This evening, I was seething as I polished the granite counter top. (Don't ever get a black granite highly polished counter top if you value your time in any way whatsoever, unless you can afford a slave... I mean 'help')
To be honest it doesn't take that much to make me seethe, as I quite enjoy it. But this was not seething in a venty, let's-rant-about-it-over-cocktails kind of way, it was serious having an argument in my head type seething.
The arguments you rehearse are always so much more eloquent then anything you can conjure in real life ( TV never reflects this truth - remember the verbosity of Dawson's Creek?) and almost always you decide precisely what you want to say after the fact.
Anyway - I hate being told what to do. In the most perverse manner. Even if I wanted to do the thing I am being told do a little bit, I will stop wanting to do it if someone keeps insisting that I go ahead and do it. And then I will absolutely not want to do it, at all, ever. This might be to my detriment but it doesn't matter, as long as I win, and I only do what I want to do and not what someone said I should do.
Of course there is a loophole - at work I frequently do what people tell me. But this involves using a whole other facet of my personality that barely would see the light of day otherwise, in which I try to be helpful at all times (providing there is a cash reward). This is leftover conscientiousness from when I was Lisa Simpson. I mean, a child.
Anyway this evening the sister of the lady of the house decided to give me advice/barrage me with probing questions and accusations on my relationships. I have to say, I could assume this is a cultural difference. Perhaps in Canada it is not rude to tell someone you barely know what they should be doing with their love life, even instructing them in a patronising tone that you need this book. (Don't follow that link - it's new age self help, you don't want to see it.) But in reality I think unsolicited advice on relationships from a virtual stranger is as rude here as it would be at home, especially when it comes from a sixty year old single woman who's had 3 different love interests since I arrived here (they are a frequent topic of the family). Plus her nosey assumption of my 100% straightness was really irritating and she kept labouring the point of my waning fertility (not outright or I might have poked her in the eye).*
What really rubbed me up the wrong way is that I am not 19. I don't even look it. One more grey hair spotted this week! (Scratch that - today I picked up the little one from school to discover I was in the same outfit as most of the kids - skinny jeans, converse and a hoodie. I don't look 19; I look either 28 or 12, depending on the clothes.) Not being a teenager means I have accrued 11 years experience at loving people other than my family, and you can learn plenty in 11 years.
This extemely annoying bright-orange-haired lady then proceeded to recite to me the following saying with an up and downy 'you know what they say' warning tone of voice:
'If you always do what you always did, you'll always get what you always got.'
For anyone who even knows me a fraction, it is obvious that my current stance on relationships (as in, I'm only bothered about myself) is certainly not indicative of me doing what I always did.
For the first time since the year dot, a/n other is not the top priority. Obviously this allows too much time for navel gazing (re blog) but it does allow for trips all over England and abroad to see friends, and the realisation that I'm feeling relatively good about being by myself right now.
I must add to this that the lady of the house, (and now her little dog sister too) are trying to hook me up with a local guy they vaguely know. My time out has stretched a bit longer than I thought, but I've been on dates, kissed friends I probably shouldn't have and fallen inappropriately and disproportionately in love with a French intern's accent...but unless you are this guy, in the flesh, then my plate is full enough thank you very much.
p.s. I realise that links to a photo of Lee Min Ho in flip flops sitting in what could be a teenage boy's bedroom (only much cleaner), which denotes he is too young for me. This aint Vancougar for nothin'.
* Yes, it's a sensitive subject already in case you couldn't tell
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