When I was in college, I was elected the dorm Secretary. Besides wearing old librarian glasses and talking on an intercom and saying, “Yes, Mr. Johnson. No, Mr. Johnson. Yes, Mr. Johnson,” my job was basically writing up dorm news and posting it in the bathroom stalls.
My Dorm News, which included funny commentary and homemade cartoons and a stone-clad guarantee that I would use of the term “tossing-off” in every issue, became a big hit. People started looking forward to popping a squat and soon the sale of laxatives on campus expanded beyond the narrow bulimic market.
But one thing I noticed was that while I directed my wit onto the whole of the dorm, what went out as diffused sunshine of raggery to 300 or so people, came back to me in the form of 300 single rays of insults, magnified under a lens that resulted in a serious burning as painful as any scorching I inflicted on any ant during my sociopathic youth.
It’s not that “You can dish it out but you can’t take it.” I can take it, or at least that is the line I kept saying in prison when I was being bent over a table and gang-raped. It is just that even I have my limit, my breaking point, and while my jokes were—and still are—meant to make light of a situation or to help someone not take life or themselves so seriously, the insults coming back to me seem more designed to hurt. And they do.
Because people are so used to looking at others like caricatures, compartmentalizing them like they would their comic books, “This is the ‘Great Evil Villain’ section and this is the ‘’Heroes With Multiple Heads’ section,” they think someone with a bitterly wicked wit like myself has no feelings. “And we’ll put him in the funny yet jerky emotionless section.”
What they don’t realize is that I feel more than most due to a condition called “PMS,” which while in women stands for “Psychotic Mood Syndrome” in men it stands for “Pussy Men Syndrome.” When I am ragging, like Cinderella’s chariot at midnight, I can turn into a pussy (well that was what happened in the X-rated version!)
While this emotional sensitivity at times allows me to have a greater understanding of others which proves useful in my healing work and writing [for an example see “Lie With Me” at http://rebelyogi.com/lie-with-me.html], it can also result in an inability to control my tear ducts.
I watched the movie Blood Diamond with Toad, which is about the diamond trade in Africa, showing rebels amputate villagers hands to discourage them from voting and stealing others into slavery to scrounge all day in dirty water searching for diamonds so that scumbag companies like De Beers can sell a bonehead here in the states an overpriced clear rock to attach to his soon-to-be’s finger so that she can wave it around to all her coworkers in order to feed her pathetic vacuum of self-worthlessness. About an hour and a half into it, Toad paused the movie so that she could change her Ben & Jerry’s feed tube, and I burst into uncontrollable balling, and by this I don’t mean that I was running around fucking everything in site. After 10-minutes of hysterics, even Toad was like, “Seriously, it’s only black people.”
I watch the PETA underground video recorded in China where these “men” grab animals by their back legs and swinging them in a big circle, they smash their heads into the ground; where they skin animals while they are still fully conscious and when one animal, a dog in this case, reacts in pain to the skinning while fully conscious, the abuser steps on his neck and applies his full weight in a crushing force; where one animal lying there, bloody and without any no hair on its body except its eyelashes, bats its eyes a few times and then collapses over. And, unlike the common person, I cry. I try to justify this by telling myself that people have just grown insensitive to injustice but the truth is I’m just a pussy.
So the other day I was stopping into the bank with Abandon. Another man entering slightly before me held the door and I assumed it was for us. I started to walk through and as I was halfway committed, I saw a woman was on her way out and saw that perhaps it was she who he was holding the door for. The lady and I both paused for a bit and then I quickly slid in ahead of her with a smile.
She walked through giving me a look of death that was meaner than the attitude Death gave Lois on Family Guy when she made him a cup of cocoa [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4txlA33jdk&NR=1]. She then said loudly, “Unbelievable!”
I walked back outside and called to her. “Excuse me, ma’am? Hey, I’m sorry, I was already halfway committed to entering and thought I might as well complete the job.” She either didn’t hear me or, more likely, chose to ignore me. I went back into the bank and said to the guy who held the door, who was now making a withdrawal from the magic money machine which prints up money as easily as Hasbro does Monopoly money and the Federal Reserve does American currency, “You know, it’s not so ‘unbelievable.’ I mean, if I were floating upside down, that would be ‘unbelievable.’ But sliding in the door before her—highly believable.”
I was reminded of a scene between Alice and the Queen in Alice In Wonderland:
Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
My bank friend, Quiche, always comments on how my constant smile, a la “The Joker” from Batman minus the deformity, always gives her a lift. Well this time my smile was hidden behind obvious distress and Quiche asked me, “Is everything okay?”
I started to have a PMS moment and leaned on the counter with one elbow and covered my face with the other hand as tears rolled down my face and onto my deposit slip. Quiche, always sensitive, said, “Those deposit slips cost money, you know. You shouldn’t waste them.”
It wasn’t so much the word “unbelievable” that started the waterworks. If the woman had said, “Onomonopia” I would have understandably burst into tears, as this was the war cry that the Ottoman Empire blasted out during the Armenian Genocide. It was that I’m trying my best and while I often fall short, I just wish someone once in awhile would give me a pass, would care about me more than they did judging me. And if I hurt their feelings, I wish they would just tell me, “You know, I’m really sensitive about being 5’2” and 300 lbs. and when you called me a ‘extremely fat sack of crap’ it hurt my feelings,” rather than lashing back at me that I have major character flaws and “That is the reason no one likes you but your dog!”
“Abandon, you like me, right girl?”
“As long as the food keeps coming I do.”
I thought back to D.J. from college who after a summer of doing way too much LSD would come into the group house from the cold winter and leave the front door open or turn on the sink faucet and fill a glass of water and then leave the faucet on and if you said, “Uh, D.J.? Can you turn the water off?” he’d say, “Dude, I’m trying.” I guess the only difference here was that I wasn’t having acid flashbacks; I was just PMS-ing.
Fred Sanford, played by Redd Foxx on the early 70s sitcom Sanford and Son, used to say, “My name is Fred G. Sanford. And the ‘G’ stands for___” and he would always fill it in with whatever applied at the moment—“Gorgeous,” “Gallant,” “Guadalupe.” [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WqazleR3FE]. I think in my case it will be a little less ambiguous:
“My name is Swami P and the ‘P’ stands for ‘Pussy.’”
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REFLECTION:
Think of a few times when you might not have acted or behaved to your ideal. If someone was there to tell you what a jerk you were, did that help you? Did you leave them and think, “That was so useful that now I am a changed man! I will now devote my life to not making mistakes.”? Or did you leave thinking, “Screw that bastard! Just for that I’m going to be even more of a son of a bitch!”? (that’s my usual mode of action.)
When someone doesn’t behave in the way you would prefer, do you rip them a new butthole? Do you talk calmly and quietly like a Passive Aggressive Pussy (PAP) and do your best to make them feel like shit while keeping yourself odorless in your own mind? Or do you actually care so much about the other person that you will keep their personal growth placed higher than your need to be a self-righteous asshole, maybe even to the point of not commenting about their suboptimal behavior?
MEDITATION:
Imagine yourself with your husband or wife or boyfriend or girlfriend or boss or coworkers. Imagine you do or say something that is slightly boneheaded. Maybe you answer your girlfriend honestly and tell her, “Yes, you do look fat in those jeans,” or you answer your husband truthfully and say, “Now that you ask, I’ve had a lot of better sex with past boyfriends.” Imagine your companion telling you not only what a jerk you are for saying/doing what you did but how your very character is so horrible that even Satan is praying that you go to Heaven because he does not want to taint Hell with your admission. How do you feel?
Now imagine you do or say something that is not your perfection and your companion tells you what kind of effect your action or words have on him or her. Imagine they look at you so lovingly when they share this with you and you can see in their eyes that they care more about you coming to an understanding for yourself than they do about their own possibly hurt feelings. How do you feel?
Imagine someone else doing or saying something that is not to your ideal and go through both ways of reacting. First, imagine explaining to them why they are lower than the bacteria that feeds of the waste of pond scum. Second, imagine looking at them with such love in your eyes—whether they’re a “stranger” or not—and not because it is the “spiritual” thing to do but because you genuinely love this fellow soul traveler. Then allow whatever words come through you to share with them. Filtered through your loving heart, it won’t matter what you say, they will feel your love and want to change not for you but to be a better person for themselves. Feel blessed that you are so loving and not a self-aggrandizing prick.
Reading this surprised me a lot. I didn’t take you for a sensitive person. I like it. I don’t find it to be “Pussy” at ALL. It’s just your feminine energy being expressed and I find nothing wrong with that. I mean, what’s the fun in being “Masculine” all the time?
It’s true. Sometimes when I’m with a lover, I wear a dress and have her slap me in the face with a dildo. It’s somewhat refreshing not always having to do the “slapping.”
Lol…You and Sarcasm