Condimental Philosophy

So, tonight I was thinking- good things are supposed to come to those who wait, right? But why do we all *know* that you have to bang the hell out of the side of the bottle to make the ketchup flow?

In other thoughts, today I decided to diagnose a personality disorder. Not my own (I don't believe in self-diagnosis...) but someone else's. This someone else BUGS. It's one of those things where I don't know the person enough to pinpoint why she annoys me, but I already know that, should I take the time to get to know her, she would annoy me, thus I allow myself to be lightly annoyed from a very pleasant distance.

Anyway, I was talking with Jessica tonight about this girl's personality problem. (You see, I'm only one of many people who seem to have this reaction to said person. Here, let me give you something to go off: she's one of those people who, even though she's met you and been personally introduced to you repeatedly, she ignores you until someone introduces you again, at which point she offers you her limp handshake. Blech.

I have diagnosed her with Personality Diarrhea. An absolute inability to control the obnoxiousness of her personality, her mannerisms, even (apparently, as was discovered after 2 hours of having to sit behind her at an event) her laugh. She can't contain it. Whatever is in her childhood, the resulting effects just run (pun intended) out of her, to the disturbance of those around. I use her as an example, but it absolutely applies to many other people, I'm sure. I'm just using her as an example because she snubbed me today (at first) and I like to use my literary revenge whenever I can. I do NOT take snubbing well.

In case you're wondering how that turned out, I then started playing a game called "I'm Deaf". I mean, I had never really cared for her, but I'd always thought "well, she's just getting used to figuring out who I am". But by now she should know my face as well as her mama's, I've seen her enough. So I let the initial snubbage ride. Then, a half hour into our outing (I don't know what happened, the guys we were with had started watching the game and weren't responding to her throwing popcorn at them or something) she began turning around and randomly commenting to me. Baiting me for conversation. And trust me, people, there was a LOT to talk about at this tournament. Apparently rugby fans dress up like it's Halloween, and our section was the guys dressed like Hooters Girls. There was no shortage of conversational material.

So, back to our story: we find our Heroine (me) being volleyed with light conversational tidbits from her Subject. Apparently she was THAT desperate for attention (attention desperation = the "personality" part of her particular PD disorder) and waiting for me to take the bait and be the bend-over-backwards friendly person I usually am... but PMS restrained me from being that good woman today.

Her: (Wrenching around in her seat) "Wow, what's he doing on the team?!" (let me point out here that the guy was Asian and was on some team just not from Asia-- you know, like, I dunno, France. Apparently she doesn't think Asians should emigrate. You're starting to see my point about her.)
Me: Eyes at the scoreboard, intently soaking in Samoa's first goal. Like SUPER intently.
Her: (turns back around, to replot her strategy)

Her: (turns back around, at some nondescript point in the game and says something inane like) "Wow, I mean, what's even happening?!"
Me: Eyes on the field, a laser directly pointing over her head, avoiding eye contact, but with my mouth slightly ajar as if amazed by play, completely fascinated to the point of being physically UNABLE to respond to her.

This method proved highly effective, much to my joy. If only I was genuinely deaf, I might have had better luck actually tuning out the voice, but we can do that on the Beta trial.

It was fun. All those years I've spent trying to win over the most unwinnable-overable personalities were wasted folks. Today I have seen the light. Some people just have a complete inability to control themselves or their obnoxiousness and you, too, America, you can tune them out. Just turn off your ears. It sounds cruel, but when you think of it, it's what our parents did to us all day long!

(This public service announcement has been sponsored by Personality Pepto.)