Why do people want to punch me in the face?
The other day I was telling two good stories and I realized I probably never told them here on the blog. I didn’t find them with some quick searches, so hopefully they are new. I should say that nobody has tried to punch me in the face recently, these are both pretty old stories.
Story the First, in which I get punched in the face:
Shortly after I had learned to drive (I think I was about 17 or so), I was waiting in a long line of traffic over a bridge. Basically, there were two lanes of traffic over the bridge, but at the end of the bridge one lane was turn only. Since most people wanted to go straight, traffic gets very backed up in that lane, while the other was mostly empty. However, you can turn right from the turn lane and then turn left into a shopping center, go through the parking lot, and then come back out on the main road. They had lots of signs up saying not to do that, so I tried not to. But sometimes, when you just couldn’t take it anymore, you had no choice.
So I had been waiting for quite some time in the straight lane and I finally decided to go in the turn lane. Unfortunately, on my ’87 Celebrity there was no side mirror on the passenger side. Since traffic stretched behind me for some ways, I couldn’t see very far back in the other lane. I slowly began inching out when suddenly a car appeared and roared by me. Because I was going so slowly and watching for just this case, I hit the breaks and didn’t get out. As the guy flew buy I could see him angrily shouting at me, but I didn’t think much of it and after he passed I successfully pulled into the turn lane.
After a moment I saw that he had gotten out of his car, blocking traffic, and was walking back towards me. He was huge! When he got to my car I (stupidly) rolled down my window. He began shouting at me, saying things like, “Do you know how expensive my car is?” So right there I think you know the caliber of man I was talking to. I tried to make two points, 1) I didn’t actually hit his car, and 2) given that I had no side mirror, I believe (and still believe now) that I did the correct thing, which was the best I could with what I had. I didn’t have much time to make these points however, since he then clocked me in the face. Then he calmly turned around, got back in his car, and drove away. Maybe after he got the initial rage out by punching me, he realized he was a hulking, roided out adult with an expensive car and I was a nerdy kid in a piece of junk. Or maybe not. It wasn’t much consolation to me at the time.
Story the Second, in which I almost get punched in the face, but not quite:
The first place I lived in Pennsylvania had a shared laundry room. I hope you, gentle reader, have never had the unfortunate experience of using such a setup. The laundry is always full when you want it, the equipment doesn’t work and it is costly to use. Having come to this place directly out of college, it wasn’t as foreign of an idea as I wished it to be, but it was what it was. Because drying takes so much longer than washing, there is always a backup with the dryers, forcing you to leave your wet clothes in the washer and keep checking on the dryers hoping that you get the one that just opened up before anybody else does. So, one day, I went to check on the laundry and the dryers were full of dry clothes. “Fair enough,” I thought. Perhaps the dryer just finished the second before I walked in the room. You have to give the person the benefit of the doubt, even though it is more likely that the clothes had been sitting there for hours. But when I came back 20 minutes later and the clothes were still in the dryer, I felt justified in moving them to the top of the dryer and putting my clothes in. Now, I should specify, I honestly didn’t think I was doing anything wrong. I wasn’t doing it to spite the person, I honestly just thought that was the protocol. That’s how it worked in college. Tell me in the comments if you think it is weird to move someone’s laundry.
So anyway, after putting my laundry in the dryer I went back to my apartment. Shortly thereafter, there was a knock on my door. When I opened it there was a very angry, very large man. He was big enough that he filled the entire doorway. He asked me if I moved the laundry and when I said that I had, he really layed into me. How dare I this and he doesn’t know where my hands have been that and how dare I touch his wife’s clothes, etc. Since he seemed to be hung up on me being dirty, I offered to pay for him to re-wash his clothes. I don’t think he was listening to me. As he talked he was getting more and more angry until I felt certain a punch was eminent. Luckily, his wife appeared and literally pulled him away from me and into their apartment. (Luckily for him! 
)
I spent the next few months living in fear of him. If I was leaving and I heard them coming out of their appartment, I would hide in mine until they were gone. One day, months and months later, we passed each other in the hall, where I couldn’t hide. I had just gotten past him when he said, “Hey!” I was thinking, “Oh no! Please tell me someone else didn’t move his laundry and he thought it was me!” But to his credit he actually apologized to me! I was quite shocked actually.
And to this day I doubt I would move anybody’s laundry. I am also extremely nervous to move anybody’s food out of the microwave at work!
Weekend of hell
Okay, so let’s start off with the big move weekend. So I worked my ass off to get all my worked hours in that week by Thursday so I could take Friday off and drive down there, as well as slaving away every night when I got home to get all of my stuff packed up (see previous post). So of course when I got down to NC Sara had almost *NOTHING* packed, which was not surprising of course (see 2 posts ago). I was so mad that she didn’t have a single thing to do all week and she couldn’t pack her apartment. It was kind of strange actually, because I was so mad but at the same time it’s exactly what I expected so how mad could I be? So I got there at about 4 in the afternoon and we straight up packed from then until 2 a.m. Then we had to pick up the U-Haul at like 7:30 a.m. so we didn’t get much sleep. So then, the guy that she hired came over to help us and thank god…he was a hard worker and strong. A life saver. So we got everything loaded in the truck by about noon. But it wasn’t over because her apartment was filthy. We cleaned from noon until like maybe 7 or 8 p.m., including me scrubbing floors on my hands and knees. Her place was filthy. Being a really old apartment does not help. We went to bed that night, but of course it wasn’t much of a night’s sleep seeing as how we had packed up the bed and futon and everything. Hard wood floors, not too comfortable. Then we had to get up early yet again the next morning to finish cleaning before the landlord got there. The nice thing was he wrote us out a check for her security deposit right there rather than making us wait for it! Then we hopped in the car (well, Sara in the car, me in the big ass moving van) and drove 8 hours to philly. We parked the van at the new apartment and then went and slept at my old apartment. The next day we got up early (again) and gathered up Tony and Dawna and Jeff and went and unloaded all of Sara’s stuff. Then we went and loaded up all of my stuff and then brought it back and unloaded it. Long day!! Plus it rained for all of my stuff, of course.
That was hell weekend and I think that’s all I have in me as far as updates right now. Maybe later.
Part 7 – Sara’s visit
Not too much to note from that Sunday until Wed. when Sara got here. We did move to our new building at work and it is AWFUL. Aside from the fact that everything is old and dirty and nasty, the worst part is that JUST MY SECTION of the room is 80 degrees every day. The other parts of the room are cooler, but not by me, no sir! It’s AWFUL baking in the sauna every day.
Anyway, Tuesday night I was telling Sara about how excited I was that she was coming and how I was planning on all this stuff to do for her when she got here. Sara told me that she felt like I was only doing this stuff to make up for going to a strip club on my bachelor party. This made me REALLY REALLY upset because first off, I don’t feel like I did anything that I need to apologize for and second off, here I am planning all this nice stuff like making food for her and giving her back and foot massages and she wants to cast doubt on my intentions. I would think that most girls would be happy that a guy was willing to do all that. Sara has an amazing ability to really upset me. At that point I felt like the whole week was ruined because everything I did was going to be cast into suspicion. Sara thinks that sometimes she says things to hurt me when she’s unhappy because I’m so emotional and she knows she can hurt me. I mean she’s not concious of this, or at least she wasn’t until that moment when she figured it out. That’s not a very nice quality, so hopefully now that she knows she won’t do it. Okay, so Sara got here and we had a discussion about finances, which I don’t really care about. I trust her 200% to handle everything, because she loves it so much that I know she will do a good job. I think she wants me to be a part of it because she’s afraid she’ll mess something up and she would be really hard on herself if she did. That’s the funny thing…I wouldn’t be mad at her, but she’d be much more mad at herself. Sara had said she wanted snacky food so I scraped the whole making dinner thing and went to the store and bought cheese sticks and taquitos and stuff to make bruschetta and spanikopita and a bag of chips and a couple of 2-liters of Pepsi One because that’s what she drinks. We didn’t eat even 1/3rd of that stuff! Thursday after work we went bowling with all the work people. I did good on the first game, but not so good on the second game. I think even Sara beat me. Tony kicked some major ass. They put out a pretty good spread there at the bowling alley and I took advantage of it. We tried to go to Target and Bed Bath and Beyond but we didn’t find what we needed. Friday I left work early and we went over and signed the lease for our new apartment. This was really the day I was looking forward to because I really wanted to show Sara the new place!! Then we ate at a little italian sandwhich place that our landlord recommended and it was great. We drove down 30 to the city and saw a lot of the neighborhood, but then I accidentally got some coke on the sleeve of Sara’s shirt that she likes (and looks really good on her). Unfortunately that really ruined everything because she wanted to go home. I felt bad but secretly I was kind of upset at her because I was having a really good time and I had so looked forward to this…in fact it was pretty much the only thing we really did that was fun the whole time she was here. Anyway, check this out. We went to Bed Bath and Beyond and bought something off of our registry!! 
The duvet cover that we really really liked was going on clearance so we were worried that it wasn’t going to make it to the wedding. Since it was on clearance it was 40% off, plus we had a coupon for 20% off of one item. On top of that, Sara had a gift certificate given to her by the Down Syndrome group. After all that we got a $200 duvet cover for like $60!! Oh yeah we also went to IKEA…lots of shopping that day. Okay so then Friday night we went over to Dawna and Jeff’s with Tony and we all played Trivial Pursuit Pop Culture Edition. The game took WAAY longer than expected (like 3 ½ hours) so we didn’t leave there until late. Saturday was pre-marital counseling day, hooray! ::sarcastic:: I thought it was okay, but Sara just rolled her eyes and sighed all day. It didn’t teach me anything I didn’t know really, but I had never really thought about it in terms of my relationship with Sara, so that’s really what I got out of the day. I spent all day just thinking about relationship stuff…for that reason I think it was good. Unfortunately, the relationship coach we happened to get was the main guy from the thing and neither of us really liked him very much. Whenever that guy was in the room Sara would cry, because that’s what she does in situations like that, which prompted the guy to tell us that our relationship was fragile. What an asshole. That really pissed me off. He doesn’t know shit about us or our relationship. We went to this great place for lunch in the city though. It was called “Two Goodfellas” and the service was really bad but my sandwhich was fantastic. It was also HUGE! Thank god I just got a half instead of a whole, because it was just gigantic. Anyway, we got through that, so that was good. After that we went over to John and Melissa’s new house. It was really big, 4 bedrooms, and since they bought it in Jersey rather than philly, it was only like $180,000. You couldn’t get that house around here for less than $300,000 and possibly a lot more than that. The neighborhood is really nice too. The house is kind of weird though…there are all these crawl spaces all over the place and they’re like secret passages, you can go in one closet and come out another in another room. The weirdest part of all is that they have this one little 4×4 landing thing that is on the second story and carpeted with a railing, but there is no way to get to it, other than another one of those little crawl spaces. It’s almost like it’s a little display area of some sort. Oh yeah, and more more thing, they took out most of the garage to make the kitchen bigger, but the garage door is still there. You certainly couldn’t fit a car in there, maybe a Mini if you somehow parked it sideways. It’s nice that they can use it for storage and all, but it’s just funny to open a garage door and just find this tiny storage area. We also ate at Don Pablos. Thank God for Mexian food!!! Oh how I’ve missed you. Sunday I wanted to have some fun since we had mostly worked the whole time she was there, but it wasn’t in the cards. First we went and washed Sara’s car, then we came back and did a crap load of laundry. We also watched School of Rock (it was okay, exactly what you would expect) and took like a 2 ½ hour nap. Okay, I think that was about it.
Ugh
You know, sometimes its really a burden trying to be the guy who’s trying to make everybody laugh.
We had design meetings (read fist fights) for 7 of the 8 hours today and yesterday. I hate it when people yell at each other. I always try to play the peacemaker and be the one to cut the tension, but really that’s not my job. I’m not responsible for that. After a particularly bad argument that broke the meeting up, I went back to my desk where Sara had been furiously trying to get ahold of me. She had had a stressful day and was upset. I tried (unsuccessfully) to cheer her up. After a bit she abrubtly said she had to go and hung up. I know she’s not upset with me in anyway, just stressed out about her capstone, but I was a little hurt by the way she talked to me in her phone messages and then on the phone. She didn’t mean to be hurtful. Even still, after I got off the phone with her I just sat back and thought, “I’m really sick of being the guy who’s always cheerful and takes on everyone else’s problems.” I need to realize that I’m not responsible for everyone’s happiness.
The Prof. canceled class all next week so technically I’m done…unfortunately we had to have class for FOUR HOURS last night to make up for it. That’s pretty rough after an 8 hour work day. Plus side is, since I’m not taking classes over the summer, I’m done for quite awhile now. Well, that’s not exactly true, I still have my take home final, due next Thursday.
I have 2 apointments to see apartments tomorrow. I called about 3 other places, maybe I can make an apointment with them if they call back. They probably won’t though because it sounds like they are rental offices or real estate offices so they probably won’t check their voice mail until Monday. All I can do is see as many places as I can.
Time to go see Kill Bill 2!
Last night
Haven’t had any time to update lately!!
So I’ve been looking at apartments lately because we need to start our lease in about 6 weeks…eek! I hate to make rushed decisions. So I’ve been looking at some various places that me and Sara have jointly decided to look at and reporting back to her on what I’ve found. Every time I’ve told her about a place, she always picks the place that I say is the worst of the batch and basically argues that we should live there. Now, I’m not neccesarily opposed to living at some of those places, but it upsets me in that I make opinions based on things that I’ve seen there and clearly my opinions hold no weight. This upsets me because, if my opinions aren’t going to have any basis on the outcome, then why am I bothering to work extra hours in the begining of the week so that I can leave early and go around to these various apointments that I’ve set up to see apartments.
After arguing about this for a while, a few things came out. First off was that aparently Sara has not made any decisions on anything on the apartment, including whether we should even move, much less WHERE we should move. From her point of view, having me look at apartments is just part of her way of helping to make these disicions. This came as a complete shock to me because 1) we only have SIX WEEKS until we move in, so some decisions really need to be made by this point and 2) when we have a conversation that results in an area that would be good to live in, which is in turn followed by about 5 hours on my part looking for apartments online, which is in turn followed by another 5 hours on my part of setting up an appointment and looking at an apartment, I see that as a decision about (at the least) which areas we are narrowing our search too. This was a huge miscommunication aparently.
Second off, when Sara automatically picks the apartment I identified as the worst of the lot and argues that we should live there, she said she is playing devil’s advocate. I aparently can not distinguish this from actual argument for an apartment that she likes.
At this point I’m completely fed up with the apartment thing. All in all I’ve spent probably in the neighborhood of 15 to 20 hours working on it and all Sara does is argue with me about it. Also, she argues that $115 extra a month is too much to pay for an apartment that is vastly better than another, yet she has no problem paying $100 extra a month for an extra 200 square feet at another apartment. Now I agree with her, but it just seems why do you arbitrarily decide one thing is worth the money and another is not. If her main motivation was purely the money, then why wouldn’t we get the smaller apartment? I know if she saw these places that I saw, she would completely agree with me about them, however, clearly I am not able to properly convey to her these impressions.
So we had our big argument that resulted in her crying, neither of us getting to bed very early and especially resulted in nothing getting resolved about the apartment. About 10 minutes after that she called me back and said basically that she trusts me to get the apartment on my own and I should just pick one out and don’t ask her about it. Now this is far and away the only idea that makes sense, however, I feel like no matter what apartment I pick she’s going to be upset with it. She argued so hard against the apartment that I by far liked the most that I feel like I can’t get that one, even if she now says that she was just playing devil’s advocate. Also, there are a lot of unknowns and I feel like if we made these decisions together and we were wrong, so be it. If I made them by myself and I’m wrong, then I’m blamed.
My next step is to try and compromise. Supposedly there are a lot of big houses that have been turned into apartments around the really wonderful area that I found the best apartment in. On Saturday I’m going to drive around and see if I can find some of those places. If I do, hopefully they will be cheaper than the apartments that I looked at around there. The money is really the issue, especially since we don’t know if Sara will be working.
So that’s the long and the short of it. I’ll know more on Saturday, after I look around for houses. Hopefully they’ll have signs up out front and I can just walk up and see the places. I’m not too confident this will work out.
So much to talk about!
I’ve had this damn song in my head ever since last Thursday.
Okay, so let’s go chronologically. Went yesterday and helped sand and paint Dawna and Jeff’s living room. It went really fast and I had a pretty good time. I wish I had a house to work on. :/ I can’t wait.
After that we had our big “drink night” but I didn’t feel very good before the drinking even started, so I didn’t drink that much. Nobody got really smashed except their neighbor’s daughter Kelly, which was kind of strange because nobody even knew her. I was going to sleep over there (because I was planning on drinking lots) but I ended up going home around 1:30 since I stopped drinking around 11:30. We had such big plans for drinking, but I’m thinking maybe my best drinking days are behind me!
Saturday was a milestone though, because it was the ceremonial first day of my sandles! The left one has fallen a little bit into disrepair, but the super glue on the right one has held up really well, so I think I need to get some for the left one.
This morning I was in no hurry to get up and get ready so I was just lazing around until like noon. Then I finally was just getting ready to get to work on my paper and Dawna calls and asks me if I want to go play in the park and celebrate the nice weather. I was just about to say “no” when she said the magic word…”frisbee”. Frisbee is like homework kryptonyte! So I got to wear the sandles again AND play frisbee for the first time of the season.
Talked to my best friend today who got picked up for his second D.U.I. on Friday. This time he was in Huntington County which is aparently very tough on drunk driving because the head judge’s daughter was killed by a drunk driver. To make a long story short, it sounds like he’s going to get 45 days in jail, lose his lisense and maybe some community service, maybe even Anibuse. He knows that he deserves some punishment but he’s trying to get his jail time commuted in exchange for something else (maybe house arrest) so that he doesn’t lose his job, which he loves. The bad news is, it’s only 32 days until the bachelor party that he’s supposed to be throwing for me. What a party it will be if the best man’s in jail. He’s said a few times that he knows he has a problem and he needs help, but we’ll see if it actually changes anything. He had to go to alcohol class last time and that obviously didn’t help anything. I’m almost hoping that he does have to do a decent stretch in jail, maybe it will wake him up.
I tried to talk about this whole thing with Sara and she didn’t want to talk about it because she doesn’t really like Schafer. I was pretty upset about that because this is a pretty huge deal in my life and I tried to turn to her and talk about it (since she’s going to be my wife and all) and she didn’t want to hear about it. I just think that’s really rude because here I am trying to come to the one person I should always be able to come to and she can’t even just listen to me because her “distaste” for the subject was too much. I know that she’s not a big fan of the things Chris does, but neither am I. She’s only known him for 3 years so she only knows the bad side of him, but I’ve known him for about 20 of my 24 years. As far as I’m concerned he’s like a brother to me. (I’ve known him *almost* as long as my real brother) If your brother makes some bad decisions, you don’t just give up on him. You stick by him and hope he turns things around. I called her back and told her these things. I was just feeling so frustrated with the whole Chris thing and then she didn’t want to hear about it…if I was at home I would have cried, but since I was in the car outside my friend’s house I managed to choke it back. I haven’t talked to her since, but she thinks I’m avoiding her because she IMed me and I wasn’t here so obviously I didn’t answer back. I’m not avoiding her, I just didn’t get home until late. I’ll have to straighten that out tomorrow.
After that we went back to my apartment, but Dawna and Jeff still had a bunch of food and pop left from yesterday and I said that it’s too bad we weren’t there because I didn’t have anything for them…so then they convinced me to bring my laptop over to their place and work on my paper there. Sounded like a bad idea, but I actually managed to get it done.
Left there at like 8:20 to make it over to John and Melissa’s before Sopranos started. I ended up staying there and talking for another hour and 20 minutes after Sopranos got done. I’m very sad that they are leaving on Wed. to move into their new house in Jersey. I miss them already.
All in all, very busy weekend and I didn’t get to play the guitar as much as I’d like. I’m really wanting to get back into it some more…I’ve only played a handfull of times since Christmas.
Time for bed.
So much for spring break
I have so many things I’ve wanted to write down in the past few days but I’ve been too busy to do it. I don’t have class this week, but I’ve been working 10 hour days since I took Monday off.
Okay, quick things first:
Thanks for 11 years Gilbert. Packers fans everywhere will miss you, but none more than my sister. I seriously think she cried when she heard the news.
I did my federal taxes the other day and found out I owed $800! For whatever reason I was apparently claiming 3 on my W-4’s rather than 1. The mistake has been fixed, but that $800 is going to hurt the wedding savings. :-/ I’m doing state tonight, so we’ll see if I owe any more.
Here’s a 10 on the crazy meter. That’s my friend’s dad, my friend who is going to be an usher in the wedding. How nuts is that? I am upset that the article tries to paint him as this big evil child molester that has been coaching football just to get close to little boys. I know that is not true because I know the guy, but anybody else reading this story will probably blindly follow the media’s sensationalist suggestions about him.
I have been completely intolerable for the past week or so. Seriously, if I deserve some serious ass kicking from Sara for putting up with me. Every time I talk to her I have just been the biggest ass. Any little excuse to argue with her I have, even if I didn’t care about whatever we were arguing about. Whatever she says, I just automatically disagree with her. I seriously have no idea where this is coming from, it’s almost like I’m having an out of body experience! It’s like I’m just completely freaking out. I’m going to call her and apologize tonight. She’s been so good the whole time though, like she’s not holding it against me. I spent a long time thinking about what was going on and I’m not really sure, but it pretty much has to be the wedding. Picking out tuxes really got to me for some reason…made it real in a way that nothing else had so far. My crazy mood swings started that day and so did my dreams…I’ve had no less than 1 wedding or baby related dream per night. This has to be what it is, but I still don’t understand why it would make me act like that. Why do I have resentment towards Sara? I’m hoping that it’s just a little hiccup as my subconscious gets ready for the married life. I’m not really worried about it and it doesn’t make me question the wedding at all, only makes me question my subconscious coping strategies. The thing that baffles me is my inability to understand what the underlying problem is, because I can’t fix it until I understand it.
Alright, that is a condensed version of all the stuff I wanted to get down here. I should have more time coming up this weekend, so hopefully I won’t be forced to put this off!
14
Now that I’m starting to have some friends on here, I’m going to try to cut this up so that my entries aren’t so long. The problem is, I never intend to write so much and it just kind of happens!
I got 387 out of 390 on my Operating Systems final, but someone got 388. It better not have been 85…after all the crap I gave him about beating him by 1 point on the first test, it would be revisited upon me 10 fold.
So I finally had to decide about the job at work and I decided to take the new job on Horizons. I’m going to start on April 9th.
Apparently, everyone on both sides had assumed I would keep the job that I had, so I think everybody was a little shocked. Andrew and Ben looked like they were going to cry and Jeff said, “You….BASTARD” and joked that he was going to screw me over on my next appraisal. He also said, “You might as well go tell Dawna so she can start gloating.” Even Garold (who I don’t even like) came over and told me he would be sad to see me go. Hell, he’s one of the reasons I’m leaving! Then I went downstairs and told them I was going to take the job. Tony was so happy he told me, “If you weren’t a guy I’d hug you!” He then interrupted a meeting Dawna was having and told her and she yelled “Yippie!” and disbanded her meeting. I have to say that both reactions made me feel a little good inside. Maybe that’s wrong, I don’t know, but oh well.
I had a pretty good time in NC. I think both of us were a little moody over the weekend, which took away from it a little bit, but it was still a good time. I hate going all the way there and then fighting with her. I think that now whenever I’m with her, I’m really touchy because I’m overanalyzing every little thing, asking myself, “Are you going to be able to live with this the rest of your life?” I know that’s just making everything worse, but I can’t help it.
JCS was good, but you could tell it was not being put on at the highest level. The sound quality was pretty bad (although that didn’t matter as much since I already know all the words anyway) but there were some interesting takes on things in this production. The biggest thing was that it was set in a little bit more modern times, with kind of a “raver” bent…for example, a big saggy-jeans wearing, tattooed Judas kills himself by shooting up rather than the more traditional hanging. It was also a little risqué considering that every church youth group for miles was in the theater!
Sara is the worst thing that could ever happen to a diet! I’m going to pay her to spend one day with each of the people in the contest. “Let’s get ice cream! Let’s get cappuccino! Let’s buy Girl Scout cookies! Let’s go out to eat! I don’t want to make that for dinner, let’s make gorditas!” I think we managed to do pretty well though. Well, I did at least but I can’t speak for her.
Larissa just picked the “hot guy” rather than the “average guy” on Average Joe 2. No matter how much nicer the average guys were than the hot guys, she instantly liked the hot guys just because they were hot. Nice guys finish last again! I hope she dies.
Well actually, she ended up getting what she deserves. The “big twist” at the end of the show was that she had to admit that her last boyfriend was Fabio. Who cares, right? Well apparently the guy she picked did because he got all pissed off and immature and dumped her over it. Oh well…she picked the hot guy rather than the average guy and, well, that’s what you get.
God, girls are so obsessed with the way guys look. Don’t they know what kind of stress that puts on us guys to conform to their body image? Well you know what? To hell with their unrealistic body images! Down with the women oppressors!
Okay, time to get to bed.
Bed time
I feel completely unprepared for my final tomorrow. I’ll probably be able to sneak some study time in at work tomorrow. Tomorrow is also the day I have to make a decision about the job downstairs, and I haven’t made a decision yet.
Going to be a fun day.
Sara really pissed me off tonight by saying that all private schools should be gotten rid of because, “Why pay for something when you have something perfectly good for free.” Well first off, she’s very lucky that she lived in a school district where the public school was good, but I can’t believe that she can’t conceive of one that isn’t so good. In her specific case, the private schools weren’t as good as the public ones. In plenty of other situations (including the one I was in) the private schools are much better than the public schools. Besides, even if they are not, why shouldn’t the choice at least be there? If I want to blow my money on a substandard education for my child, that is my right and no one should be able to take that away from me.
Aside from that though, there are MILLIONS of reasons why you might choose to go to a private school rather than a public one that have nothing to do with quality. My parents wanted me to go to a Catholic school because they wanted me to be taught with their values in mind. They were willing to double pay for that, through taxes to a school I didn’t attend on top of a hefty fee charged by the Catholic school. I have nothing against public education, but my parents wanted something specific for me and paid for it. Should it be illegal for them to have that option?? All schools have strengths and weaknesses. Why shouldn’t I be able to choose one that coincides with my strengths and preferences, especially knowing I’m going to have to pay out the nose for it? Also, I’ve heard of cases where people are excessively bullied or made to feel uncomfortable or out of place. They can stick it out where they are and be miserable, but it’s worth money to me to take that added stress off of my kid.
Just today I heard a story about a friend of a friend in NYC who lived in a really poor neighborhood and went to a really crummy school. He was a brilliant kid but this specific public school system just wasn’t keeping up with him, for whatever reason. His parents couldn’t afford to send him to private school, but he was able to get a voucher and go. Now he has a huge high paying job and he attributes it directly to the private school he went to.
I have no bias against public school. I personally have no reasons to choose private school over public school, other than the quality of the school. In my experience, the quality varies very greatly from area to area, even within a county, therefore, this is not a decision I can make until I settle down somewhere and compare the schools. I do know this though; I REFUSE to have my kids go to a substandard school just because it is public. If it is within my power I’m going to do the best I can for my kids.
I’m happy for Sara that she had such a great public school to go to. I’ve been there and it really is fantastic. Everything is new and nice and very suburban, with good teachers and good families. I’m just sad that she can’t imagine any situation except the one she personally experienced.
That’s all folks, I should really get to bed.
Trouble in Paradise
So, thanks to my last post I ended up getting in a big fight with my fiancée today. I think I just learned my first lesson in, “why people’s journals are supposed to be locked up and hidden under a mattress”. I was totally blindsided by it, it never occurred to me for a second that she would be upset by reading that. In retrospect, after talking things out with her tonight, I can see why she would. For the record, nothing in there was directed at her. Every time we have a fight and I have a chance to cool down, everything always seems so pointless. I spent a large part of the day thinking about this and being pissed off and thinking, “I’m not talking to her until she talks to me first!” and now that it’s all resolved I just think, “wow, I can’t believe I wasted a second thinking about this, how stupid.” I still don’t retract anything I said though, I feel stronger about that than politics or religion. For me it IS religion.
I think this is the first fight we’ve ever had that I wasn’t the first one to crack. I can’t stand making her upset or having her be mad at me, so I always call her and tell her she’s right and I’m an ass. It’s not that I lie to her just to end the argument or anything, it’s just that usually once I take a step back and look at the argument, I realize how pointless it is. I worry about always quote unquote letting her win, though. One reason why is that she’s gotten so accustomed to me being wrong that I feel like a lot of times she discounts my opinion right off the bat. I’ll admit that I sometimes I lack common sense and I have an awful memory, but sometimes I actually am right. The other problem is that I worry that she doesn’t see me as very manly. Luckily for me, she’s smart enough to be with a person that treats her right and takes care of her, but all of my experience with women (both through dating and observation) is that they like the guy who is a complete jerk and never cares what they think. She is a competent, intelligent person but she has said on occasion that she likes it when I take charge of things, so I have to assume deep down that she has the same unconscious inclination towards having a man swoop in and take care of her. I’m very confused about this because it seems to go against everything I know about her. Also, any time I’ve actually tried to take charge of things she immediately starts questioning/disagreeing with my decisions, so it’s nearly impossible to actually do so. Women always say with their mouths that they want a guy who respects their opinions, but with their actions they seem to say that they want some 1950’s man-in-charge type relationship. Could this possibly be true? What I’m trying to say though, is that I’m worried that if I constantly admit defeat, she will lose respect for me and that she’d rather be with a different type of person. It’s funny that I still worry about that after all this time.
With the wedding coming up so fast, I think about it almost exclusively. I wouldn’t say I’m a commitment-phobe, but it is definitely something that is very hard for me. When we have a fight about our belief systems it really makes me realize that we have a lot of differences, which of course makes me wonder if we really should be getting married. I know that sounds like I have doubts about marrying her, but that’s not exactly true…it really has nothing to do with her. These questions stem from my nervousness about getting married, not from any incompatibilities between the two of us. I was completely amazed to find out she has no questions whatsoever about whether we will stay together or not; I thought them only natural. I guess it’s because her parents are not divorced. I’m practically paralyzed with fear that I will somehow mess this up. It’s not really a question about if I should marry her, more like a question of if I should EVER get married. There’s no question in my mind that I will never find anybody better than her.
Okay, waaay past my bed time.
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