I’m angry (part 2)

This is a rant. I might be writing things that are biased and unfair and, well, not nice. Just so you know.

To be precise, I’m not really angry. I’m pissed. That sentiment from the beginning of my NaNo is mine (Just scroll down to the quote.) If I were to act on my feelings right now (which I won’t) I would yell at everyone to leave the house, punch innocent bystanders in the nose and then blow it up. The house I mean. And then just walk away without looking back.

I’m pissed because,

1. every time I want to complain to somebody about something it ends up with them being jealous at me because my life is better than theirs.
2. all the people who live around me have dogs that bark. One of them is so loud that often my students will stop playing in mid-piece because they’re startled by the noise. This dog barks at everything that moves. On day it went on and on from 7 am to 11 pm. No, I’m not kidding.
3. there are thousands of cars driving by our house every day and every single one of them is driven as if it were in a formula 1 race. You can feel the anger and frustration of every single person in every single car everywhere in my house.
4. all the people around me are running around like headless chickens because of Christmas. You can feel the vibrations everywhere.
5. my mother-in-law is one of those people. If you sit in our kitchen for a while you start feeling that you are sitting inside a pinball machine. With her being the ball.
6. I spend the whole day carrying things from one part of the house to the other.
7. there is dust accumulating everywhere.
8. our basement is humid and moldy and two of the walls upstairs and I don’t know what to do about it short of renovating half the house.
9. I’m sick of positive thinking and my own new age-mentality. Really.
10. I don’t want to try and change myself and my behavior. I have worked at this so hard and I don’t want anymore.
11. nobody else around me seems to be working on themselves anyway. All of the older generation in my family are acting totally unconscious and mindless. So why should I try to be different?
12. I always have to explain my life. I can’t just sit down and do the thing I do, I always have to explain it. And then the other people make me feel weird.
13. I’m supposed to make small talk in such huge amounts. I didn’t ask you to talk with me. Leave me alone.
14. there are so many new blog posts accumulating in my feed reader every day. I love you all and I want to leave thoughtful and nice comments but I don’t feel like it.
15. after avoiding the news for years now this whole social justice thing makes me care about AIDS-orphans in Africa and the Iraq war, and homeless people in California.
16. the fact that there is so much suffering in the world makes me even more angry than the fact that I have to think about it.
17. I have to do things I hate to make my child happy.
18. just when I wanted to concentrate more on music I got a cold again and can’t sing.
19. when I can’t sing I can’t play either. (I’m weird that way.)
20. everybody tells me that this is the best time of the year.
21. I have gained 4 kilos and felt fat even before that.
22. I’m cold all the time.
23. I have to listen to mangled and hacked Christmas songs every single day. Since the beginning of November.
24. in order to make enough money I seem to have to teach even students that have no talent or dedication whatsoever.
25. I’m not allowed to tell anybody just to fuck off and leave me alone.
26. I have to be sensible all the time.
27. all of the governments and especially the US one are screwing up this conference on Bali again.
28. the headlines in the newspapers are all about how cars will get more expensive and how we have to take care of the car industry. Because that’s so much more important than the planet.
29. I have committed to a lifestyle that’s a bit greener and so I have to spent twenty minutes every week to separate and hang up little squares of cloth that were used to wipe my butt. Or nose.
30. I have to feel guilty every time I stand in the shower and let the hot water run over me longer than necessary. Or even take a bath.
31. I can’t afford a new piano.
32. even if I had a new piano the only people playing it would be my students. Most of them hacking at it so that I would get the feeling the piano sounds like crap.
33. I have to get up in the morning.
34. I have to be a grown-up.
35. I can’t spend the whole day finishing my hanami-stole.
36. there are aluminium wires in our house that are a fire-hazard.
37. my kitchen is as ugly as the day that my husband’s grandmother installed a beige-brown fake tiles PVC floor because my mother-in-laws dishwasher broke and there was water everywhere. Sometime in the seventies.
38. my son is messy and often lazy.
39. my son talks more than any human possibly can, me included.
40. my husband’s angry too.
41. every time I tell somebody that I am a music teacher they tell me how they did or did not learn the piano as a child.
42. every time I knit in public somebody tells me that they once knit a scarf too.
43. I have to do housework. At all.
44. I don’t have a cook, cleaning woman or gardener. (But I’m sure that if I had those I’d be annoyed that there were all these people around all day.)
45. I haven’t slept enough for years.
46. I get so much advice I didn’t ask for.
47. I had to talk with my mother-in-law about the “bratwurst” she gets us for Christmas dinner four times already. Because, you know, there has to be this special sausage like the one she had back in “Schlesien” (Silesia) which is now part of Poland. And the woman who used to make them here stopped because she was like 90 years old or so. So now there is the quest of finding the perfect ersatz bratwurst. And there have to be red and white ones. And I ordered both types but less of the red one and then she had to ask me back because she said, my husband doesn’t like the red ones, only he does like them, only not as much as the white ones, and so she will be off to the big city today to get them. She already got the train ticket of her friend, only she has to bring it back immediately afterwards, and then we will get the sausages. Only if the red ones are only available with caraway we don’t want any. This, by the way, has been only one of the million things I had to talk with my mother-in-law about. Every single organizational detail requires like three “meetings”.
48. I have to wrap and send off Christmas presents to my parents.
49. I have to wrap the Christmas presents for my son. Oh, wait, I don’t have to. I guess he’ll get his presents unwrapped this year.
50. every single thing I do feels like it’s not enough.
51. I’m forty now and still don’t know what I want to do with my life.
52. I still have Lia’s manuscript sitting on my desk and haven’t written anything about it to her. And it’s an excellent manuscript.
53. I wanted to make one handmade, sewn Christmas present and there is no way I’ll do that before the New Year.
54. everybody tells me that it will be getting more quiet soon but I seriously doubt it.
55. every time I enter the woods they are full of people walking their dogs without leashes. And then when I freeze because I’m afraid of dogs they tell me their dogs won’t “do anything”. People, it would be nice to keep your dogs a little closer. Because, seriously, I’m afraid. And because I’m afraid I do act weird around dogs. Which makes the dogs act weird too. And well, I can see that your dogs are not exactly well-trained when you have to whistle and yell for them twenty times before they decide to maybe come back to you.
56. I have to buy all of the groceries for next week today. With my son in tow.
57. there are so many stupid people in the world. And they all seem to want to talk with me.
58. every time my mother offers to help me with something ends up with me thanking her for her work and doing everything that was really important myself.
59. there are people who need a suitcase bigger than themselves for a weekend getaway.
60. there are relatives who always come and visit just the week before Christmas.
61. there are people who are afraid of doing things like baking a cake from scratch, with yeast, or knitting cables or fair isle. It isn’t rocket science, you know. And if you don’t want to do things like that and knit garter stitch forever? Well, fine by me, just don’t make me feel bad because you’re jealous that I can do all of the above. I had to learn how to knit cables and fair isle out of a book too. It’s not like I was born with those abilities.
62. there are such a lot of women out there who are intimidated by anything they deem “technical”, like a screwdriver for example, and I always seem to end up helping them.
63. people keep telling you the same things over and over again, like “You have to enjoy the first year with your baby, it goes by so fast!” Well, maybe for some people but for me if it had lasted only a bit longer I maybe would have strangled my son.
64. people keep telling me how nice and patient I am when all I want to do is punch them. Only I’m too well-behaved to do anything but smile.
65. after years of thinking that basically all other people were as busy as me I found that, no, they aren’t. So, please, waste your own time. Not mine.
66. everybody tells you to just leave the housework for now. Well, I left it for a couple of years now, and sadly, it hasn’t gone and done itself. And still, the house feels better when it’s tidy and clean.
67. I tried to get back on track by re-subscribing to flylady again, and then I couldn’t stand all the e-mail. I didn’t do anything different and so, I have to confess, the e-mails didn’t do the housework.
68. there is no place you can buy addi knitting needles where I live. (For years and years every knitting magazine I read told me to use addi turbos. But you couldn’t get them. I was really curious about them and ordered some on-line from about as far away as you can get while still being in Germany. Those needles are great.)
69. every single yarn shop in a radius of 40 kilometers around my house has exactly the same selection of yarn. Novelty yarn and lots of acrylic. Blah.
70. my son woke me up at 3 in the morning saying, “Mama, my ear hurts.” Which means that at that instant my whole next week exploded in my face.
71. I spent the whole morning tending to the hurting ear so that I couldn’t take a shower or rest before an extremely long day of teaching.
72. instead of doing all remaining errands today and take a little nap afterwards I will have to do the errands tomorrow when every single person in the whole town will be out grocery shopping.
73. I never seem to find clothes that fit.
74. the deodorant I use leaves white stains on all my tees that don’t come out in the wash despite saying “pure”, and “invisible”.
75. things like that deodorant really saying “pure” and “invisible” instead of “rein” and “unsichtbar”. Or an ad for a “Cashmere Schal”. People, we’re in Germany, please say “Kaschmirschal” or even “Kaschmir-Schal”. Otherwise I’d go with “cashmere scarf”.

End of rant for now. I totally reserve the right to come back and add to it later. So now you can get back to your cookie baking and singing of “jingle bells” or whatever. I’ll sit in my misanthropist corner for a while to cool off. Or maybe not cool off but learn a way to tell the people who are pissing me off that they are doing so without yelling at them. I’ll of course be back as my usual pseudo-social-self in time to promote the just post baby shower thing.

Thanks for your patience.