It's true. There's just no way around it. I cannot pretend to be easy-going or laid-back, except that like everyone else I have a few exceptions to this rule. Here's a list about this topic. (I'm sort of liking this list thing. It's way easier than cohesive posts about one thing. You can be shamelessly brief.)
- I'm weird about reading. At any given time, I have a list of about four books queued in my head. So right now, I'm reading King Dork (for book club; can I just say that if you were to read any book and come to any book club, Tim, this might be a good one for you...), but queued after that are a) some book about Disney World's early years, b) a book about sports fandom, and c) Motor Mouth by Evanovich. It's entirely likely that I'll read these books in that exact order, and when I start the Disney book, I'll queue up another book behind Motor Mouth. Possibly What Was She Thinking?, but also possibly one of the myriad books I've brought home from two libraries in the past three days. I don't always make these book queues, especially when I'm having a hard time getting interested in reading, but right now there is an embarrassment of book riches in my world, and it helps me to make virtual queues for them. It's insanely structured in my brain, and I'm not saying I wouldn't bump a book for a better option, but still. You have to admit it's slightly bizarre.
- I MUST be on time. I hate not being on time more than I hate almost anything else in the world. I'd pretty much rather be any amount of time early than late, which is compulsive, to say the least. It's probably good that I don't go to many parties, because I'd be horrendously bad at being fashionably late. I don't like fashionably late. If you want everyone to come at 9 and not 8, put freaking 9 on the invitation. I also don't understand being late. Part of my anal nature is the freakish way I plan everything, so I inevitably have a plan for getting out of the house on time. I realize that not everyone does this, and I also realize that sometimes things not in our control intervene. But then you must realize that since I have a predisposition to leave weirdly way too early for everything, even if I think I'm running late because of traffic, I will be on time. Being late makes me feel uneasy. It makes me feel as if I'm breaking my end of a contract, a contract that says, "We are having dinner at 5:30. Not 6 and not 5, but 5:30. Not 5:35 or 5:25, but 5:30." If we have a reservation for 5:30, I will panic beyond a place of sanity if I think we're not going to make it on time. It's anal. It's possibly beyond anal. Whatever it is, it's a compulsion that I probably will never get over. It's possible that the chronically under-planned and lateness that is Sam will relax me, but it's more likely that he will feel the hammer blow of an evil look if he's not ready to leave the house at the time I deem appropriate. It's entirely likely that I'm in fact making him prompt. Poor man.
- The aforementioned planning. I'm not the best at flying by the seat of my pants. In fact, I'd rather not, thanks. I like to have a plan, so that I know exactly what to expect. (There is one exception to this, and that is getting around by car. Oh sure, I'll look at directions, but I'll rarely print them out. Mostly, it's because I can remember very easily the directions without the paper. But also, I trust myself to get where I need to go. I'm good at direction, in general, so I don't need to plan things so crazily.) I don't like finding out where I'm going for dinner the 5 minutes before I go. I don't like going somewhere to figure out where to go next. I don't like plans that contain wording that goes something like this: We'll meet there at 7-ish. What the hell is 7-ish? 7-ish doesn't exist, that's what I think. Occasionally, no plan can be a plan, but only every once in a while. I can be less anal and admit that once in a while. I swear.
- I don't like to lose. This is possibly an understatement. In fact, I don't like to fail at anything, and that includes the category of losing games. Possibly the biggest single thing I'd like to change about myself are my feelings about failure. I suspect it's a pretty common oldest child thing; I constantly feel the need to prove myself (at freaking ANYTHING, for god's sake) to whomever. This cannot be in any way blamed on my parents, who have always maintained a basically...how to say this...blase attitude? about everything from bad grades to....not getting into grad school. I don't mean to say that they didn't want those things for me, or that even that they weren't disappointed in bad grades or the other thing, but that they never really made those things expectations. I definitely always knew that at the end of it, they didn't really care about that 'D' in religion in college. They want other things for me, probably chief among those things my happiness. If I fail at a few things in life, well, I'm quite sure their attitude is, "Hey, everyone does." And they're totally right. No, I'm definitely the enforcer of the demand for perfection from myself, and it can get ugly. I mean, I don't even want to lose board games. Or computer games. Or card games. I like to win. And I really don't like to do things where the risk of failure is present. I mean, I do. Because you know, I'm in a relationship, and that right there is a risk. I've always been a big fan of the whole "jump off a cliff" thing, even if I find it excruciatingly hard to execute sometimes. It's, well, you know, one of those things I'm always ALWAYS working on, even if it seems I'm not. There's always something I don't want to do because I might be bad at it, and yet I'm always going ahead and trying things. Bike riding comes to mind. And something else I did a few months ago that was a going-down-in-flames failure (which I don't really want to talk about because it still is kind of embarrassing to me, but nevertheless, I did it. I'll never ever do it again, and I felt pretty poorly about the whole thing for a few days, but you know what? I did it. That was a victory right there.), but that probably was freaking good for me. The whole grad school fiasco? Probably good for me, in the end. I suspect how we deal with failure might ultimately be one of our more important characteristics because like I said, everyone does it, and life is kind of set up so that you're always going to be failing at something. I'm still not a graceful loser, and it still rankles, but I'm working on it. I swear. In fact, I'm working myself up to re-tackle "Gimme Shelter" on Rock Band on the guitar, at medium difficulty. The song that brought me down. I'm going to play it until I don't fail. No matter how many failures that takes.
I will say this: Sam is everything that I'm not in the controlling life category. He is Laid-back (capital L) and very much just about going with the flow. In many ways, he's probably very good for me, because of that. He does tell me to relax. A lot. And hey, I make him on time. It's probably a good trade.
1. I can't understand how you manage to remain friends with me, given that I am very nearly incapable of being on time. Well, I'm getting better - and should, since I have been actively trying to be better for the last two years solid, at least. The main blessing, for our friendship at least, is that we usually meet either after work, where there is absolutely no temptation to dawdle beforehand or for a concert, which is the only exception to my chronic lateness. I find it very disturbing to be late to a concert. Only recently could I bring myself to intentionally miss an opening act that I know I won't like.
2. I find it fascinating that you don't pay much attention to directions. It flies in the face of your timeliness and planning addictions.
3. Though you love to win, you aren't a bad winner. Of course, it is easy to be nice to the last-place finisher when you are in first, but I never saw much trash-talking or anything like that in our fantasy league.
Also, I am still talking about your mad trivial pursuit skills from the one game we played damn near ten years ago. Holy crap! Can you believe our junior year was almost ten years ago?!?!
Posted by: Rita | March 14, 2008 at 05:30 PM
1. I remain friends with many people who are late a lot. I date one of them, after all. When we didn't live together, things could get very hairy with his lack of timeliness. And actually, HA, one of the only times I actually prefer to be late nowadays is a concert. I'm firmly in the camp of skipping opening bands unless they are AWESOME, and even then, I'm kinda like....enh. Whatever. No more of that sitting around and waiting for the concert to start for me. Interesting that we're opposites in that way.
2. Yeah, I mostly just know my way around now. I've got very complete maps in my head of quite a few urban and suburban areas, so I'm usually just....good. One of my weird quirks is my semi-photographic memory, and if I look at g-maps once, I can usually picture a route. And if I miss a turn or something, I don't get perturbed because I still usually know exactly where I am. Plus, now that I live in the city I'm very good with the numbering of streets, so I can always find my way around by that.
3. And thanks! I still love Trivial Pursuit, but no one ever wants to play with me. I think I can count on one hand the number of TP games I've played since that day however many years ago.
And HOLY M-F-ING SHIT, do you know that Rome was September 1998? That's what? Six months away? That's even more crazy to me. Must've been in what, October? that we discovered a common love for DMB (if I remember right...)while wandering around that city. That's...insane. Totally insane.
Posted by: Manogirl | March 14, 2008 at 07:41 PM