angry and ranting, do something constructive.
In the words of Patti Smith (all hail Sister Patti): People have the power.
Contact your elected officials.
Don't be passive = get involved = make a difference.
Words are cool.
The English language is complex, stupid, illogical, confounding, brilliant, beautiful, and fascinating.
Every now and then a word presents itself that typifies all the maddeningly gorgeousness of language. They're the words that give you pause for thought. "Who came up with that word? That's an interesting string of letters." Their beauty doesn't lie in their definition (although that can play a role). It's also not in their onomatopoeia, though that, too, can play a role. Their beauty is in the way their letters combine - the visual poetry of words - and/or the way they sound when spoken. We talk a lot about music we like to hear and art we like to see, so let's all hail the unsung heroes of communication, poetry and life: Words.
Here are some I like. (Not because of their definition.)
Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Smart Girls
(A Trillian de-composition, to the tune of Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys)
Mama don’t let your babies grow up to be smart girls
Don’t let them do puzzles and read lots of books
Make ‘em be strippers and dancers and such
Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be smart girls
They’ll never find men and they’re always alone
Even though men claim they want brains
Smart girls ain’t easy to love and they’re above playing games
And they’d rather read a book than subvert themselves
Kafka, Beethoven and foreign movies
And each night alone with her cat
And they won’t understand her and she won’t die young
She’ll probably just wither away
Mama don’t let your babies grow up to be smart girls
Don’t let them do puzzles and read lots of books
Make ‘em be strippers and dancers and such
Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be smart girls
They’ll never find men and they’re always alone
Even though men claim they want brains
A smart girl loves creaky old libraries and lively debates
Exploring the world and art and witty reparteé
Men who don’t know her won’t like her and those who do
Sometimes won’t know how to take her
She’s rarely wrong but in desperation will play dumb
Because men hate that she’s always right
Mama don’t let your babies grow up to be smart girls
Don’t let them do puzzles and read lots of books
Make ‘em be strippers and dancers and such
Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be smart girls
They’ll never find men and they’re always alone
Even though men claim they want brains
Life(?) of Trillian
Single/Zero
Wednesday, February 01, 2006
People stink.
There. I said it.
People absolutely stink badly.
One of the down sides to being a person type of animal is that we’re capable of reasoning and capable of making choices. And we’re capable of choosing to behaving badly, to treat our co-humans badly.
I’ve long suspected it’s me, that I bring out the worst in people.
That otherwise polite and well behaved people are moved to strong (negative) reactions to me.
If it’s not just me, if I’m not responsible for bringing out the worst in people, there are a lot of really horribly rude and bad behaving people sharing our planet.
Oh sure, even if I do bring out the worst in people there’s no excuse for some of the behavior I have thrown at me, but if it’s my fault I have to take rudeness assaults in stride. And I usually do. It’s a way of life for me. No, I don’t feel victimized. I feel that peoples’ natural reaction to me is rudeness. No, I don’t go around bullying or purposely inciting angry mobs. I try to keep as much to myself as possible and when I do have to interact with other people I try to be as polite and friendly as I know how to be, I’ve been known to paste on a happy face and smile like I really mean it in a lot of situations where other people would not even consider it.
I was raised to be polite. Which is fine. I have no problem with that. Because being rude or mean never solves anything but almost always makes things a lot worse. I’m trying so hard to feel nothing, no emotions, but I still care about other peoples’ emotions. I don’t want an emotionless society, and I don’t advocate going commando on the emotion front for most people. I want other people to feel emotions. I want other people to be normal. So yes. I go around faking a lot of emotions lately. Smile like I mean it, pretend to feel an appropriate feeling and consequential reaction. I even fake cried a few weeks ago. It didn’t feel good and it didn’t feel bad. It didn’t feel any way at all. Maybe deep down in there I was upset and the tears were a physical response to some deeply buried emotion. But in my conscience they were crocodile tears. I felt nothing but I produced tears. Which is fine, the situation warranted tears and so I performed the expected duty of response. I dunno. I don’t like who I’ve become but I didn’t like the old me, either, so really, at least I’m not crying real tears over upsetting facets of my life anymore so for me that’s an improvement. I like not welling with tears every time I think of HWNMNBS. It’s a huge improvement for me. I think it’s a good step down the road of apathy. I only well with tears over him sometimes now. It used to be all the time. Any thought of him, no matter how good, bad or fleeting, would produce watery eyes. Period. I just typed that, thinking of him, and my eyes are only slightly more fluid than usual. I still have problems with the bigger stuff, the memories or thoughts which still cause my heart to skip a beat and then ache still produce major tears, oops, right there, like that. Oh brother, here we go. I don’t know why I do this to myself either. I’m an idiot and a stupid girl, too. The whole thing is still, always, I guess, overwhelmingly sad for me. And you know, I miss him a lot. Oh be quiet. It’s my baggage and I’ll carry it until it kills me or gets lost.
Right. Okay. No emotions allowed.
I’ve had a hole in my heart for so long I try to fake it and just smile along.
Big stuff is still an issue but the rest of time I’m doing pretty darned good at feeling nothing and faking it when necessary.
Which is where being raised with good manners comes in handy. I know how to be polite which even for normal emotion feeling people often requires a great deal of faking it and smiling like you mean it. In fact being polite at it’s core is nothing more than smiling like you mean it. Faking it.
Because that’s what you do when you’re polite. You don’t hurt other peoples’ feelings. You act and react in the least offensive and most kind and caring way you can muster. Save your true feelings for behind blogged doors where you only offend or upset people who willingly choose to read what you honestly think.
Wanted to say....Said instead...
See? I’ve been faking it a really long time.
I’m not saying that’s good or an aspirational pinnacle of emotional health, but, given the choice of being polite or rude, the polite high road is almost always the better way to go for me. I don’t get what I want anyway, so, better to walk away politely than being rude. The only who looks and feels bad is the person who’s rude. If nothing else being polite should score karma points and judgment day points for those who worry about scoring those kinds of points.
I know. So enlightened of me. Such a good Girl Scout.Not really. When I’m bad I’m awful. So I try to make myself behave properly, politely, as a way of keeping the awfulness at a controllable level when it does rear it’s ugly head. There again, the lack of emotion is helping with that, too.
Smile like I mean it.
There’s this girl/woman/person who lives in my building. She and I have a schedule thing going where we cross paths a lot. I see her at least a couple of times a week. I’ve lived in my compartment for a year. Every week for a year I’ve been crossing paths with this girl. And every time, yes, every single time our paths cross she’s on her mobile phone yelling at the person on the other end. The person on the other end is often her mother. I know this because at a very high volume my yelling neighbor will say things like: “MOM! YOU’RE NOT HELPING THE SITUATION! THAT’S A STUPID IDEA! WHY ARE YOU ALWAYS GIVING ME SUCH STUPID ADVICE?! BARK BARK BARK GOD YOU’RE HORRIBLE! BARK BARK BARK! SHUT UP, MOM, JUST SHUT UP AND LEAVE ME ALONE! BARK BARK BARK! YOU DON’T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT IT! YOU’RE STUPID AND UNHELPFUL! BARK BARK BARK!” One day several people were waiting for the elevator. Yelling girl was naturally on her mobile yelling. “NO MOM! I’M NOT DOING THAT! THAT’S THE DUMBEST THING YOU’VE EVER THOUGHT OF, GOD YOU’RE STUPID. BARK BARK BARK NO THAT’S DUMB JUST SEND ME THE MONEY. BARK BARK BARK I NEED IT NOW NOT NEXT WEEK! BARK BARK BARK! NO! F#*K YOU MOM, F#*K YOU!!” Most of us were trying to busy ourselves with whatever we had available to busy ourselves. I found the new postal meter stamp very interesting for a very long time. One of the other people waiting for the elevator was an older lady. When the offensive swearing occurred some of the other people and especially the older lady were shocked and offended. I wasn’t. I’d heard this from yelling girl in the past. I knew it was probably coming and was braced for it. The older lady who probably doesn’t hear that sort of language very often stood there gape mouthed and wide eyed. The yelling girl said, “MIND YOUR OWN F#*KING BUSINESS!” to the older lady. One of the guys waiting said, calmly, “We’re trying to mind our own business but It’s impossible with you yelling and swearing in the lobby.”
‘F#*K YOU TOO!” she responded.
Older lady, just now able to speak, said “You should be ashamed of yourself. No one should speak to anyone like that, especially their mother.”
“I TOLD YOU TO MIND YOUR OWN F#*KING BUSINESS! F#*K YOU B!TCH!”
“Okay, that’s it, I’m calling security,” the calm guy said, motioning through the lobby to the door man.
At that point the elevator arrived and yelling girl sped onto it and started jabbing the buttons. Another woman jumped into the elevator and hit the “hold door” button. Another elevator arrived. The door man arrived. Calm guy relayed what had occurred. The door man said, “(Yelling Girl) come on, I have to write you up again.”
Again.
Ah. Okay. It’s not just me who finds this woman intolerably rude and offensive.
And yet she continues to go around being rude and offensive.
I know she’s like this outside the confines of our building, too.
One evening I stopped at the grocery on the way home from work. The grocery door is kind of weird. It’s not automatic open and there’s a gate type of thing to keep grocery trolleys in the store and off the street. (For the unurban dwellers: shopping trolleys are high theft items in cities. Stores take great pains and expense to keep the trolleys in the stores and off the streets.) This particular door is particularly weird and difficult to navigate. There’s almost always a line of people waiting to get in and out of the door. Not a huge deal. Really. One evening I was waiting to enter the store behind another woman. There were several people waiting to get out of the store.
I heard her before I saw her.
“GET OUT OF THE F#*KING WAY YOU STUPID C%NT!”
Ahhh. Just like home. Yelling girl.
Sure enough, plowing through the otherwise patient lines of people at the door was my yelling neighbor.
As she cut through the line and reached the door, the woman ahead of me made the near fatal mistake of reaching for the door. Out burst yelling girl. She looked the woman ahead of me straight in the eye, made serious eye contact, and said, “YOU STUPID B!TCH GET OUT OF THE F#*KING WAY!” and whipped her plastic bag of groceries over the trolley gate really fast so that they whipped the woman ahead of me in the arm. Yes. Yelling girl accosted a complete stranger with a bag of groceries. And stormed off yelling profanity at all of us.
The woman was thankfully okay (I, being polite, asked her if she was okay). We all waited our turn entered the store and that was that.
Yes. Yelling Girl is a case of rudeness on steroids. Clearly there are anger management issues there. I can see why people would react rudely to her. I can see how she could incite angry mobs. I can see how she could bring out the worst in a person. I involuntarily physically tense up the second I see her or hear her voice. She’s not only rude she’s unpleasant and causes negative responses. Heck, she’s apparently routinely written up by building security.
And yet she continues to behave this way. I’m sure she doesn’t see herself as rude. I’m sure she pins adjectives like ‘take charge’ and ‘bold’ and ‘confident’ onto herself. She doesn’t see a difference between assertive and aggressive. It’s her problem but she makes it other peoples’ problem.
She’s rude.
But I regularly see her bringing home a bevy of handsome and seemingly well adjusted men. And no, she’s not on good behavior around them. She’s yelling, swearing and screaming on her mobile phone in one hand and draped around these men with the other arm and hand. And the men are passively walking along with her as if she were behaving politely or at least normally. Oh sure, I rarely see her with the same man twice, and frankly I’m a little concerned with what she might be doing to them behind closed doors. Darnedest thing, I never see her with a man leaving the building. But she’s behaving that way and still managing to do quite well for herself on the man front. I will not connect dots about this, I’ll leave that up to you and your own opinions of men and what part of their anatomy controls their lives.
If behaving like Yelling Girl is what it takes to interest a man, that’s not the sort of confidence I want. I’ll happily spend the rest of my life alone before I behave that way. Swut. I try to be on my best behavior and I bring out the worst in people. It scares me to think of what might happen if I behaved like her. Then again, who knows? Maybe people would be so afraid of me they’d treat me really well.
But somehow I doubt it. What is apparently working for her would never work for me.
So, I met this guy. We’ve been emailing and talking on the phone. Don’t get all excited for me. He’s not Mr. Right for Me, but he speaks in complete sentences sometimes containing words longer than one syllable and seems to be in possession of a sense of humor. Hmmm. Maybe he could be as close to Mr. Right for Me as I’ll get. The first in-person meeting has been dragged out longer than I like, but he travels a lot for work and I’ve been really busy at work so, you know, it’s just taking a little longer with him.
We had a date set for a few nights ago. I was looking forward to finally meeting him in person so he could reject me on sight so I could move on with my life without the false hope that this guy might be different. I don’t like to invest too much time with men before meeting them in person. Getting to know them and starting to like them before meeting face to face makes the rejection a lot more difficult to take.
The day before our first in-person meeting I had one of those drop everything and run phone calls. No, the long arm of the law or the ASPCA didn’t finally catch up with me. (Furry Creature’s fur is fine and you can hardly tell where he was waxed.) There was one of those family emergencies where you don’t think, just go.
Unfortunately for me, I did think about a few things while I was mad dash panic packing. One of them was my date with Mr. Not Quite Right.
I bothered to do the polite thing and took the time to call him to cancel the date.
“Hi Mr. Not Quite Right.”
“Hi Trillian, I’m just standing here wondering what to wear tomorrow. I hope you’re not calling to cancel our date, har har.”
Why, oh why did he have to choose that line?
“Oh dear. Well, erm, um, I’m sor—”
“Oh no. If you’re canceling you can forget about me and don’t bother to email or call. We’ve had this planned a long time.”
“There’s a family emergency and I have to leave town in about an hour, I’m really sorry, Mr. Not Quite Right, really. My mother’s in intensive care and I have to go to be with her.”
“You expect me to believe your mother’s in intensive care and you’re bothering to call me to cancel a date? You’re either a saint or a horrible liar, and I don’t believe in saints so that makes you a bad liar.”
Me, pondering if it would be better or okay with him if I were a good liar. “Look, I’m really sorry to cancel on short notice and I’m really sorry you think so little of me that you think I’m lying.”
“Forget it Trillian. Go take care of your mother. Don’t give me a second thought. Seriously. Don’t bother to think about me again because I’m not interested any more.” click.
He hung up on me.
Now.
Up to this point Mr. Not Quite Right had not displayed any signs of rude, selfish or childish behavior. But in not giving me the benefit of doubt he gave me benefit of huge insight into his personality. Which is ultimately good. Disappointing, but good. It’s probably me bringing out the worst in someone again, but better to find out now than after life commitments have been made, emotions invested, an entire future life not to mention a wedding planned.
(Smiling like I mean it, smiling like I mean it, smiling like I mean it...)
Weird and bizarre stuff happens to me. I am plagued with bad timing. I know this and accept it. Everyone who knows me soon realizes this and either wants nothing to do with me or sticks around for the comedic aspect of the weird things that happen in my life and the bad timing bestowed upon my trips around the Sun. Anyone who gets involved with me has to learn to live with it. On the plus side, never a dull moment. On the negative side, well, never a dull moment.
And my family is really important to me. Um. Maybe I’ve got it all wrong, but isn’t family supposed to matter? Aren’t we supposed to care about our family? Isn’t that normal? If it’s an issue for him and if his family isn’t important to him we’re better off apart. I mean, who wouldn’t do everything possible to rush to their ailing mother’s side in intensive care? Who the swut is he to not respect my feelings about my mother and, who is he to not respect my mother and her health?
Don’t believe in saints, eh mister? Yeah, well, you never met my mother. And I’ll tell you another thing, she wouldn’t like the way you talked to me and the lack of respect you showed for me and my feelings. (She doesn't know I'm voiding all emotions from my life because she's in the inner circle where I allow emotions, but that doesn't invalidate her assumed opinion.)
Rude, inconsiderate, hurtful and just plain weird. That’s what my saintlike mother would think of him. Raspberries to him.
Speaking of childish behavior.
Still. How can he be so rude? I know, I know, I’m so much better off learning this about him now. And he and his behavior are meaningless, insignificant, in my life and the much more important issue of my mother.
I didn’t give it or him too much more thought.
I’ve spent the last few days in a hospital with my mother.
Then I checked my email. What to my wondering eyes should appear but three emails from Mr. Not Quite Right.
“Ah. Well,” thought I, “Okay. He’s calmed down and realized he was a gross selfish jerk. I can forgive him. He was disappointed which after all is sort of a compliment. He was actually disappointed I canceled the date and he couldn’t meet me in person. I mean, the disappointment says something about him.”
Email 1, sent shortly after The Phone Call, contained a few brief sentences dripping in sarcasm about my mother’s health and some rude name calling.
Email 2, sent the day after The Phone Call, was a lengthy rant against me and all women. He’s glad he found out “about me” now (gee, you too?), that I’m (get this) “just like every other woman” because I’m “lying, manipulative and controlling” and “just like every other woman” I put my “family ahead of my relationship with my boyfriend.” (Boyfriend? I have a relationship and a boyfriend? Wow. I had no idea seven emails and three phone calls constituted a relationship and boyfriend. Even though we never met in person. I’ve had lots of boyfriends and relationships over the past few years if that’s the case. I’m doing a lot better than I thought!)
Email 3, sent the day after email 2, told me that he was going to block my email.
Um, isn’t that just assumed? Still, he’s being polite and letting me know I needn’t bother sending all those emails I was writing begging for forgiveness and another chance. Offering myself to him if could just help me not be like every other woman. That I’d completely disown my family altogether and make him the center of my Universe if he’d just give me a chance.
But since he’s blocked me I can go along attending to my mother’s health crisis.
I don’t have to worry about not doing whatever I did to bring out the worst in him. And he can consider himself lucky to dodge a fatal bullet with another woman, like all the others, who lies, manipulates and controls him.
