Confrontation
Sep. 2nd, 2003 01:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
talktoolooseDo basic fears ever go away or do you just learn to live with them? One of my worst is confrontation and the universe is throwing me a lot of opportunities to deal with it now. Gee, thanks.
The upstairs of our little house is a self-enclosed apartment in which a mother and son have lived since a year before we even bought the house. They're both nice and the relationship is amicable. Nonetheless, it is a small wood-frame house and we hear every shout and feel every thumping footstep. The weeks when they go away to her family's cottage are blissful.
Now, this lady is interesting. A whitebread, small town girl who moved to the big city in her early 20s and had an unexpected kid. She's about 34 now, vivacious, intelligent and good mother... and loves to fuck lots of big, black men. Actually, she's also partial to Latin Americans and really anyone darker than herself. There have been times when she's come home with a new guy on a weekly or twice weekly basis and then the porous nature of sound in the house can get very entertaining.
Anyway, the parade slowed down last spring and we were seeing a lot of one guy. In fact, he seemed to be living in the house and we kept waiting for her to announce that we had a new tenant. But she didn't. We started to fume. Well, Snake started to fume, I started to fret. She needs no legal permission to move in a roommate but our small house already had four adults and a child in it and we didn't want more and, at the very least, courtesy demanded some word from her. But she said nothing and I said nothing and we waited to see what would happen. She was nervous, too. When she was heading off for a week in July she said with false breeziness, "My friend will be watching the apartment while I'm gone." Uh-huh.
But the universe wasn't letting me off the hook so easily. In August, after she and the first guy were heard fighting a lot, a second man moved in. (The fact that he was really cute must not enter into any discussion here.) Again, I didn't confront her despite big shoutings and mutterings in our kitchen. If you're wondering why Snake doesn't do the talking, it's because that's, somehow, my province. It's just as well. The Hungarian way is to fly off the handle and create an ongoing feud you can savour unto the seventh generation. For me, the goal of peaceful co-existence is both a philosophical end and a necessity. I can't sleep quietly with discord under my own roof.
When she went away on vacation last week, I asked her pointedly: "Who's going to be here while you're away?" She looked nervous and said the name of the first guy. After I went to work, she came up to TuTu and said, "Oh, I forgot to mention to Talktooloose that [guy number two] will also be here..." See, she's no better at confrontation than I am.
Yesterday, it became clear that the time had come for a discussion. With this realization, my pulse rose, my stomach contracted and I proceeded to pace around the apartment like a demented wind-up toy for the better part of an hour before I got up the nerve to yell up the stairs, "Hi, could I talk to you for a minute?"
The discussion went wonderfully. I calmed down when I heard the tremor in her voice (I was successfully disguising my own tremor by claiming to be in rehearsal for a Roy Orbison tribute). The long and the short of it is that the new guy is her new boyfriend and she's been helping the other guy out until he got on his feet. Well, he now has a job and she's been trying to work up the nerve to say, "You! Out!" Now, she can use landlordy threats to make sure he's in a new place by October 1. Nonetheless, I am going to covertly seek legal advice this week. I suspect that the number of tenants allowed in the unit has been exceeded.
The important thing is that I got up my courage and made my will known. Now it's time to do the same at work. I haven't had a raise since 2000 and my three day a week is starting to default to four and five days at a time when I really need it to be three. I am trying to get past the voices in my head that tell me not to stir up trouble ("You need this job! Lay low!") Yeah, but they need me, too and I'm not without leverage. I'm an asset they won't jettison quickly. And every extra day I work, my resentment grows keener. Hell, when I have to work five days, I spend more and more time online. It serves no one.
So, time to face the racing pulse again and make my needs known.
Thank you for your patience. I'm sorry if I was long winded. Please don't hate me. I shouldn't have said anything.
The upstairs of our little house is a self-enclosed apartment in which a mother and son have lived since a year before we even bought the house. They're both nice and the relationship is amicable. Nonetheless, it is a small wood-frame house and we hear every shout and feel every thumping footstep. The weeks when they go away to her family's cottage are blissful.
Now, this lady is interesting. A whitebread, small town girl who moved to the big city in her early 20s and had an unexpected kid. She's about 34 now, vivacious, intelligent and good mother... and loves to fuck lots of big, black men. Actually, she's also partial to Latin Americans and really anyone darker than herself. There have been times when she's come home with a new guy on a weekly or twice weekly basis and then the porous nature of sound in the house can get very entertaining.
Anyway, the parade slowed down last spring and we were seeing a lot of one guy. In fact, he seemed to be living in the house and we kept waiting for her to announce that we had a new tenant. But she didn't. We started to fume. Well, Snake started to fume, I started to fret. She needs no legal permission to move in a roommate but our small house already had four adults and a child in it and we didn't want more and, at the very least, courtesy demanded some word from her. But she said nothing and I said nothing and we waited to see what would happen. She was nervous, too. When she was heading off for a week in July she said with false breeziness, "My friend will be watching the apartment while I'm gone." Uh-huh.
But the universe wasn't letting me off the hook so easily. In August, after she and the first guy were heard fighting a lot, a second man moved in. (The fact that he was really cute must not enter into any discussion here.) Again, I didn't confront her despite big shoutings and mutterings in our kitchen. If you're wondering why Snake doesn't do the talking, it's because that's, somehow, my province. It's just as well. The Hungarian way is to fly off the handle and create an ongoing feud you can savour unto the seventh generation. For me, the goal of peaceful co-existence is both a philosophical end and a necessity. I can't sleep quietly with discord under my own roof.
When she went away on vacation last week, I asked her pointedly: "Who's going to be here while you're away?" She looked nervous and said the name of the first guy. After I went to work, she came up to TuTu and said, "Oh, I forgot to mention to Talktooloose that [guy number two] will also be here..." See, she's no better at confrontation than I am.
Yesterday, it became clear that the time had come for a discussion. With this realization, my pulse rose, my stomach contracted and I proceeded to pace around the apartment like a demented wind-up toy for the better part of an hour before I got up the nerve to yell up the stairs, "Hi, could I talk to you for a minute?"
The discussion went wonderfully. I calmed down when I heard the tremor in her voice (I was successfully disguising my own tremor by claiming to be in rehearsal for a Roy Orbison tribute). The long and the short of it is that the new guy is her new boyfriend and she's been helping the other guy out until he got on his feet. Well, he now has a job and she's been trying to work up the nerve to say, "You! Out!" Now, she can use landlordy threats to make sure he's in a new place by October 1. Nonetheless, I am going to covertly seek legal advice this week. I suspect that the number of tenants allowed in the unit has been exceeded.
The important thing is that I got up my courage and made my will known. Now it's time to do the same at work. I haven't had a raise since 2000 and my three day a week is starting to default to four and five days at a time when I really need it to be three. I am trying to get past the voices in my head that tell me not to stir up trouble ("You need this job! Lay low!") Yeah, but they need me, too and I'm not without leverage. I'm an asset they won't jettison quickly. And every extra day I work, my resentment grows keener. Hell, when I have to work five days, I spend more and more time online. It serves no one.
So, time to face the racing pulse again and make my needs known.
Thank you for your patience. I'm sorry if I was long winded. Please don't hate me. I shouldn't have said anything.
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no subject
Date: 2003-09-02 11:08 am (UTC)I thought that was the Greek way!
For similar reasons, my wife and I have worked out a similar division of labor. We break it every once in a while when I feel like she's not being hard-assed enough, and thus risking us getting shafted. Usually, this results in me pissing someone off.