Greyhound Memoirs #5

CLASS STRUGGLE
5/17/01 12:10pm EST

I didn't mean to sound like a snob about homeboy. He was very kind to me, got off the bus and told me to have a nice trip. It's just, maybe I don't, what's missing? I just don't relate to people well. I don't know how to interact on a superficial level. I will soon learn, in my first ever job in the beloved and well-appreciated service industry. Customer service has nothing on service industry. It may seem obvious to you that they are completely different things, but for me, the way I am, I needed to learn it through experience. I will also learn, among the lessons that I can never relate to you, that I know nothing of relating on a superficial level. I did learn very quickly how to deal with drunks, how to defuse a possibly volatile situation and how to step back and let someone take care of situation. I continue in my Greyhound journal to say that I loath small talk, which I will learn to crave and respect. And I always thought somehow that made me a deeper person and I couldn’t do it because it wasn’t worth doing. And that’s the thing. I’m all talk.

My mother grew up in the south and in the 1950s. Needless to say, she is very chatty. Go to the grocery store, she talks to the bag boy. Go to the movies, she chatters to the ticket-taker. Go to a restaurant, she’ll talk the waitresses ear off. All these people are paid to be nice and so I always assume they are thinking, “Lady, shut up.” But now that I’m a mom, I think that was what I was thinking and those people probably enjoyed someone being nice to them while they were at work.

My personality confuses people. Well, it confuses me too. Most people see either one side of me or the other and think “Oh, I’ve got her pegged”. When I wrote this journal entry, I thought I was the only one person who was multi-dimensional.

It always made me feel like a fake. I was one way with my friends and another with my boyfriends and another with my parents and another with my teachers.

Insert rant about how this all ties into Irving and Jamie. Any rant will do and be better than the one originally writen in my journal.