There are things that I simply do not enjoy.
Here are some of them, in no particular order:
1. Commercials for erectile dysfunction pills (I'm sorry, but I find these so offensive and/or stupid. If I was a guy, I'd seriously question the marketing "geniuses" who came up with these).
2. The fact that currently, my car doesn't think it has windshield washing fluid in it, even though it does (I think it's frozen. Sigh).
3. The fact that I don't know enough about cars to FIX my car (or often even to describe what is wrong with it to the people who can fix it).
4. Robert Pattinson's unwashed hair. Blecccch.
5. Scraping noises (The sound of a plow scraping against bare pavement. Fingernails on a blackboard. Ice scraper against a windshield) Even typing that is enough to make me shudder.
I could go on, but I won't.
However, all of these things -- even the plow noise -- pale in comparison to this, the thing I dislike more than all other things. This is the one that will torment me in the darkest hours of the night and pounce on my thoughts in the middle of the day.
Here it is:
I hate recognizing my own most unlovely behaviours as mirrored by someone else.
I'm uncomfortable when I see someone behaving in a somewhat crazed, hyper-irrational fashion and think "Wow, that guy really needs to chill," and then realize -- that's what I look like when I'm so far out of my happy place that we can no longer be located on the same map. It's not pretty, it's no pleasant, and if there was ever an incentive to work to be less -- I was going to use the word "frenzied", but I don't think it's accurate. Less insistent that I carry the weight of the entire world. Less likely to panic when something doesn't go 100% to plan. Less apt to lash out at someone rather than reaching out to him or her.
I know it's important, that this is how we learn -- by watching -- and it's how we learn both how to behave and how NOT to behave; it doesn't make it any easier, however, to see yourself and to know that sometimes? You're only one step away from being the very thing that you least like in others. Learning (she says sighing) can be so unpleasant.
Kind of like fingernails on a blackboard.
"You're only one step away from being the very thing that you least like in others." Or even a half-step. Or a centimeter! So true; good point.
ReplyDeleteOur kids are (thankfully) old enough now that we can all laugh at, and mock, the erectile dysfunction ads. Most of the ads are so very cheesy, with older beautiful couples looking moonily at each other, copping a grope, and heading off to ... those bathtubs? whatever. Eminently spoofable.