631: Tales of a Bored Housewife
I preclude this post yet again with a semi-related comment, that explaining oneself is not necessarily excusing oneself, and the difference between the two should be noted.
For instance, I have never been drunk, therefore I have no idea how I would act when drunk. I don't feel deprived of this experience, however, because [to make an extreme case] what happens if I become a mass-murderer when drunk? That becomes an explanation of why I don't like getting drunk, if such was true, but it shouldn't excuse the fact someone dies when I get drunk. I should not be able to say with impunity, "Well, that's just what happens." I should be fully capable of not getting drunk and not killing someone. It is not an excuse to literally get away with murder, it is a reason to act responsibly with the knowledge and to NOT get drunk.
I can't respect people who use "well, that's how I am" as an excuse. Behaviour can be changed if you are willing to change. Excuses aren't excuses, they're declarations of an unwillingness to be responsible.
That said, from an observational standpoint, I recognize that I am both antisocial and somewhat depressed, because I push people away for seemingly no reason and don't reach out to others when I could and should. At the same time, I accept this outcome, because a lot of the time I feel as though it's merely "I ought to socialize" rather than a genuine "I want to socialize," and I don't want to put forth the effort into bugging others, "Hey, are you free XYZ date?" and calling around until I find someone who is and is willing to stay up all night with me, just because I predict I will be bored then [that is, Wednesdays and Fridays, at current]. Most of the time, I expect to work on one of my too-many projects, anyway--it usually just ends up that I don't.
...I wrote this in the wrong order. I can't figure out how to link the new first section with the old :p Oh, well, par for the course. You can make your own link, if you like.
Since I was little, I've had the subconscious notion enforced upon me that we grow into adults, marry our soulmates, and eventually isolate ourselves from everyone else in all respects besides work. [As I said, this was subconscious, and I'm fully aware of the problems inherent in this belief.] Most adults I'd met only serve to reinforce the notion, as my own parents in particular never seemed to hang out with friends--and still don't, save the weekly church social stuff which pretty much only happened because I befriended Annaleise in third grade and attended WAPC with her family because I wanted to hang out longer, and in either case church was just a social circle and not a group of Friends in the sitcom's sense of the word [though that may be just my own perception].
Part of that stems from my parents having moved to a new state entirely, away from old family and friends, and they haven't been or have grown out of being the kind of grown adults who have Boys'/Girls' Night Out once a week... that, and they spend enough time with their co-workers at work to be that interested in hanging out with them after work as well. Part of that is that my mother, as a flight attendant, works three or four days a week during which she is away entirely, leaving my father a bulk of having raised my brother and I. Part of that is, as my father told me, he realized that work was tiring, and he liked to rest on his time off.
Again, church is the exception, and my doing... [at least, as far as I'm aware in my twenty-odd years of living there in the past.]
So the subconscious notion, especially for stay-at-home mothers, ends up--and I'm afraid very few adults that aren't much closer to my age or mindset than not have proven me wrong on this--being You must find the one person who is your perfect opposite in experience, so the two of you form a perfect union where, between the two of you, you know everything and don't need anyone else for anything. It's not really a wonder that this fails in practice. Perfection is elusively impossible to attain, even when uniting two dissimilar people that the faults of one are overcome by the strengths of the other.
Even so, I've found my habits leaning annoyingly toward that tendency anyway, to grow apart from all my friends [even the ones specifically "mine" instead of my friends that were friends' friends first] and put my entire social livelihood in Charles. It's not fair to put that pressure on any one person, to have one's own happiness entirely dependent on the other. Yet I don't feel particularly deprived not having my own local friends, except on those long nights off when I've gotten bored of whatever project I started to finish but didn't. [This is why I try to avoid posting more than once on those nights--usually I end up drifting into the kind of bad territory that comes from an excessively bored mind.] What's worse is when my overactive imagination takes over and runs with some bad element that I shouldn't torture myself over but is impossible not to ponder... it's that in particular I know I ought to avoid but can't when I'm bored and alone.
It's an annoying dichotomy--the freedom of enjoying my own interests by myself, but the loneliness of cabin fever, and the erratic flip-flopping of moods between the two. I could soul-search all I like, but as long as I'm Overnight with no similarly Overnight friends, I don't think I'll reach much of a resolution, particularly with that part of my brain that is exclusively limiting my social life to whoever is immediately living with me [which makes Nag being here that much more depressing].
Perhaps I should start using Trillian again XB except that I've been irked by how many programs are clogging up my drive again and wondering if I ought to do another wipe. That, and the Catch-22 of whenever I *do* hop on, no one seems to actually be active.
Mind wandering meanderingly again. I guess that's a long enough post =/
I'll remove commenting, not for any particular reason save that I don't want my imagination running away again wondering how y'all might respond [or, if at all]. There's another thing that gets me--why do I think I don't care if no one responds, then care when no one does? Or, why do I feel upset when certain "fair-weather" friends only post good responses to a good post and "foul-weather" friends only post bad/critical responses to a bad post [not necessarily mine, but in general]? Or the LJ emo-garbage about Unfriending people and why does that subconsciously feel bad even if it's someone you Unfriended first?
That sucks. I'd rather feel perfectly sociable or perfectly unsociable, not this wavering-in-between bullshit. At least if I knew I enjoyed socializing I could buck up and get a Dayside job--even at another company--and get to hang out with actual physical people now and again besides the hour or two before I have to go to work when I'm still groggy.
Speaking of groggy, I have been itching to buy a set of those Memory Foam pads and pillows we have at work, because my bed is decreasingly comfortable, but Charles said something about Mum possibly foisting another bed on us, so I have to wait X/
..."have" to wait. I'm losing sleep, in the meantime... though that's par for the course as well.
For instance, I have never been drunk, therefore I have no idea how I would act when drunk. I don't feel deprived of this experience, however, because [to make an extreme case] what happens if I become a mass-murderer when drunk? That becomes an explanation of why I don't like getting drunk, if such was true, but it shouldn't excuse the fact someone dies when I get drunk. I should not be able to say with impunity, "Well, that's just what happens." I should be fully capable of not getting drunk and not killing someone. It is not an excuse to literally get away with murder, it is a reason to act responsibly with the knowledge and to NOT get drunk.
I can't respect people who use "well, that's how I am" as an excuse. Behaviour can be changed if you are willing to change. Excuses aren't excuses, they're declarations of an unwillingness to be responsible.
That said, from an observational standpoint, I recognize that I am both antisocial and somewhat depressed, because I push people away for seemingly no reason and don't reach out to others when I could and should. At the same time, I accept this outcome, because a lot of the time I feel as though it's merely "I ought to socialize" rather than a genuine "I want to socialize," and I don't want to put forth the effort into bugging others, "Hey, are you free XYZ date?" and calling around until I find someone who is and is willing to stay up all night with me, just because I predict I will be bored then [that is, Wednesdays and Fridays, at current]. Most of the time, I expect to work on one of my too-many projects, anyway--it usually just ends up that I don't.
...I wrote this in the wrong order. I can't figure out how to link the new first section with the old :p Oh, well, par for the course. You can make your own link, if you like.
Since I was little, I've had the subconscious notion enforced upon me that we grow into adults, marry our soulmates, and eventually isolate ourselves from everyone else in all respects besides work. [As I said, this was subconscious, and I'm fully aware of the problems inherent in this belief.] Most adults I'd met only serve to reinforce the notion, as my own parents in particular never seemed to hang out with friends--and still don't, save the weekly church social stuff which pretty much only happened because I befriended Annaleise in third grade and attended WAPC with her family because I wanted to hang out longer, and in either case church was just a social circle and not a group of Friends in the sitcom's sense of the word [though that may be just my own perception].
Part of that stems from my parents having moved to a new state entirely, away from old family and friends, and they haven't been or have grown out of being the kind of grown adults who have Boys'/Girls' Night Out once a week... that, and they spend enough time with their co-workers at work to be that interested in hanging out with them after work as well. Part of that is that my mother, as a flight attendant, works three or four days a week during which she is away entirely, leaving my father a bulk of having raised my brother and I. Part of that is, as my father told me, he realized that work was tiring, and he liked to rest on his time off.
Again, church is the exception, and my doing... [at least, as far as I'm aware in my twenty-odd years of living there in the past.]
So the subconscious notion, especially for stay-at-home mothers, ends up--and I'm afraid very few adults that aren't much closer to my age or mindset than not have proven me wrong on this--being You must find the one person who is your perfect opposite in experience, so the two of you form a perfect union where, between the two of you, you know everything and don't need anyone else for anything. It's not really a wonder that this fails in practice. Perfection is elusively impossible to attain, even when uniting two dissimilar people that the faults of one are overcome by the strengths of the other.
Even so, I've found my habits leaning annoyingly toward that tendency anyway, to grow apart from all my friends [even the ones specifically "mine" instead of my friends that were friends' friends first] and put my entire social livelihood in Charles. It's not fair to put that pressure on any one person, to have one's own happiness entirely dependent on the other. Yet I don't feel particularly deprived not having my own local friends, except on those long nights off when I've gotten bored of whatever project I started to finish but didn't. [This is why I try to avoid posting more than once on those nights--usually I end up drifting into the kind of bad territory that comes from an excessively bored mind.] What's worse is when my overactive imagination takes over and runs with some bad element that I shouldn't torture myself over but is impossible not to ponder... it's that in particular I know I ought to avoid but can't when I'm bored and alone.
It's an annoying dichotomy--the freedom of enjoying my own interests by myself, but the loneliness of cabin fever, and the erratic flip-flopping of moods between the two. I could soul-search all I like, but as long as I'm Overnight with no similarly Overnight friends, I don't think I'll reach much of a resolution, particularly with that part of my brain that is exclusively limiting my social life to whoever is immediately living with me [which makes Nag being here that much more depressing].
Perhaps I should start using Trillian again XB except that I've been irked by how many programs are clogging up my drive again and wondering if I ought to do another wipe. That, and the Catch-22 of whenever I *do* hop on, no one seems to actually be active.
Mind wandering meanderingly again. I guess that's a long enough post =/
I'll remove commenting, not for any particular reason save that I don't want my imagination running away again wondering how y'all might respond [or, if at all]. There's another thing that gets me--why do I think I don't care if no one responds, then care when no one does? Or, why do I feel upset when certain "fair-weather" friends only post good responses to a good post and "foul-weather" friends only post bad/critical responses to a bad post [not necessarily mine, but in general]? Or the LJ emo-garbage about Unfriending people and why does that subconsciously feel bad even if it's someone you Unfriended first?
That sucks. I'd rather feel perfectly sociable or perfectly unsociable, not this wavering-in-between bullshit. At least if I knew I enjoyed socializing I could buck up and get a Dayside job--even at another company--and get to hang out with actual physical people now and again besides the hour or two before I have to go to work when I'm still groggy.
Speaking of groggy, I have been itching to buy a set of those Memory Foam pads and pillows we have at work, because my bed is decreasingly comfortable, but Charles said something about Mum possibly foisting another bed on us, so I have to wait X/
..."have" to wait. I'm losing sleep, in the meantime... though that's par for the course as well.