The colleague who can't spell youtube and follows her kid's bus to school has recently moved in beside me at work. This is certain to provide much fodder for two reasons: first, I am not exactly busy at work these days so I overhear all of her conversations; and second, she has a habit of jumping into any conversation she manages to locate with her own supersonic hearing. (This last bit also means that I'm getting better and better at whispering. A new skill for the resume.)
Last week she brought me into a conversation with another colleague about male-female relationship dynamics. Here is the ensuing discussion:
Me: Well, I've grown really uncomfortable with big romantic gestures. I'm always the guy in the relationship and I'm looking at this guy who's crying and pouring his heart out and I just don't know what to do with it.
Colleague: You should watch that. If you don't get better at that, your boyfriends might turn gay.
Me: Ummm... what do you mean by that?
Colleague [comments edited for length]: Well, my brother-in-law was married with two kids and his wife drove him crazy. He woke up one day and told his wife he was leaving because he wanted to be with men. But then he was abused by nuns when he was two so that might explain some of it. And then I know this other woman who was married for 30 some odd years and then woke up one day and just decided she had had enough of her husband. So she left him for another woman.
Me: But do you think that maybe those two people were always gay and just didn't want to admit it and deal with it?
Colleague: I don't really believe in all that genetics stuff.
Me [muttering to self, realizing there is too much to say, unwilling to get into long argument I have no hope of winning]: Oh, OK.
RainyBow
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
office convo trilogy #1: relationship advice
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5 comments:
Luckily, science won't forsake you for not believing.
1.) Women that follow their child's school bus, scare me more than having drinks with Jeffrey Dahmer!
2.) I prefer to believe in Genetics, because I don't want the worry of waking up one morning with a totally rearanged lifestyle. Call me a 'stick in the mud' but I like a certain amount of consistancy in my morning regimen, you know?
3.)I wonder if this colleague is one of those folks that think Jesus Christ, was a narrow minded bigot. Jesus was never a skinhead!
Well, emory, if you want consistency in your morning regimen, don't eat a pile of beets and night and then forget about them in the morning. No need to share details; I'm only going to say that it was not a good start to my day today.
But then you don't eat brussels sprouts, so methinks the chances you eat beets are quite low anyway.
I do eat eat the b-sprouts, but that doesnt mean I don't eat the rest of Neolithic cuisine.
In fact, I was was forced to eat a great deal of it (thanks to those damn African famine victims on TV) as a child.
The difference between me and young master Twist was, he actually wanted more! I was usually locked jawed, and zip lipped, with a clothes peg on my nose and my ear firmly pinched between my mothers thumb and fore finger.
J'adore beets! They were the only root vegetable that brought me relief, and freedom from the table.
My parents didn't really get the concept of vegetables when I was a kid. When I had to fill out what I ate for health class at school, my teacher didn't much like that I had half a Sara Lee cake every day for breakfast. Some phone calls to my mother ensued. Then we had artichokes one night for dinner and we all hated them, and that was that.
But my ears endured their fair share of abuse nonetheless. They still smart from being sandwiched between my father's thumb and forefinger. Mine was because I talked too much. Apparently the deterrent didn't work.
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