posted 2007/02/19 at 15:09
I need you all to help me gain a little perspective here, because I may be in one of those situations where I'm placing unfair expectations on other people, but I'm not entirely sure of that.
Perhaps this is because I've always been far more of an observer of human interaction than a participant, but I try to look for patterns in the activities of the people around me, and adjust accordingly. For example, although the time at which my parents have dinner every night can vary quite widely, after dinner, without fail, they will always go lay down and cuddle together on the living room couch for fifteen to twenty minutes before taking an evening shower together. On rare occasions one or both of them will fall asleep during this "couch time" and it will take longer for the two of them to drag themselves to their shower, but there's still a general pattern there, and I plan for it accordingly; if I need to talk to the folks about anything, I make sure I talk to them about it at dinner so as not to interrupt their cuddle time. I also try not to take any showers close to when they're going to shower, to make sure they have plenty of hot water.
Now, I will admit that my schedule has become a bit more flexible now that I'm out of school, but there are still some general patterns that have held true in my life for quite some time. For example, about two hours and fifteen minutes after I walk downstairs to the garage with a video game console under my arm, I come back up here in worse need of a shower than anyone in this family ever gets. In all seriousness, I have to be careful where I take my shirt off in the bathroom after a workout, because I've been known to drip so much sweat into the cat litter that it starts clumping up. However, in spite of this pattern generally being true for the past couple of years or so, I can't begin to tell you how many times I have finished up a workout in the garage, then walked back up here only to find that my sister or brother-in-law have just started a shower. This leads to me having to stand here drenched in my own sweat, sometimes for twenty minutes at a time, unable to sit down without leaving a huge damp ass-print on my chair or bed.
I mention this right now because another general pattern that holds is that I get my lunch around an hour to an hour and a half after I eat breakfast. I do my daily journaling between the two meals, so sometimes it can take a bit longer, but again, it's a general pattern that's been established for quite some time. However, after I finished my journaling earlier today, I went downstairs to find that my sister had just put a cake in the oven and that it wouldn't be accessible for at least forty minutes. Every time I've gone downstairs since then, my sister's been busy baking other stuff, and I can't be sure exactly when I'll be able to fix my lunch here. It's bad enough that I'm pretty much starving at this point, but now the entire house smells like a cake that I can't eat on my diet anyway, making the hunger all the worse.
Now, I don't want to go into too much detail right now, but this is just part of a larger pattern of disrespect that my sister and brother-in-law have been engaged in, and steadily escalating, for quite some time now. It is no exaggeration to say that the two of them completely ruined both of the last two Christmases for me, and I can't begin to count how many times my mother has burst into tears recently due to their bad behaviour. The thing is, at least at this exact moment where I'm waiting for my sister to get out of the kitchen, I don't know if it is necessarily fair for me to blame her for not seeing this pattern in my activities. I don't know if other people are as observant of these kinds of things as I am, and if they aren't, then it would be unfair of me to blame my sister, at least in this instance. Am I incorrect in assuming that other people are as observant of these kinds of things as I am?
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon