After, at age 13, a particularly traumatic event (the death of a relative, and ensuing funeral), my (particularly emotionally distant) father said in my presence that he had no plans of trying to be a friend to me.
Six years later, it was clarified that what he -meant- was that he felt he didn’t have the skills to be close to his sons, but that’s not what he said, and the damage was already done. From that earlier day on, I looked at him as an enemy, not a friend.
Someone left behind a notebook in a discussion section I taught. I was flipping through it to see if I could find a paper with a name on it, so I could return it to the right person, and I came across a page of notes she was writing back and forth to her friend, about what a loser I was and how sorry they felt for me.
Fuck them. I can’t believe how much I let it get to me. I was doing exactly what I wanted to do with my life, and doing it very fucking well, and two snotty-ass, same-haircut-havin’, thong-flashin’, stupid-algebra-mistake-makin’ sorority bitches feel sorry for me!? Ha! And yet, clearly, it still makes me mad as hell.
I should have dumped her notebook, and all her astro notes, and all her homework assignments (including the one due that week) straight into the fucking recycling bin, but I didn’t, because I’m a better person than her and her bitchy little friend.
It is just astonishing how that kind of shit gets to you, even when the source is someone whom nobody in their right mind would have any respect for at all.
…overheard by some troll I used to work with who thought the reason I got lots of intersting projects thrown my way instead of hers was because I was sleeping with my boss.
I mean, I was, but there was no way she could have known that.
I’m kidding, of course; I wasn’t sleeping with him.
This occurred in the winter of 1985 with a senior partner in a large Detroit law firm, who kept canceling on me for about 2 weeks (including one office visit). He would then only arrange to meet on a Sunday morning at his home. It was colder than hell out, and he was about half an hour late picking me up.
I should have seen a pattern developing here. The man had been an FBI attorney in his younger days, and he was practicing the time-honored technique of putting the heat on (including roudly cussing out his wife after she phoned during our meeting). His interview consisted mostly of grilling and here-and-now challenges. “You write? Write something. Draw cartoons? Draw me a cartoon.” Like that.
I was completely put off and frozen up by then (not just physically frozen, either). He’d been writing on a legal pad, and when he left the room for some reason, I took a look. I didn’t get beyond the first line:
“A very dull young man. Talking to him is like pulling teeth.”
Moreover, he wrote this while across the table from me, just in front of my eyes. He then left the room momentarily as if to make sure I read it.
Guess the Bureau struck a blow for old Harvard that day.
Wow, I’ve been lurking here for a long time, but I definitely had to contribute to this thread!
This happened a few years ago, and by now my friends all know the story, and the damage has been repaired. But when it happened, and immediately after…
I was on an airplane, waiting to take off after a long week with a client. I was anxiously wanting to get back to my beautiful wife and home, but the plane was delayed. To kill time, and to let her know that I would be a bit late, I dialed her cell phone. Then connection was made, and I heard restaurant sounds ( it was lunch time) and somebody fumbling with the phone. Then a mans voice. The conversation went something like this:
Mans voice: “Who was that?”
Wife: “My husband. I hung up on him”
MV: “Why? I kind of like the idea of him being on the phone while I do THIS”
W: (giggling) “Stop it! We’re in public”
MV " Call him back"
W: “No, I don’t want to talk to him. I want to talk to you”
MV: “are you going to tell him about us?”
W: " I was going to, but his father is sick. It’s pretty serious."
MV: " You are going to have to tell him sometime"
W: “This is going to sound awful, but if he dies, we’ll be able to pay off the house. If I leave him, I’ll really need that money”
MV " That doesn’t sound awful. You’ve got to look out for yourself. Are we going to look for an apartment next week?"
W:" Let’s put it off a few weeks. He doesn’t suspect a thing. Sometimes I think he’s an idiot."
MV: (laughing) You think?
Then a flight attendant asked me to hang up as they were closing the doors for departure. I had heard plenty, and hung up. The worlds longest three hour flight immediately followed.
It sounds worse than it really is but here goes.
When I was in 6th grade I was alot uglier than I am now. My brother was dating off & on with a woman who he was friends with. Her and her brother would come over to our house and we’d talk and make movies (action, comedies, etc) in the yard or in the house.
So she is talking to some people at the library and I enter and she doesn’t see me. One of her friends ask ‘are you dating’ and after that he meant to say my brother’s name to ask if she was dating my brother but he said mine instead by accident and she says something like ‘ewww god no he’s disgusting’. I’m sure people ahve said far worse but I don’t really remember any of them offhand.
Damn, Cletus Hornblower. Damn.
Oh my good lord. That made my heart sink just reading it.
This is the worst time to say it, but, [[Cletus Hornblower]] welcome to the boards.
-foxy
Wait, there’s no punchline? I was expecting to hear you’d dialed the wrong number or something.
You win the thread.
Well, not sure there is a punchline - but sometimes there are happy endings. My dad got better and is still very healthy, I had relatively easy divorce ( don’t want to hijack explaining why, but she didn’t get any money), and not long after she got pregnant from the guy on the phone…at the same time HIS wife did :wally. Both of the women had had enough and he ended up moving into a dumpy apartment paying child support for 4 kids. At that point the story had become too Jerry Springerish for my tastes and I stopped paying attention.
This is one of those “well, the other person was completely insane” situatoins, but it was still enough to give me a complex that I still haven’t gotten over.
I’m a sarcastic person by nature - always cracking wise and dropping one-liners. A while back, my wife and I had been getting on pretty well with another couple we had met - the guy and I shared many interests and enjoyed hanging out, my wife and the woman had really clicked, and all four of us enjoyed doing things together. It was going fine for a few months, and suddenly things went cold - it just never “worked out” for us to do stuff, they always had previous plans when we’d invite them to do things, and so on.
A few months later (after they had broken up), I started hanging out with the male half again, and he explained to me that the woman had hated me, all going back to an incident when I had complimented her interior decorating skills. She had thought that I was being sarcastic and mocking the job she had done, but I had been 100% serious, even hoping (and asking her) that she’d help my wife and I decorate our new apartment. Because of this, she had forbidden him to hang out with me and refused to do anything together since.
Sure, it’s just that she was completely nuts, but now I have a complex about it and always worry that people I really like are going ot secretly be angry at me and think that I’m being mocking when I’m just being me.
Sometimes that can actually be a productive attitude, because then you do go out and do stuff by yourself, and usually end up meeting people.
Time, by popular demand (I overheard one of my wife’s friends ex-piano teacher say it when I answered my domestic helper’s mobile phone by mistake thinking it was my wife’s), for my promised second story.*
So I’ve somehow interested this stunning Chinese lawyer/concert-standard pianist. Her friend, Laura, also a lawyer, sets her up with me and we go and watch a film (My Life as a Dog - Danish fare) followed by supper at her place. I ask her to play the piano and she plays the first movement of Schumann’s piano concerto (one of my favourites). (She just plays the piano part, incidentally.)
Then we talk. It’s going pretty amazingly - I’m in the zone like I’ve never been before bird-wise - when it goes suddenly flat.
“Laura says you’re a bit wally.”
I do pride myself on my quick wit, so I try this in response.
“Do you mind if I help you with your English?”
“Of course not.”
“It’s ‘a bit of a wally’, not ‘a bit wally’.”
She thanked me. I wonder to this day if she knows what a wally is.
I seem to hang around discreet people who don’t talk out of school because I’ve never overheard anything about myself.
My father did say one thing to me and I don’t think he even realized what he had said. I still get a chuckle out of it when I think of it - like now.
We were discussing methods of birth control and he confided his favorite method which he said he knew was the only one that worked because he had “tried the others and they don’t work.”
So I guess my sister and I were unwanted.
Actually you can. When I first started approaching women I couldn’t tell shit from shinola but after you do it a few times you learn to read subtle cues that you were overlooking earlier like tone of voice, how the eyes look, body language, how eager they are to carry on their end of the conversation, etc. This leads to finding better people and avoiding worse people. And you learn to create stereotypes about people based on how they carry themselves, how they dress & body langauge which aren’t 100% accurate but which are better than nothing.
And, I always try to remind myself that people who act like that towards you probably act that way towards everyone. There are alot of insecure people who are hateful and cruel but they are only that way because they treat themselves that way. A mature, stable person would not do that kind of thing to you and by and large people won’t treat you badly unless they treat themselves badly as well.
My point is that only people who treat themselves like shit will treat other people like shit. For some reason that makes me feel a little better when I get mistreated because I know that in that particular person’s mind everyone is fodder to treat like dirt starting with themselves.
Apparently, two different sets of people don’t like me and think I’m stuck up. This was related to me by various friends. I guess it’s not necessarily bad, but more amusing than anything else.
roger, what’s a wally?
Surely I’m not the only one who doesn’t know what that means…
That’s the joke, of course - that the non-native speaker thought it must be a compliment, because she liked me. What she didn’t realise was that Laura (who was Irish and quite fiery as well as being beautiful) was badmouthing me. Laura must have known that Teresa hadn’t interpreted her aright, which, I think, made her rather amused. Lawyers!
Anyway, :wally this smiley is called ‘wally’ in its coded form, i.e. when you click the icon when making a post that is what will appear in your text box. Dictionary definition ‘a stupid or foolish person’. Carries more the sense of ‘wanker’!
First, I just want to say that some of these are heart-breaking! Damn! Off the top of my head I can’t think of any times this type of thing happened to me, except for once when I overheard my mother telling someone, “…well, you know what a loner Rodgers is…” Not exactly a mean thing to say, but I had never considered myself to be a loner at that point, so it was a bit of a shock.
Roger thornhill – I don’t get your first example. (Didn’t get your second example either, till you explained what a wally is!) On the surface, saying that you learned a lot from someone “in a funny sort of way” doesn’t strike me as overly mean – a bit eyebrow-raising, but if said in an affectionate way, it wouldn’t be offensive at all. Is there a subtext I’m missing? Was he implying that you were stupid or something?