“Say to yourself in the early morning: I shall meet today ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men. All of these things have come upon them through ignorance of real good and ill... I can neither be harmed by any of them, for no man will involve me in wrong, nor can I be angry with my kinsman or hate him; for we have come into the world to work together.” ~Marcus Aurelius
There are days I have to tell myself that even the most powerful individual in Western civilization at one point still had to remind himself every morning that he was going to run into assholes. Or at the least, human beings.
I'm a jerk sometimes. For instance, I hate grocery shopping, but primarily because of the people involved. But I'm never the problem. That's crazy talk.
I like to frequent my particular food retailer because it's small, has all the stuff I buy, I know where everything is, and they pack and schlep my stuff out to my car FOR FREE. But the produce section is the worst-designed area of any retail establishment that's ever been established. You know how sometimes you're in those parking lots that have angled parking spaces, and no matter which aisle you drive down, you're always angled the wrong way? Add 45 people all squeezing the avocados and sniffing the cilantro at the same time, and you have the produce section of my store.
Add a 4-year-old kid shoving his kiddie-cart into my ankles, and you have hell. Add his mother yelling, "Keenan, I told you to stay near me!" and you have the 9th circle of hell.
Add some hipster drinking a Venti Starbucks and distractedly reading his texts and parking his cart in the middle of the aisle, who I meet, aisle after aisle after aisle, no matter which aisle I turn down, THERE HE IS, sipping and blocking.
Or there's the cute elderly couple I meet in front of the deli counter. She has an old-lady, tight-curl perm and he has a red Mr. Rogers cardigan and a cane, and I smile to see them looking over the pork loins. Until he abstractedly backs into me as I'm trying to ease by him, and suddenly this sweet elderly lady turns into a fishwife, haranguing him for getting in my way. "You can't walk backwards, Joe! Watch where you're going. Do you think everybody needs to run into you in the grocery store?" etc. while I hasten to assure him the fault was all mine.
Keep making marriage look good, kids.
And oh, don't make me tell the story of the dairy section, and Stephen, the toddler who wants a Gogurt and doesn't care who knows it. His mom doesn't care either. I get all introverted in public, so loud and shrill sounds like what was coming out of that kid's mouth sent me racing for the checkout so I can go home and stay there for at least a solid week.
I got irritated with this lady in the parking lot who, instead of walking her cart 20 feet back to the store or to the adjacent cart return, simply hooked the front wheels over the curb and drove away. In front of me!! All blatant-like.
But—
I accidentally dinged my car door against the one next to me (windy day) and then drove away, spending a good five minutes feeling very superior to that excuse for humanity who couldn’t take two minutes to do the right thing.
Then I got irritated because the jerk in front of me didn’t use his turn signal before slamming on his brakes in front of me. No problem: two miles down the road, I caused someone to hesitate at a 4-way stop because I didn’t feel like flicking my pinky finger to execute my own signal.
THEN I got annoyed because a friend didn’t call me back in a timely manner that accurately reflects the status of my valued friendship. Well! I never return phone calls until I deem it convenient, and sometimes not even then. It’s not personal, either.
AND the other day I got a little irritated with my sister because she gave me some unsolicited advice about – well, it doesn’t matter, but never mind that I’ve given Heather my own set of excellent advice on how to raise my nieces many, many times over the years. Having once been a snide and sullen teenage girl, I sure as hell know how to raise one.
Sometimes the asshole is in the mirror.
It turns out that every time – EVERY TIME – I get salty when I see someone do something douch-ey, there is an equal and opposite douche-like behavior from me that balances the universe. (Honestly I don’t know what science does without me.) It might not be immediate, but it will come. Let’s see…how do I convey this in an image so you nice folks can understand…I know! It’s like I have…let’s say a…big knotty, sappy, pine log in MY eye, and I’m really, really concerned about pointing out that nicely-whittled, smooth splinter in YOUR eye. (I adore when I can make up a really good metaphor to explain these kinds of things.)
And then there’s my behavior when someone is trying to be nice, and I won’t let him. Today I was running along, minding my business, when I came upon and intersection and slowed down because there was at least three cars trying to enter the same intersection.
And this truck driver, in some misguided attempt to be nice, STOPS IN THE MIDDLE OF STREET TO LET ME CROSS THE INTERSECTION IN FRONT OF HIM, flouting all the rules of the road I know and some I probably just made up. Granted, he was trying to be nice. I waved him on. He waved me on. The other drivers got in on the waving too, but their gestures were more of the avian variety. Finally, I executed the universal signal of a runner who is absolutely NOT going to run into an intersection flush with vehicles: I stopped my watch. All douche-like. I made a big gesture of it, too.
He finally took his right turn, and so did the other two drivers. I felt bad, but I was dead set on living.
Human interaction is hard.
