High School Psychology
There are, according to my high school psychology teacher, three types of internal conflicts.
Approach-Approach: you want two things, but you can't have both.1
Avoid-Avoid: you don't want either of two things, but only one can be avoided.
Approach-Avoid: you want some aspects of a thing, but not others.
Pursuant to #3, I find that it is impossible to play Scrabble in Los Gatos without going to Los Gatos.
I hate Los Gatos.
Granted, these days I mostly hate it on principle. It's been nearly three years since I had any active, current hatred going on. During those three years I've met two people who lived there and were not horrible. I quite liked both of them. Still, a girl's gotta have her irrational prejudice.
Los Gatos: the town has a servants' entrance. That pretty much sums it up. I worked there for six wretched months, and every day I'd get off the highway at the servants' entrance, the town's back door. Just inside city limits there's a gas station and a liquor store. Every night, the servants file out past the two. Fuel to get far away, and courage --either to leave for good, or to make it through the next day. The people who work there are never the people who live there.
There are over 20,000 people in Los Gatos, and yet at times it seemed there was only one family. The husband worked long hours for high pay in San Jose, came home only rarely, spent no more than five minutes a week with the children. The wife had no need to work and would have felt it degrading to do so. She spent her days shopping and having long lunches with the other wives. She always wore pastel jogging suits, but never actually jogged (it's not ladylike to sweat) and she drove an enormous SUV that she never could learn how to park. She thought of her children more as fashion accessories than as independent human beings. The children were always blond, the boy two years older than the girl. His name was Michael. Her name was either Haley or Emily. They adored their mother and feared their father, but in fact were raised by a nanny. She was Latina, but never Mexican. She was from Argentina, or Bolivia, or Venezuela. Hiring Mexicans brought up all sorts of Questions that could be avoided by choosing a more exotic-sounding country of origin.
If you wanted to escape the wrath of the women, you had to admire the children. You had to agree that they were the cutest children anywhere. You had to sympathize with the women as they talked about their money problems. The problem was not that they didn't have enough, of course: they discussed these money troubles while buying thousand-dollar cameras (that they never learned to use) after eating fifty dollar lunches, driving between the two in a $70,000 SUV. No, the problem was that they didn't have more than they had, and that problem drove them all mad and never, ever, would go away.
Finally I told my boss's boss that I couldn't take it anymore, that he'd either have to find me a job in Capitola or I had to quit. After a few attempts to negotiate, he got me the transfer, and my quality of life skyrocketed. Since then I have made every possible effort to avoid going to That Place.
Tonight xpmorgan asked if we were going to the tournament in two weeks. It didn't enter my brain that the tournament to which he referred was going to be held in That Place, and I was quite happy to say that yes, we would be there. At the end of the night, the location became clear, and I was frozen in horror. It would not be the first time I skipped something I really wanted to do simply because I did not want to go to That Place. Approach-Avoid. Approach-Avoid. Mr. Whatever-his-name-was would be proud.
And so it came to this: which is stronger, my residual distaste for That Place, or my desire for ever more Scrabble? They turned out to be pretty much equal. eyeearnjay's thumb was on the scale in favor of going, and so I agreed, on the condition that if we encountered any women in jogging suits, he would protect me from them.
1: I have since learned that you generally can have both, if you're not too concerned with what people will think.
Approach-Approach: you want two things, but you can't have both.1
Avoid-Avoid: you don't want either of two things, but only one can be avoided.
Approach-Avoid: you want some aspects of a thing, but not others.
Pursuant to #3, I find that it is impossible to play Scrabble in Los Gatos without going to Los Gatos.
I hate Los Gatos.
Granted, these days I mostly hate it on principle. It's been nearly three years since I had any active, current hatred going on. During those three years I've met two people who lived there and were not horrible. I quite liked both of them. Still, a girl's gotta have her irrational prejudice.
Los Gatos: the town has a servants' entrance. That pretty much sums it up. I worked there for six wretched months, and every day I'd get off the highway at the servants' entrance, the town's back door. Just inside city limits there's a gas station and a liquor store. Every night, the servants file out past the two. Fuel to get far away, and courage --either to leave for good, or to make it through the next day. The people who work there are never the people who live there.
There are over 20,000 people in Los Gatos, and yet at times it seemed there was only one family. The husband worked long hours for high pay in San Jose, came home only rarely, spent no more than five minutes a week with the children. The wife had no need to work and would have felt it degrading to do so. She spent her days shopping and having long lunches with the other wives. She always wore pastel jogging suits, but never actually jogged (it's not ladylike to sweat) and she drove an enormous SUV that she never could learn how to park. She thought of her children more as fashion accessories than as independent human beings. The children were always blond, the boy two years older than the girl. His name was Michael. Her name was either Haley or Emily. They adored their mother and feared their father, but in fact were raised by a nanny. She was Latina, but never Mexican. She was from Argentina, or Bolivia, or Venezuela. Hiring Mexicans brought up all sorts of Questions that could be avoided by choosing a more exotic-sounding country of origin.
If you wanted to escape the wrath of the women, you had to admire the children. You had to agree that they were the cutest children anywhere. You had to sympathize with the women as they talked about their money problems. The problem was not that they didn't have enough, of course: they discussed these money troubles while buying thousand-dollar cameras (that they never learned to use) after eating fifty dollar lunches, driving between the two in a $70,000 SUV. No, the problem was that they didn't have more than they had, and that problem drove them all mad and never, ever, would go away.
Finally I told my boss's boss that I couldn't take it anymore, that he'd either have to find me a job in Capitola or I had to quit. After a few attempts to negotiate, he got me the transfer, and my quality of life skyrocketed. Since then I have made every possible effort to avoid going to That Place.
Tonight xpmorgan asked if we were going to the tournament in two weeks. It didn't enter my brain that the tournament to which he referred was going to be held in That Place, and I was quite happy to say that yes, we would be there. At the end of the night, the location became clear, and I was frozen in horror. It would not be the first time I skipped something I really wanted to do simply because I did not want to go to That Place. Approach-Avoid. Approach-Avoid. Mr. Whatever-his-name-was would be proud.
And so it came to this: which is stronger, my residual distaste for That Place, or my desire for ever more Scrabble? They turned out to be pretty much equal. eyeearnjay's thumb was on the scale in favor of going, and so I agreed, on the condition that if we encountered any women in jogging suits, he would protect me from them.
1: I have since learned that you generally can have both, if you're not too concerned with what people will think.