How is it that my mother can take ten minutes of work, and just by talking to me about it make me abhor the idea of bothering to do it so much that it takes three days for me to actually do it?
Well, actually, I think she's been badgering me about these particular ten minute tasks for more than three days, but still, how does she do it? How can she manage to instill in me such a horror for the job in question that rather than spend the less than an hour on it it would take, I spend days worrying about it?
I surmise it has something to do with the amount of extra pressure. Every time I'm asked to do something it comes complete with a whole selection of ways I could potentially screw up what I'm supposed to be doing, in addition to a lot of information I don't need to actually do the task in question. This is probably why I'm so terrified of phones.
It used to take me hours to make a casual phone call. I'm down to it only taking a few minutes of prep time, but really important calls can still be left unattended to for days. When I used to have to make phone calls, it was sort of like DOS prompts. IF YES do this, IF NO do this other thing, but it was more complicated than just that, it was a whole programming tree of despair that would have to be memorised before making the phone call, and then would have to depend upon the person on the other end saying all the right things. I was not prepared for an improvisational performance. How am I supposed to get all of the right information if they don't follow the formula? And I can't even see them to try to jump in politely, or make appropriate facial expressions to indicate that they're not helping me.
I'm better now than I used to be.
I just don't understand how she can do this to me. How a half hour conversation with her can render me totally useless. Yesterday I spoke to her for something like half an hour and then she proceeded to call back three times today. I didn't answer my moblie, I figured she might've gotten the hint yesterday that I had no desire to speak to her for quite some time. Unfortunately, the last time the boy decided it would be a good idea to cancel the ringer. I didn't know what he was doing, and he answered the phone and then hung it up... and then told me about it. Since it was ten o clock, and I was in no mood to call her back so she could rant at me for two hours, I didn't, but I can't wait until tomorrow. She probably thinks I hung up on her.
I told the boy that when we move, we're never speaking to anyone related to us ever ever again. He doesn't agree.
Since I'm on the subject, here's the story of the week about his mother. The other day she was telling us that she's of the personal opinion that RSVPing for things is something rude, arrogant, stuck-up people do. I don't know how low-brow and tacky you have to be to consider things that the people who wrote the book considered common etiquette in the 50's and 60's to be rude and arrogant, but, yeah...
Sometimes I feel a little sorry for Nathan, because he's coming to the realisation that many of his relations are narrow-minded all on his own. He says on his own that he's glad he went to a real university rather than just community college to get something of a wider range of view in life, because he realises that the prejudices he had (and that a lot of his family still has) aren't the way the real world works. I don't encourage him in this, he comes up with it all by himself when his aunt launches into another speech about the Mexicans taking away jobs, or his mother comes up with another display of gentillity.
It makes me wonder just what the difference between a college education and a high school diploma is going to come to in the next years, and at the same time to take a look at why. Why should the views at a public institution in a rather conservative corner of the state still be so much wider than the prejudices of those not exposed to them? In this global economy (more than economy: it's a global society), shouldn't people who have gone to high school know at least a little bit more about the world around them? And if not, why not?
The one decent bit of writing from The West Wing I've heard was a statement by (I think) Rob Lowe about how schools should be palaces. I remember thinking that it never occured to me that it should be that way, but it should. Education should be the highest goal of any man, of an country. To know as much as possible about the world in which we live and our place in it- what more should we be on this earth for than to know all we can about our lives on it? Not just being able to say the times tables, but to come away from an educational experience knowing something more about the world as we relate to it.
How could there be any other answer?