Unresolved petty bitterness from your past

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

One in particular that has probably made me who I am today, ( diligent about fact finding) is in January of my Senior year in high school my mother says to me,
" With your grades, I doubt you could get into the community college." ( yeah, my self esteem was crushed down to China at that moment.)

THEN in April of that year I over heard her saying to a friend, " I don’t know why she hasn’t applied to any colleges."

I had a C average without even trying or buying the books. ( Being the good catholic school girl I stole my books and sold them back at the end of the year for a nice 100% profit.) Everyone said to me “You should try harder”, “your a smart girl” ( which always sounded like an insult to me) and my response was, " Why? I’m coasting through this without any effort and PASSING and I WON’T remember any of this stuff in 10 years." You know what, the only thing I remember is Literature and that’s for Jeopardy!.

Oh then, there is the guidance counselor who counselled all of my brothers and had been counselling for 30 years and had some pretty outdated views ( but it took me a few years after this to figure that out) It was sometime during my senior year, he looked at my grades and my shy quiet demeanor and nice girl next door looks and the nice things my teachers said about me and said, " You should find yourself a nice husband and have a bunch of kids." ( I almost cried right in front of him for being given a death sentance like that to a 16 year old girl. ( I graduated a few months after turning 17) )
Then a truly defining moment for me happened not long after I married. Here’s the set up with the cast of characters:

Mom - never mowed a lawn in her life ( had kids to do that and now has a lawn crew) Hates outdoor work. She is an excellent interior designer and always receives compliments on her house, which when clean, looks like its filled with museum peices.

Mother In Law - Has spectacular gardens, yard and gold fish pond. The inside of her house is always orderly, though decorated in heavy germanic fashion. She works harder than five women inside and outside the house.

Me - Newly married, maybe a year after marriage, I can’t recall exactly and still trying to balance out my side with his side.

Our house - newly built on 10 acres. The area around our house is mostly mud and rocks. ( lots and lots and lots of rocks. Our area is the #1 producer of gravel in the nation, nice, huh.) the rest is overgrown weeds from being a neglected farmers feild. The inside of the house is stark white walls and the remnants of our respective parents basement furniture and garage sale finds. Nothing matches.

I just got home from work and my mom and mother in law were over for an impomptu dinner set up by my husband who loves stuff like that.As the Moms have brought dinner, ( if they didn’t they’d starve) I race upstairs to change into work clothes that can get muddy and the windows are open, I can hear my mom and mother in law chatting nicely about nothing.

THEN I hear this:

Mom: I don’t know why she doesn’t have more done on the inside of the house. They’ve been here a year now.

Mother In law : Why don’t they have any landscaping done? There’s nothing down, not even grass.

I am normally a fairly stoic person, but I nearly cried when I over heard that. I was working a regular 40 a week job and commuting two hours a day. My husband was never home due to another job and I had never decorated anything but a locker in my life. My fear, and it still is a big one, is that the moment I would pick a color or style I/we liked, it would instantly look dated. Any time I brought up ideas that I thought would look nice, he would agree, but I never got any help and I will not do it alone ( at least on the first attempt. I have a severe impairment when it comes to directions.) We had bills to pay and the MOMs expect the house inside and out to look model perfect. I knew at that moment I could never please either Moms in my life and I suppose it has lead me to be completely apathetic about decorating. Which is fine now as I totally expect my son to destroy those walls, stain the carpet and color things with crayola. The only furniture we have bought in our entire marriage are leather couches, which have turned out to be a blessing in disguise for all the puke our Carrie of a son has hurled on them.

22

I’ve got a couple things that may or may not be ‘petty,’ but I’m definitely bitter.

The one happened in middle school. I developed early and had gotten used to the occasional remark or cat-call. However, when we moved right before I entered 7th grade, I had an entirely different group of people to meet - and they were beyond cruel. Every day in P.E. and shop classes I’d be cornered and harrassed, sometimes to the point of tears (and as the 2nd-youngest of seven kids, I’d learned that NOT crying was always the best reaction to anything). I was called a slut every single day for an entire school year (just because I had bigger breasts than the other girls my age), which at 12 is a little much.

Towards the end of the year I’d had enough and when the group of boys in my gym class started in on me, I stood up to them. I don’t remember the conversation, up until the teacher [after 8 months or so] stepped in to see what the problem was. I was the only one sent to the principal’s office. For whatever reason, I assumed that when I told the principal what had happened, she’d understand the situation. Instead, she called my mother in and told us that since those boys came from “bad homes” it was MY job to withstand their “harmless teasing.”

A few days later I ran away from home, and got picked up by the cops and spent a few hours in jail. The police officers that picked me up spent the entire time while we were waiting for my parents to get me showing me scary pictures of people that had been brutally murdered and telling me it could’ve happened to me if I hadn’t been lucky enough that they picked me up.

OK, now I’m thinking that’s not petty at all. Too bad it’s too late to sue. At least I can hang on to the bitterness :slight_smile:

“You’re going to listen
to ME? To something I
said? Haven’t I made it
abundantly clear over the
tenure of our friendship
that I don’t know shit?”

  • Brodie, “Mallrats”
23

This is pretty petty, but I’ve had a grudge against our landlady ever since the day we moved in. Or at least, a week after that day. She showed up so we could finish signing some papers, and she saw our dog. At the time, our dog was a little 12 lb., 14 year old, orange, blind barky mutt. Anyway, the lease says we’re required to have a fence if we have a dog, but she took one look at the dog and said, “Oh, she’s old, she won’t live long, you don’t need a fence.” I know she was just a dog, but that was a pretty cold thing to say. And, of course, the landlady was right, she died 4 months later, but that was STILL a pretty cold thing to say.

Another thing that I don’t know if I’m bitter about or not, but a little shaken and confused, and, yeah, bitter: in high school I was the prototypical outcast. Didn’t have any friends, didn’t have a car, sat in the back of the classroom reading instead of studying, used to see how many hours I could go without uttering a single word to anyone (other than maybe role call), etc. To me, the cool kids were the brains, and I longed to be included in their group, but never thought I was smart enough. So imagine my surprise when I had this conversation with my sister last weekend:

Sister: Do you remember Katie K------?
Me: Yes.
Sister: And her sister, what’s her name…?
Me: Meredith.
Sister: Yeah, well Meredith and Mattie S----------- run a cafe in McMinnville now. I was in there the other day and they asked about you.
Me: Really?
Sister: Yeah, they wanted to know if you were still doing art and stuff. They really loved you.
Me: Really??
Sister: Yeah, all those girls in school loved you, you were just too shy to talk to them. Ingrid P-------, Shelley M---------, they all thought you were great.
Me: Really?? Wait, I was just in Shelley’s house last November looking at her dad’s gallery, and she didn’t even look my way. (I didn’t mention that, as soon as I noticed Shelley, I reverted to high school mode and avoided drawing her attention.)
Sister: Oh? Well, she did, she can’t say enough nice things about you. Whenever I run into anyone, they always ask about you and your art. They really like you.

So… just why exactly didn’t anyone ever let me in on this secret in high school? They didn’t need to throw a big party or form a Kathey appreciation club, just maybe, I dunno, held a conversation with me? Asked me how I was doing? It’s probably my fault; I put them so high on a pedastal that I was too intimidated to ever make the first step, but surely I didn’t intimidate them. Fat, ugly, pathetic me? I can’t even intimidate a housefly. So why did I have to be so alone? Why couldn’t I have had friends? I dunno. but now I regret (and feel bitter about) all those years in school I wasted, when maybe I could have been bonding with these people instead of hiding and feeling sorry for myself.

“I hope life isn’t a big joke, because I don’t get it,” Jack Handy

24

Folks, what some of you went through is unmentionable. I feel for you.

This is pretty petty, though.

The Eisenhower is getting underway in about a half hour. We knew this was coming, what with Floyd running up the coast. You just don’t let a couple billon dollar ship ride a hurricane out at the pier.
The XO lets everyone know that all hands need to get underway. Then recants yesterday and says only non-essential personnel can remain behind.
The request chits flew.
My Division Officer tells me this morning he’s not headed out with us, oh and by the way, the Admiral’s riding the ship so you’ll have to “play” PAO this week. I’m already undermanned 60% but I’ve got to get by with myself and just two folks in my division.
I suck it up, give my hardiest “Aye, aye, sir!” and go about getting ready to get the ship underway.
One of my guys then tells me his wife is hysterical so he wants to go on leave. Mind you this is four hours before we’re to head out to sea.
I deny his chit. With myself and two guys we still have to run and monitor the ship’s entertainment system 27-7 as well as handle numerous press queries dealing with the fleet sortie. I explain this to the Department Head. He denies the chit also and forwards it to the XO.
My guy’s wife apparently called the XO in the meantime. The XO goes against my advice and approves the chit.
Then proceeds to lecture me about my need for compassion when dealing with my men.
Excuse me?
Isn’t this the military?

He’s lost a lot of stature in my book.

Anyway, 25-foot seas here I come – yee ha!!

25

A couple of school-related slaps in the face from very different periods of my life.

A spelling bee (these seem pretty common so I’ll through in my hat as well). Second or third grade? The word was “reindeer”. This ones easy, thought I, since all the other goofusses are going to think it is spelled r-a-i-n-d-e-e-r. I spelt it r-e-i-n-d-e-e-r and naturally was judged wrong. My parents happened to be present - it was some sort of even, held in the evening - very important. Later on they explained that I hadn’t sufficiently glottal-stopped between the the two e’s, so the judge figured I spelt it “reinder”. Irksome, but understandable.

My next example, in a completely different league since it still gets me all filled with bile and butterflies and other stuff I don’t like being filled with, is called peer grading. At grad school I had plenty of group projects, and they were all emotional bloodbaths with everybody accusing everybody else of not working hard enough, etc. Sometimes I worked harder than others, sometimes I didn’t work as hard. The first hunk of bull surrounding the grad school group project thing is that it somehow simulates the workplace. I’ve been in several jobs with teamwork involved, and none of them ever approached the hatred, stress, backbiting, or intellectual bigotry of any of my grad school projects.

So anyway, for one class the prof decides she can’t be bothered coming up with a grade for each student herself, so she figures she’ll just give each project a grade and let us distribute the points ourselves. I worked harder for this course than any other course I can think of, and our project was considered the second best in the class. And I hated my partners and they hated me. I got an F for that class, the only F I’ve ever gotten.

Why did they grade me so low? I didn’t grade them low. I abstained from “voting”, which meant I divided the score equally (20% to all five members). They could either have been motivated by hatred, wanting to grade me down to punish me for not being like them (I didn’t have anything to say about the school basketball team, for example). Or they could have been motivated by greed, since any points they didn’t allocate to me they could have allocated to their beloved selves and to on another. (I’ve never heard of anything like this grading system being used anywhere else, so if you’re shocked at how stupid it is, so am I.) So the prof averaged my 20% with their whatever percents (somewhere between 20% and zero) and I just didn’t have enough points left to make a passing grade.

I retook an equivalent course later in a different department, and passed, and got the degrees, although sometimes I’m not sure if I will really ever recover from graduate school. Pardon me, I’m shaking a little.

26

Sorry Boris, it sounds like you’ve been through enough, but – if I was going to talk about getting burned in a spelling bee, I wouldn’t “through” in my hat!!

“non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem”
– William of Ockham

27

Maybe we should open a ‘bad spelling bee experience’ thread. I was about 7 or 8 when I got an invite to the city spelling bee. I had to show up (with my resentful older brother as a chaperone) on a Saturday at the State Fair and Exposition Center and sit in a room with more kids than I’d ever seen before in my life up to then (~500). They handed out the initial lists of words and I raced right through, then backed up and double-checked, then triple-checked and turned it in, totally confident because not one word was unfamiliar and I knew I’d aced it. So I’m waiting with the other kids as the tests are graded and the names of the contestants with a perfect score are called. They call my first name, followed by another surname. At that instant, a boy a few rows in front of me springs to his feet, so I figure that must be him. So I wait and wait. Then it’s over. It wasn’t 'til I was on my way home on the bus with my brother (this is about 1959) that I figured it out – I happen to have a rather rare French surname which incorporates a silent ‘t’ (everybody in the family has tales of massive manglings) and the idiot reading off the names had mispronounced it; the kid in the front row had simply been the kid called before me. Ah, all those untaken roads . . .

I got others, but that’s another story.

28

Arggh! Don’t you know? The word is “throw”, spelled t h r o u g h. Come on, do you think I’m a dofoos? Or is it “dufus”?

Looking back, I’m surpised no on took issue with my use of “spelt”. It’s a bad habit of mine, but “spelt” is a real, albeit obsolete, spelling of “spelled”. It’s also a kind of wheat.