I binge ate 3 cookies and about six cups of popcorn, all because my roommate has been grating on my mind. I just can't stand something about her, but I haven't been able to put my finger on it, but I figured it out today...she hasn't had her quarter-life crisis yet!
You all know what the quarter life crisis is...you work your ass off and get loans up the wazoo, all for the final payoff, the jobs you will get to choose from the day you graduate. But when you get searching for the $40,000 a year entry level position you can't find a thing in your field, and the only job you end finding is a administrative assistant position at a humidifier manufacturer. So you stay at the waitressing job that you had during school, because it pays more.
Tera has spent the last few years of her life traveling the world, living in South Africa, Switzerland, and India. This year, at 26 she started studying Global Studies at a community college, when she graduates she will have a job waiting for her that will pay enough for her to maintain her Aveda shampoo/MAC cosmetics/BMW lifestyle.
She is still living in paradise, the time when you feel like the world is open to you, all you have to do is give your best, and it will embrace and congratulate you. And I am here with my feet on the ground, in the much less nurturing real-world. The chasm between our realities inspires more than just envy, it also leaves me frustrated and resentful. She will make a statement about which I assume I am supposed to applaud. When I instead offer up a more down-to-earth or balanced perspective, she seems to react as if I am not someone with a more grown-up perspective, but someone who the world is not going to be handed to on a platter (maybe because of my not-easy answer thinking.)
Then, as a weird contrast to this enthusiasm, is a surprising pessimism. The world just sucks. When I offer up, again, my a little older perspective that yes, the world sucks, so we have to do what we can to make it a better place, and be happy for the good things that exist. When I react like that she seems to dismiss me as if I am unaware or uncaring about the reality of the world.
And in a related, but non quarterlife-crisis themed issue, she is just driving me crazy with her new found discovery of diversity. She grew up in a mostly white suburb, so now that she is hanging out with predominantly non-whites she has gotten this whites can do nothing right and not-whites can do no wrong. It is PC taken to a misinformed extreme. One night when I commented that a guy who was hitting on her was a bit too "ghetto" she acted so high and mighty, stating "I don't judge people that way." But you put a trailer park wife-beater wearing appelation coal miner in front of her and she will call him "privledged." It is somehow unenlightened to discriminate in dating a small category of black people, but to write off the entire white population as being "privledged" and "mainstream" is perfectly reasonable. I too suffer from a bit of white-bashing, but I, having gone to school and lived in the inner city which she finds so exciting right now, am more than aware that there are people of all ethnicities that you don't want to have anything to do with.
And one more thing driving me fucking nuts, she is so helpless. She will say things like "we should try to hook up my computer to the internet." This is secret code for "Diana, figure out what we need to get to hook up my computer to the internet, go get what we need and then hook it up." It is so annoying. And once again, when I am poo-pooing the idea of doing something for her that she can or at least should do for herself, I am poo-pooing the IDEA in her eyes, so the idea is "shot down." (Did I tell you about the time she was asking me how to change the lightbulb in her room?)
Oh, and the other thing. I lent her money when she had money problems. She is finally paying me back after I went off on her (if you are nice and want them to feel no guilt or embarrassment, like I was, she interprets it as I really don't care about getting the money, so go out to eat all the time) Now she is letting her brother, who owes her $700 for use of flight benifits, go on a vacation to Alcupulco, which will come out of her paycheck. If she would ask for the money he owes she could pay me back. I am sorry to say this but...bitch.
The world revolves around this girl, and it is really hard to interact with someone who doesn't have a different perspective about the world, but who is correct, and your perspective is somehow substandard, because it doesn't fit into their limited worldview.
Just about everything wrong with this girl was once wrong with me. So what I am forced to deal with is what I have put others through myself. Whatever my universal punishment is, it is much easier to deal with knowing finally what it is that has been driving me crazy.
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