I have very little patience for people who do not help, do not do anything themselves, and then feel free to criticize the way you have done something.  It makes me so cranky that I can’t even see straight.

At the end of last school year I agreed to take on another position at my school.  Our students are divided into four Houses (I know, like Harry Potter!  I love it!) but basically no one was in charge of the whole thing; placing kids, ordering shirts, contacting parents.  It’s a big job, and no one wanted it.  I took it.  This is in addition to teaching full time and supervising the after school child care.  But, I saw a need and I wanted to give everything I can to my school.

I have been working on this since the middle of July, along with the office administrator.  I’ve put in hours of work doing inventories, comparing class lists, trying to balance numbers that just don’t want to be balanced.  It’s been a really big project.  Today I sat down in the office to enter certain students House assignments into the database, and just as I’m getting started The Name I Gave My Nightmares interrupted me.  

(Okay, I should explain that.  There is a woman I work with who I don’t see eye to eye with.  In fact, not even close.  For a long time my friend KP didn’t think this woman was real.  She just though it was an anthropomporphism of all the things that drive me nuts.  She thought it was “the name I gave my nightmares.”)

She decides that it is the right time to tell me about a new student I don’t know anything about.  I say thanks, that when the office admin. gives me the low down I’ll get here sorted.  This wasn’t a good enough response.  You see, I wasn’t going to put her in the right House, so I should do it now.  I, again, tried to assure her that the student would end up where she belonged but that I was going to work on what I was working on.  Nope, not good enough.  For the third time The Name I Gave My Nightmares demanded that I open up that child’s file this very moment and put her in the House deemed appropriate by The Name I Gave My Nightmares in all her wisdom.

I got frustrated.  In a less than pleasant tone I told her that while I appreciate the information, I had a system that I was working with and that she was being unhelpful by trying to disrupt what she didn’t understand.  This went over poorly.  Apparently, since neither the office admin. nor I could be trusted to know as much as she does it was wrong of me to resist her meddling.  I should be a lot more grateful, since I couldn’t possibly be doing my best on a huge undertaking.

I put on my headphones and ignored her until she left.

I just couldn’t interact with her anymore.  She was jumping up and down on my last nerve over something that I have such a short fuse about.  At no point ever does she take on an extra project, or volunteer to supervise an activity, or even ask if she can help with anything.  But she is always the first to object to something.  No matter what you’ve done, it isn’t right.  Moreover, usually the mistake you’ve made is that you’ve made her life slightly less than ideal.  It is a seemingly unending cycle; she doesn’t want to do it, but you did it wrong.  

And this attitude just drives me bonkers!  

If there is a real problem with something, by all means, bring it up, it should get fixed sooner rather than later.  If you are just a nit-picky bitch who cannot deal with minor disruptions to you’re utopian existences, then either take the lead on the work or shut the fuck up!

The thing is, this would annoy me anyway, not matter who was doing it.  (There is a reason my younger brother says I “cook with hate,” because I get super angry when people second-guess me while I’m chopping and sauteing.)  But it’s more than a pet peeve with rabies.

I struggle, on a daily basis, to be charitable to this woman.  One of my biggest struggles is that everyone, and I mean everyone, just thinks she is the best thing since sliced bread.  The rest of the faculty, the parents, the students, everyone loves to tell me how wonderful and kind and giving and loving they think she is.  I spend so much time choking on my own ire, trying not to let it show on my face that I think she is a big faking faker who has convinced everyone that her soppy PC bullshit is actual human empathy and charity.  She indulges every whim anyone has, and somehow that is what passes for “love.”  I feel like a crazy person, because I seem to see something that no one else sees, and then I get to listen to a constant stream of wrongness.

This has happened to me before.  I’ve had friends that have treated me horribly, but everyone thinks they’re just grand, so I’m left looking like the asshole who trash talking a saint.  In a way it is almost a knee-jerk reaction: as soon as it seems like a person is getting away with appearing faultless (or being treated as if they are faultless) then all I can see are their faults.  I just end up wanting to scream at everyone, “Don’t you people see how awful he/she is?  How are you missing this?”

And really, in the end, that does just make me an asshole.  I’m just as flawed as everyone else and just because I feel the need to tell everyone what a fuck-up I am doesn’t mean I should get upset at others who keep it a bit better under wraps.  It shouldn’t matter to me how the world sees other people, even if it does seem fake and superficial to me.  My opinion is just my opinion, equally as useless as everyone else’s.  

But I need some better coping skills.  I just don’t know what to do when faced with The Name I Gave My Nightmares and all of her garbage.  I feel stuck repeating the same scenarios and seeing myself turning into a monster.  I don’t want that, but I just don’t know what to do.

(1 Year, 11 Months, 9 Days Sober)