Confront the issues that bother me

Everytime I look at my legs I can’t decide. All I know is that I was absolutely complelled to buy these from the charva shoe shop.

This is a little bug bear of mine. Having been fully inducted into the mindset of recycling by the German’s in my family and then living with Absnasm who takes recycling to a religious level (I mean that in a good way) I’m finding it difficult to live in a house with people who have a rather haphazard/take it or leave it approach. Anyway, I’ve been covertly fishing other people’s rubbish out the bin for a year now, washing it and putting it in the proper bin. I’ve finally plucked up the courage to be a kill-joy and ask everyone to start doing it right.

Finally, after over a year I have got my dollar back that I lent to my ex who at the time promised to pay me back the next day. I was very tempted after I received the text message off him telling me that the last of the money was deposited in my account to reply telling him exactly what I thought of him. Namely that he is a pathetic, selfish, parasitic man with a coke addiction which he’s in denial about. I didn’t because I don’t want to waste another minute on him.

Today I met an old boyfriend in “the cafe where the waitress hates me” and in the end I had to walk away from the counter and ask him if he would get me a coffee because I was refused service again! Ironically, the guy I was meeting was the ex-boyfriend whom I once discovered in bed with another woman after I arrived home unexpectedly from an archaeological excavation (his defence was that he didn’t think I’d be home until Sunday… yeah, I know!). Anyway, despite the fact that I am outspoken and my humour can be a bit harsh at times, I’m not one to hold grudges and a lot of time has passed and we’re different, more mature, more insightful etc. Anyway, if I can forgive him then it’s a shame that she can’t get over (because I’ve done nothing wrong to be forgiven for) the fact I had a very brief affaire with her bloke before she started seeing him. I don’t want to get this girl into trouble, in fact I don’t particularly dislike her. I try to be polite as possible to her and I turn a blind eye to her evil stares, sarcastic comments and everything else. All I can conclude from her behaviour is that I must be absolutely freakin’ amazing in bed for this still to be an issue four years on. So, I partly don’t want to get her in trouble because she’s a good friend of some of my good friends and also because I feel a bit sorry for her because either a. she has very low self-esteme or b. I ruined her man! So, I’m going to have to complain to the owner of the cafe, the guy I was meeting is complaining too. I feel like a bitch for doing this but I also feel like I’m being bullied by her and I will not allow that.

I don’t want to have a birthday this year. I’m not ready and although, technically I have had a year full of fun and adventure to celebrate I don’t feel like celebrating it at all. This is odd for me as usually I’m all for birthdays and celebrating but to be honest I just feel full of dread. I wish I didn’t feel this way and I can’t put my finger on what the issue is exactly.

“Give me my money back
Give me my money back
Give me my money back
You (son of a) Bitch
I want my money back
I want my money back”

Harrumpphh! So what do you do when your ex owes you £200 and he’s owed you £200 for over a year and he’s been promising to pay you back but keeps breaking those promises? I’m skint and I want my money back. If you lend someone money and they secretly don’t intend to repay you then that’s a bit like theft in my mind. I don’t want to make things nasty and I don’t want to get spiteful. I just want what is owed to me so I can put an end to this sorry experience and move on. Part of me suspects that he doesn’t want to pay me back because then everything will be over between us. If I was him I would be racked with guilt. There is something that all men and women are always able to do and that’s their “duty”. He should do the right thing and repay me. I don’t want to have to do what I’m contemplating doing which is to ring his parents but I’m running out of options (that aren’t morally dubious) here.

The biggest stress about this whole redundancy caboodle is all the “not knowing” and in the office at the moment there is a lot of collective “not knowing” followed by pointless speculation about what might happen based on the facts that we don’t know. It’s actually got to the point where we’ve taken to studying the HR manager’s outlook calendar to find out when we might be leaving. Needless to say, there are some major communication/effective dissemination of information issues at my place of work. One question today (I’ll not bore you with what it was), which will have a big effect on what I choose to do next was being speculated upon all day with one colleague (she’s a glass-is-half-empty kinda Gal) working herself up into a right tizzy over it. So I decided enough is enough and went and knocked on the door of the Director and asked him directly. I got a straight answer (which was “yes”) and it was the answer I was hoping for. I’m glad I asked, I think it was brave of me… well, no one else had had the guts to do it.

Well, that’s sounds like the title of a modern day fairy tale.
I didn’t go to the wedding, I made an excuse, saying that I was away that weekend. I hardly know this person anymore, we were friends at school but in the last ten years I’ve hardly seen her so I don’t see why she would want me at her wedding anyway. Furthermore, should I really spoil her big day by citing her bigotry as my reason for non-attendance? Oddly, I got a text off her on Sunday thanking me for the flowers and saying that she “wished I could have been there.” I can’t tell if she is just being deeply sarcastic (I didn’t send any flowers) or there has been some sort of mix up with someone else called Lucy sending the flowers and me getting all the credit. I thought about texting her back to say I hadn’t sent them, but I thought a. If she was genuinely thanking me then it would just draw attention to the fact that I hadn’t even thought to send flowers and if she was thanking me in a sarcastic way, well, what would she reply? I also thought of texting her back saying “You’re welcome.” But that didn’t seem right either. I feel slightly guilty that I might be getting the credit for someone else’s good deed, but hell! That’s the way the world is.
As for the the bitter coffee shop waitress, well, I had the pleasure of attending the same engagement party as her the Saturday before last. Again she was rude to me, to the point that one of our most unperceptive friends was quite taken aback by it. I genuinely care about the people who were getting engaged and if it hadn’t been their party I would have pulled her up on it. I feel like she’s trying to bully me in the way one might expect a 15 year old girl to bully another. It’s the injustice of it that hurts me the most, that and the fact that she’s perpetuating the idea that I’m somehow deserving of her nasty behaviour for something that happened four years ago and I was never guilty of in the first place. It was however satisfying to see that she and her boyfriend looked as though they’d let themselves go quite a bit, although this probably only increases her hatred of me. The saddest thing is that she has effectively destroyed a close friendship that I know once meant a lot to me and her boyfriend purely through her own jealous insecurities. She’s won, we are not friends now, we do not talk and that’s a shame because everyone has lost out now.

I’d probably, unwillingly describe myself as passive-aggressive, evasive or simply just absent when it comes to confronting those issues that get me annoyed or angry. There are two particular issues that I feel I need to face head on and be honest about.
1. My best friend from VI Form College. It’s her wedding soon and she has invited me. I don’t want to go to her wedding because she’s become a racist. She never used to be racist, but since university her opinions have been decidedly bigotted. It would be easier and less upsetting if I just made an excuse about not being able to come to the wedding but I feel I owe it to the world at large to say “I won’t come to your wedding because the last time I saw you you made some pretty racist comments and I can’t be friends with someone who has those sorts of opinions”.
2. For the last three years when I go into certain coffee bars in town there is a waitress that refuses to serve me. Over three and a half years ago I had a brief, one weekend affaire with the man that is now her boyfriend. He wasn’t her boyfriend at the time, something that she acknowledged to me herself about three years ago when we had a chat and cleared the air at a John Peel Rememberance gig and something that he assued me of the night we got together. I don’t know what I did to make her hate me since but now she has decided to tell friends that she and her boyfriend were together at the time, to try to turn friends against me and now not serve me caffinated beverages. This actually pisses me off quite a bit. About a year ago she very rudely did the same thing in front of my then boyfriend. I have lost friends over this whole debarcle, I’ve had to defend myself from what this woman has said to close friends about me. On Saturday she refused to serve me when I was in the coffee shop with my Auntie and enough is enough now. I want to sort this out once and for all. Everytime she thinks that she’s punishing me she’s actually punishing herself. Whilst she has been brooding over this whole thing, feeding her insecurities off it, making it into something bigger than what it actually was, I have been getting on with my life, meeting new men, having fun and becoming more confident, more pretty and more outgoing. I need to tell her to get the hell over it, it was years ago and it’s not about me anymore, it’s about her and her externalising her own insecurites through me. I’ve been going to this coffee shop for years and I’m not going to bullied into not going in because of her. I demand my coffee!