I work with this girl who keeps grating on my nerves. She reminds me a bit of my ex friend H in that she obviously fancies herself smarter and more mature than I am–not knowing that I'm nearly a decade older than she is or that I'm a college graduate or that I've been doing this job, in some form or another, since I was 17. I seem to get this kind of condesention often, mostly because I am very mild-mannered on the surface. People often mistake my laid-back outter appearance and unshakable friendliness for witlessness. What it really comes down to is my own refusal to give a shit. I don't bother trying to prove to just anyone how intelligent I am, because some people simply don't make it onto the list of folks who matter enough. If you're sharp, you'll know it when you come face to face with another intelligent person. So what have I got to prove to a jack-ass?
I told my fiance that I was sure she was a Gemini–not that ALL Geminis are obnoxious or anything. It's just that I have a tendency to befriend Geminis who are too dill-brained and deluded to realise that they're not the ones doing all the humoring. They (my former friends) tended to be pushy and bossy and abrassive–cutting me off, midsentence, so they could correct some slip of the tongue or crack never-ending streams of jokes about something I overlooked, or give me an exasperated eye-roll for not reacting quick enough to satisfy. (H would really piss me off when I'd be talking about something kind of serious and she'd start laughing and mocking a word that got tangled and mispronounced in my mouth.) I mean, there's a time to laugh and then there's a time to just listen and take your friend seriously when she's talking about something major.
So, today I worked with her again. Only today I could see that she was feeling very pregnant–very testy, quite aggrivating and blunt, kind of quiet, dark, simmering–that in mind, I didn't let her get under my skin. Then something occured to me… and I asked her what month she was born. She said: "November, why?" and I nodded and laughed.
"You're a Scorpio, aren't you?"
"Yeah. November 10th," she said, and I laughed again.
She has the exact same birthday as me. It figures. No wonder she annoys me so much.
I was thinking as I was reading, that beople like this are perfect for a broken record response. I even thought of the one I would use. Each time I got alled on a slip of the tongue or on stuff I overlooked. My response would be: oops a Freudian slip. And I would use over and over again until they got tired of pointing out to me that I wasn't perfect, only human. Try it you may like it and develop some broken record techniques to use against annoying people.
LOL! Ancient, I'll have to try that one.
Serene, that's the total truth of it. Once I realised it, I thought, "Oh, we'll eventually get along just fine."
~X