1. Rude. The other day I was at a game night with multiple tables. One of the people I was playing with announced that they wanted to play a particular game. I called out, louder that we were starting x game and anyone who wanted to join us was welcome. Two people joined us. Now we’re a table of 5. The first of the people who joined us started whining about 7 minutes in about how long the game was taking. (It can take from 30 seconds to an hour.) He continued to whine for another 20-25 minutes while the game continued making it even slower and more difficult to play. At one point he got food, which was fine. Welcome even. Then he tapped out entirely. The literal next play of the game, someone won. The friend apologized for being an asshole, but his apology to me was literally, “I’m sorry your game was stupid.” His second apology, the next day, was slightly better, it something like, “I’m sorry I spent so much time mocking your game.” Neither of those apologies come close to the point . The appropriate apology was, “I’m sorry that my reaction to personally not having fun was to try to spoil any fun you were having. That was wrong of me. The right thing to do would have been to say when it started to annoy me. ‘I’m not enjoying this game anymore. Can I tap out?'” to which we would have said yes and just moved on without him while he got involved with other games. Instead he just got more and more agitated and made the party less and less fun for me, in particular, because a lot of it seemed directed at me, but also everyone we were playing with. I realize now I could have suggested he drop, but at the time, that seemed like a churlish reaction like, “Like if you’re not enjoying this, why don’t you go away.” which to my mind at the time seemed mean. Maybe that’s why he waited so long to leave, because he couldn’t think of polite way to walk away.
2. selfish. I got into it with a woman who thinks the wrong people are volunteering. I’m involved in a fundraiser for Purim and she thinks more of the direct beneficiaries from the fundraiser should be involved, “In my day….” I hate all sentences that begin with “In my day…” I do a shitfuckton for this fundraiser and we have an asston of volunteers; both who “directly” benefit and indirectly benefit, and it’s beyond churlish for her to be like “well I got mine, but now I feel like you’ve lost your way, so fuck all of you.” And, just to be clear, I don’t actually care that she feels that way. But I’m beyond pissed that she had the nerve to say it to my face like it was true that the “direct” beneficiaries aren’t helping. She was just super bitchy about it. She’s always had sour face around me, so I’ve never been particularly fond of her, but she is determined to fucking be right about this and she’s not and don’t think I have the right words to magically unlock understanding in her brain. I feel like even if I found the words to get through to her, it would wear off in an hour and she’d go back to ranting about how the wrong people are doing the work for an ungrateful beneficiaries who don’t contribute. Reminds me of that old keychain I had, “I’d rather be right than reasonable.” Except that she thinks she’s both when she’s actually neither.
3. ungrateful. I asked my husband to remind me something on Saturday night. He didn’t. But I remembered later Saturday night to set a reminder to remember on Sunday. So Sunday night, my husband asks me if I did the things I wanted. I said yes. I’d forgotten in the morning but then I remembered while I was on my way to the grocery store and send the appropriate mails off to people from the parking lot before I went in to shop. I then added a comment about how amusingly enough, I remembered because I was thinking about the mental load that women carry.
He said snidely and sarcastically, “Oh yes, that’s women only. Men never think about things.” And I said, Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but while I was thinking about (and doing) the following things:
- Going to the grocery to get vegetables to chop and bring to your parents house for Sunday dinner.
- Preparing for the updated birthday photo shoot for our child (which I also set up on a different day)
- Thinking about a problem I’m having at work (email #1)
- Thinking about a problem I was having with the fundraiser (email #2) mentioned in why I hate people, but entirely unrelated to that particular subject.
He backed off at that point, which was probably wise because I would have continued to explain that when I got home from the grocery, I proceeded to cut the vegetables, bag the vegetables, locate the cooler and the ice pack to pack the vegetables so they would stay cool while we did the rest of everything, gather the clothing, bathe the child… And what was he doing while that was happening? Oh right. He was sleeping and asking for an extra 10 minutes to sleep. So for yesterday, how much mental load in terms of householdy maintenance things was he bearing? ZERO to the zeroth power. So is this really where you want this conversation to go right now?
Now to be fair, he does put out the trash on Sunday and that actually does require a bit of mental load that I don’t carry. And he does it only because I categorically refuse to get involved in the ongoing debate between him and the cleaners about what is trash. So, and I’m not making this up, he reviews their trash to make sure they’re not throwing away things we need. And he’s not wrong; they have been known to throw away live gift cards, game pieces, legos, shopkins etc. But….I do not have the energy to interest to review the trash to verify it’s trashworthiness and entirely abdicate that task. That he is willing to do it is to his credit, but….there are other tasks that might be more worthy of his attention. And more to the point; I recognize the effort he puts into it. He doesn’t really seem to recognize or acknowledge the efforts I put into things.
Although the other night I was tired and crabby after a long day and I was carrying a large bag of stuff in addition to my purse. The kidlet asked me something and I forget what I said, but I sorta passive/aggressively said people could do things that would help me, like “Dad could carry this giant bag of games which would help me, but he doesn’t.” as part of a list of things that I don’t want to ask for help on because asking for help makes me feel like a failure. So when it came time to leave, he did take the bag, not just to the car, but then also up from the car into the house when we got there. And yesterday, he helped me carry bags without being asked, so I don’t know. Maybe there’s hope for a dawning awareness there. I wonder how he would feel if I started telling these jokes though: Jokes I’ve told at the office that my male coworkers didn’t like.
