Drive all blames into one.
I was just thinking, Wouldn't it be a good idea to dispel the notion that some of my readers might have, that I'm basically a very nice person? Because in the end, that would just prevent bitterness and disillusionment; we all get sussed sooner or later. So how best to accomplish this goal of showing my dark side?
I gave the matter due consideration. I thought about advice that people give about how to accomplish the reverse goal: for instance, what are people told to do, or avoid doing, at a job interview? The best advice in this instance is, Never be led into saying anything negative about anyone, no matter what. It always redounds to the discredit of the narrator, right?
Magic! perfect! In order to let you in on my fell aspects, I'm going to use this entire post to the nastiest portrait of another person from my past that I can manage. I realize that some of you with excellent memories might think that I've done this before, that a certain person has come in for his fair share of unflattering representations here. But that doesn't count--he's an ex. If you don't bore people to tears with constant bitter invective about an ex, they're likely to cut you quite a bit of slack, within certain contexts, for the occasional snipe and character assassination.
Don't malign others.
The person I've selected actually comes from the quite recent past. She was one of my coworkers at the job I just left. The first crucial step in a wafer-thin disguise of the character assassination process is to choose a pseudonym. Because I have neither shame, nor the slightest compunction, nor a morsel of compassion, I am going to call this individual Hortense, in spite of the ridiculous improbability of anyone of approximately the age of thirty bearing that name. I do this because it's a despicable appellation. (Lee, that was for you.)
Here comes another hurdle in my task: I have yet to develop adequately the really exquisitely developed techniques of droll exaggeration (some writer thingie that I haven't mastered) that have been vigorously demonstrated by a few of my much more talented friends.* By my estimation, though, this particular person is barely going to require it to make a good post.
Are you enjoying the glacial pace of this one? I kind of am--or maybe I'm just procrastinating. Maybe, on top of everything else, I lack grit.
Don't wait in ambush.
Okay, so Hortense. Heh. I met her when she transferred into my department, and almost immediately thereafter we ended up commuting to graduate school together, as we were in the same night course. Both at work and at school, her dominant characteristic seemed to be an obsessive streak, and a habit of dramatically berating herself for trivial errors. This same trait manifested as a startling propensity to deride others based on, for example, typographic errors in emails.
But proximity breeds intimacy. Hortense and I worked close by another--extraordinary--person in the same department, and the three of us got to be friends--everybreak, everylunch friends. Constant-stream-of-dirty-jokes friends; socializing-outside-the-workplace friends; sharing-crises-of-daily-life friends.
Except.
Don't talk about injured limbs.
Over time it was growing increasingly apparent what taking Hortense on really meant. Now, since I'm supposed to proving exactly how mean I can be, the fact that we were friends means that, in theory, I really ought to reveal all kinds of deep, dark--and of course hilariously embarrassing--secrets of Hortense. And even though she knows about this blog, I truly believe that she does not read it (but if I'm wrong, Hi Hortense! I know you recognize yourself! Comment if you like, 'cause if you don't like it I'll change it or delete and maybe block your ISP in the bargain! Welcome to my world!). But I just can't stomach it. Call me a wimp. I'll only say that there's something involving Laura Ingalls Wilder** that would be very amusing to relate if spilling it didn't make me too repulsive even for myself to take.
Don't ponder others.
Suffice to say that there were concerns. For instance, there was Hortense's annoying habit of considering it an act of loyalty to report to me nasty things said about me by my colleagues. These anecdotes were always served up as a little outburst--including, of course, her heroic defense of my finer qualities, and her outrage that anyone could say such a thing about me, how could they misunderstand my character so!! And even though I patiently explained to her that I really neither needed, nor wanted to know about malicious comments made by others, eventually she always leaked them to me, such a friend she was.
Outbursts were, in fact, her specialty. Fairly early on in our friendship, she came back to her workstation upset. She had just returned from a raucous, high-volume altercation with her former co-worker. In the office. In front of their supervisor. And in the course of that argument, the colleague accused her of being 'high-maintenance.' High-maintenance? Why? Maybe because everything within your orbit must grind to a halt when you become paralyzed with anger or shame--or, worse than paralysis, a performance of furious contempt directed at either yourself or your personal selection of Idiot of the Moment, absorbing every morself of energy within a quarter-mile radius?
In retrospect, this phrase 'high-maintence' was, in fact, a pithy formulation of exactly what it meant to be in Hortense's sphere. She would also mention, periodically, that she worried about her drinking; and her narration of daily events would be punctuated by stories of this dinner party at which she got blotto and broke down into uncontrollable sobbing; or that wedding anniversary that she spoiled by drinking herself into a puddle. I didn't see the drinking first-hand for a while: the one dinner party I hosted showed Hortense pretty cautious with the bottle. But when she returned the invitation on Valentine's Day, I got a glimpse of Wild Party Hortense, which included sudden flare-ups of fishwife cursing at her husband; uninvited lap-dances dispensed gratis to bewildered male guests; and lots of kind of scary gaiety.
So it wasn't that much of a shocker when Hortense showed up at the office thoroughly pickled after a business lunch one day. To be fair, others at the lunch had become equally (or, for all I know, even more) intoxicated, but Hortense was the only one fuckwitted enough to actually come back to the office. By the time she got to my workstation, she had already been chatting very vivaciously with some of our student workers; and since I could smell her from about ten paces, I imagine she was an interesting specimen for them as well. She wasn't just a bit woozy; she was at the Whoopie! stage of shickered, generous with sloppy displays of affection and punctuating her babbling with exclamations of 'Fun!!
In short, she was subject to disciplinary action just for being at the office, such a state was she in. It was about 3PM--still an hour and half left to my regular work schedule--but I whipped her out of there, to the local cafe, and bought her coffee and sat there with her, distracting her with idle chatter, until she sobered up enough that I could be confident she wouldn't try to drive home within the next two hours.
It wasn't too long after this incident that Hortense gave me and our other mutual friend The Big Chill. She was suddenly 'too busy' for all breaks and lunches, which I took at face value (because I'll rarely suspect a friend of lying to my face or lacking the courage to talk to me about a problem between us). All chat within the office was replaced by busy silence. Face-to-face encounters as fleeting as a morning greeting or just a walk-by were marked with a frozen rictus. After a while it sank in that I was being blown off. So there was the element of relief there for me; but ego and pride dictated a mixed response. She blew me off? You can't fire me, bitch--I quit!
But at that point I had only weeks left at the job. I made one straight-on, email attempt to come to the point about whatever had occasioned her withdrawal; this was met with chilly, cordial dissembling. So I let it ride, and in fact, on my last day of work, left without as much as a goodbye.
Don't seek others' pain as the limbs of your own happiness.
So, since I didn't tell her in person, I'd just like to say: Good luck with that, Hortense.
*And I'd like to clarify that by "friends" I mean "frighteningly talented people on whose blogs I obsessively comment, on each of whom I have tremendous 'friend crushes,' and who haven't specifically emailed me to request, politely, that I stop coming round and annoying them, and come on, they could figure out how to email me if they really tried." And not one of them has gone so far as to actually delete any of my comments. Yet.
**I apologize to all the LIW fans about the irrelevance of this post to your Google search.
How dare she! I mean... I mean... well... GAH! Great tale. I hope she reads it. ;)
Posted by: Mir | Tuesday, 15 June 2004 at 08:54 AM
Remind me never - ever - to piss you off ;-)
Posted by: Chris | Tuesday, 15 June 2004 at 10:10 AM
Sheep. 90% of humans are sheep (I mean, come on, how else to explain half of the crap people wear, much less eat?); 5% are mean sheep--due to bad breeding. You had one overbred ewe there, yup, you did.
Posted by: Suzyn | Tuesday, 15 June 2004 at 11:28 AM
"....an act of loyalty to report to me nasty things said about me by my colleagues"
I absolutely hate it! Hate when people do that! My sister in law used to do that to me all the time reporting every nasty thing the rest of the in laws said about me.
5 years later I realize she did this to feed some need in herself. (Namely, to keep the tension between me and the rest of the family brewing so that there would be no chance of us 'making up')
Who does it serve? It serves some need in the reporter. But it's cruel and mean spirited as far as I am concerned.
Blah. People!
Posted by: Melissa | Tuesday, 15 June 2004 at 01:39 PM
....and the not-so-nice part would beee?
ap·pel·la·tion ( P ) Pronunciation Key (p-lshn)
n.
A name, title, or designation.
A protected name under which a wine may be sold, indicating that the grapes used are of a specific kind from a specific district.
The act of naming.
Posted by: Lee | Tuesday, 15 June 2004 at 05:56 PM
hee. rabbits have pink eyes, but it doesn't mean they aren't DEADLY.
Posted by: anne | Wednesday, 16 June 2004 at 03:59 PM
Ya see I don't think of you as mean at all, not even after that little tale. But I can be quite a bitch. Which is really funny because a new friend of mine thinks of me as being so calm and level headed.
I've recently been blown off by someone I thought was becoming a very good friend. Finally I confronted her (which if you don't know me is very unlike me). asked her what was going on. She said she had a lot going on that she had to deal with and didn't want to hurt my feelings. She said everything was ok now and we should get together with the kids. Well I haven't heard from her since. Why can't people just be straight with one another it saves so much time. And she has been wasting mine.
Posted by: Maxine | Friday, 18 June 2004 at 01:09 AM
That's not mean... this is mean:
A very good friend of mine once publicly corrected my pronunciation of a word so... I burned his house to the ground but only after I had slashed the tyres on his car, telephoned his boss pretending to be him and tendered his resignation "becuse I cant work for an asshole any more", registered him as a Platinum client with the local gay escort agency (using his credit card), had hot sweaty sex with his wife and his mother (and impregnated both of them) and neutered his dog.
Don't mess with me...
Posted by: zeno | Friday, 18 June 2004 at 01:17 PM