*choke* Must... vent...
So, my friend has this girlfriend who's pretty awful. I get along with her. If I had only my interactions with her to go on, I'd probably like her. But the longer he dates her, the more she infuriates me.
Let it be known that this guy is one of the best friends I've ever had, and we've been friends for so long that jealousy and/or competition, if they ever were a factor, ceased to be one over a decade ago.
At the moment, I'm annoyed with her because of her impending birthday party, but I'll get to that in a moment. Here's a short list of things that have annoyed me over the course of the relationship:
1. She displayed no respect for the relationship Dave was in when she reappeared in his life. (And that girl was good.)
2. She bullied him into letting her and her then 4-year-old move in with him when the lease ran out on their old place.
3. Her fondest ambition is to be a stay-at-home mom. She simply doesn't want to support herself.
4. She's a homophobe who likes to sleep with other women. Um, what?
5. She's also a conservative, Dubya-lovin', Army-bein'-in scientologist. Taken together, these things add up to someone with a lack of compassion and a severe lack of critical thinking skills.
6. She has no compunctions when it comes being critical of/yelling at Dave in front of lots of other people.
7. She thinks her 30th birthday is the end of the world, which brings me to the reason I finally had to come here and spew the venom.
She turns 30 tomorrow. Because she is at heart a vain, shallow party girl, she's depressed about it: 30 is the end of everything she knows. To console herself, she's opted to enter her 30s with a bang: tons of people in a limo, custom scavenger hunt at the Udvar-Hazy Center (OK, that's pretty cool), then dinner and bar-hopping, during which she'll get shitfaced, and then an after party at their house.
Fun times, right? Right. Except that Dave lost his job a few months back. He's had to tighten the belt, and he's spending all his time right now trying to find work. Nonetheless, she thinks nothing of throwing herself this huge bash and--AND!--making Dave do all the legwork on it while she goes down to Alabama with a group of guys he's never met for a Team Fortress 2 meet-up. Then, we he doesn't get it done because he's, I dunno, GOING ON JOB INTERVIEWS, she yells at him and makes him feel like an idiot. So he gets everything done, and--surprise!--this is going to be an expensive event. Her plan is to have each person pay an equal share of the limo and scavenger hunt costs. If everyone attends, that's $117 per person, PLUS dinner and drinks at the bars. Fortunately, Dave's a sensible guy and asked everyone to donate whatever they can/want to to defray the cost of her extravagance, rather than buying her a gift or anything.
Now, I'm all for spoiling people on their birthdays, but I'm having a hard time with this one. Maybe it's the deep, lingering resentment I have of the way she treats Dave. Maybe it's that her ethics are so different from my own that I don't want to do anything to support her in this silliness. Maybe it's just that this is my slow season and we have a lot of other bills to pay. In any case, I'm thoroughly annoyed that she expects anyone to pay that much money to make her feel better about being too vapid to appreciate how much better the 30s are. I mean, seriously. I had about a week of minor angst leading up to my 30th birthday, but that was because I wasn't where I wanted to be in life, not because I felt like it was the end of the person I wanted to be! If anything, it's the beginning of her!
Anyway.
To Dave's credit, yes, he regrets getting together with her. Yes, he wishes he hadn't left his last relationship for this one. He's still with her because he's a good guy and knows that if he leaves, she and the kid are going to end up in an undesirable situation at best, or on the streets at worst. I'm just hoping that some day he wakes up and realizes that he deserves something better, enormously better, for himself.
The end.
Let it be known that this guy is one of the best friends I've ever had, and we've been friends for so long that jealousy and/or competition, if they ever were a factor, ceased to be one over a decade ago.
At the moment, I'm annoyed with her because of her impending birthday party, but I'll get to that in a moment. Here's a short list of things that have annoyed me over the course of the relationship:
1. She displayed no respect for the relationship Dave was in when she reappeared in his life. (And that girl was good.)
2. She bullied him into letting her and her then 4-year-old move in with him when the lease ran out on their old place.
3. Her fondest ambition is to be a stay-at-home mom. She simply doesn't want to support herself.
4. She's a homophobe who likes to sleep with other women. Um, what?
5. She's also a conservative, Dubya-lovin', Army-bein'-in scientologist. Taken together, these things add up to someone with a lack of compassion and a severe lack of critical thinking skills.
6. She has no compunctions when it comes being critical of/yelling at Dave in front of lots of other people.
7. She thinks her 30th birthday is the end of the world, which brings me to the reason I finally had to come here and spew the venom.
She turns 30 tomorrow. Because she is at heart a vain, shallow party girl, she's depressed about it: 30 is the end of everything she knows. To console herself, she's opted to enter her 30s with a bang: tons of people in a limo, custom scavenger hunt at the Udvar-Hazy Center (OK, that's pretty cool), then dinner and bar-hopping, during which she'll get shitfaced, and then an after party at their house.
Fun times, right? Right. Except that Dave lost his job a few months back. He's had to tighten the belt, and he's spending all his time right now trying to find work. Nonetheless, she thinks nothing of throwing herself this huge bash and--AND!--making Dave do all the legwork on it while she goes down to Alabama with a group of guys he's never met for a Team Fortress 2 meet-up. Then, we he doesn't get it done because he's, I dunno, GOING ON JOB INTERVIEWS, she yells at him and makes him feel like an idiot. So he gets everything done, and--surprise!--this is going to be an expensive event. Her plan is to have each person pay an equal share of the limo and scavenger hunt costs. If everyone attends, that's $117 per person, PLUS dinner and drinks at the bars. Fortunately, Dave's a sensible guy and asked everyone to donate whatever they can/want to to defray the cost of her extravagance, rather than buying her a gift or anything.
Now, I'm all for spoiling people on their birthdays, but I'm having a hard time with this one. Maybe it's the deep, lingering resentment I have of the way she treats Dave. Maybe it's that her ethics are so different from my own that I don't want to do anything to support her in this silliness. Maybe it's just that this is my slow season and we have a lot of other bills to pay. In any case, I'm thoroughly annoyed that she expects anyone to pay that much money to make her feel better about being too vapid to appreciate how much better the 30s are. I mean, seriously. I had about a week of minor angst leading up to my 30th birthday, but that was because I wasn't where I wanted to be in life, not because I felt like it was the end of the person I wanted to be! If anything, it's the beginning of her!
Anyway.
To Dave's credit, yes, he regrets getting together with her. Yes, he wishes he hadn't left his last relationship for this one. He's still with her because he's a good guy and knows that if he leaves, she and the kid are going to end up in an undesirable situation at best, or on the streets at worst. I'm just hoping that some day he wakes up and realizes that he deserves something better, enormously better, for himself.
The end.