Angst In My Pants

Perhaps I don't have quite as much angst in my pants as I once did, but I spend a lot less time musing than I used to. Which, for you, is probably a mixed blessing. On the one hand, you probably pass by my page as often as you once did but, instead of finding 1000 words to read while you're avoiding – what was it, Susan? 18th C literature? – you end up with a whole lot of nothing or some vague one-liner about Christmas lights and how much I hate it when the flash. (Seriously, I do.) Nevertheless, this morning I woke up with a nagging feeling that today was not going to be one of those days. It wasn't.

Over the years I've been accused of a lot of things – not the least of which is that I'm a bit of a complete bitch. Look up "bitch" in the dictionary and you get a great big picture of me and a link to my website. I can go from the simply unfeeling to deliberately cruel in fifteen seconds flat and I can do it without batting an eyelash. There has been more than one casualty, laying limp on the side of the road of my life. I've deflated more egos than I've boosted and I've done most of it relatively unintentionally and even more unapologetically. While there are, of course, some people exempted from this rule, I tend to treat the people who I would call my friends, or at least my round about acquaintances a lot like I treat my so called enemies.

I can't say that I've ever spent a good amount of time wondering why it is that I'm so hard on people. I know that I can be nothing if not verbally abusive and it's never been a mystery why there are some who deal with the business end of that sword almost every time they come into contact with me – and sometimes simply when the memory of them collides with a bad day. What I never really considered was why people like King, Nate, Aaron, or even Mike, who, for the moment at least, I had made peace with, often felt certain – or should have, at least – that I had it in my mind to be horrible to them on a given day.

I woke up at 5:30 this morning. Actually, I woke up at 11:30 last night, and 12:30, and 1:30, and 2:30, and 3:30 and 4:30…but at 5:30, I decided "fuck it" – and emphatically. Well, maybe not emphatically, but I don't really do anything emphatically at 5:30 in the morning. My point, anyway, was that between 5:30 and 6:30 I had solved a problem that has plagued the people in my life for years. Gotta love it when I day starts off like that – huh?

Okay, so maybe "solved' is a strong word. I haven't actually solved the problem, but it's less bad than it used to be. You see, there are very few people in my life that I'm not horrible to – and then I realized that there are very few people in my life who I don't hate a little, on some level and it all clicked into place.

The problem, not that you cared, is thus; if I'm treating you poorly and I haven't disclaimed my behavior with "I'm crabby today," the truth of the matter is that I probably hate you a little.

Were King alive, I'd still hate him a little. Actually, I kind of hated him a lot. A lot, a lot. Less than I did at one point, but more than was probably good for either of us. I think I probably hated him the most out of anyone I was at all nice to. Aaron…well, yup, kind of hate him a little. Not at lot…mostly because I wasn't really a big fan of him already by the time he elected to start doing things that annoy me. Hell, even Mike, I kind of hate a little…and he still lets me sleep in his bed.

While I'd love to say that the moral of the story is "don't poke the bear," I have to recognize that none of my considerable loathing, for these people at least, comes from an action I can't "get" – I may feel, quite certainly, that I never would have done any of the things that they did, but I've always, at least, been able to understand why they make the decisions that they do. So, in that vein, I guess I have to consider the moral of the story a change that has to happen on my end, rather than the other way around and, from that perspective, the moral of the story seems to be "let it go." Granted, knowing the moral doesn't mean I'm going to do anything with it, for no one has trust and betrayal issues like me. Actually, I think there are some East German Jews and a few Native Americans with small pox who might win the rodeo for that title, but no one does it with the kind of flair I do. ;)

In the end, now that I've publicly defamed a dead guy, my significant other and poor unsuspecting Aaron (told you I was a bitch) I don't really have a lot to say other than "hey, the trust and forgiveness thing was already on the to-do list."