Fri 27 Jan 2006
Imagine this scenario. A girl’s hanging out with a couple of her friends at a bar, waiting for her boyfriend to meet up with them. Meanwhile, the conversation is about the girl’s concern that the boyfriend’s been driving too fast and too carelessly, and her friends encouraged her to not only bring it up to him, but to put her foot down about it because when he drives like that, not only is he endangering his own life, but he’s endangering hers, too, when she’s in the car with him. Seeing the seriousness of this car-racing behavior, the girl is worried and when the boyfriend comes in, she brings it up to him. He laughs at her, as she had already told her friends that he would. He feels that he drives competently and that driving like this is fine because he has yet to get into a car accident due to his driving. She tells him that it’s better to be safe than sorry; better to be bored that driving dully takes too long to get to the destination, than to be sitting on the shoulder of the freeway waiting for the ambulance to arrive and wishing that he had slowed down. The boyfriend looks to the girl’s friends while ridiculing her and to the girl’s surprise, her friends laugh with him, meet his eyes as if understanding his pain at how paranoid she is, and join in the ridicule. He even looked at the bartender at some point in this, seeking support, and the bartender smiled sympathetically at him (despite the fact that the girl was the customer and it’s in the bartender’s best interest to stay out of it, if not kiss her ass). She’s not too blind to see this, and she’s not too stupid not to recognize it. She doesn’t need her friends to fight her battles for her, but some support such as stating the statistics stated to her earlier would be nice, and if they don’t want to be involved, they should’ve just completely stayed uninvolved in the conversation. The boyfriend did agree to drive more carefully, but not without throwing a last smart-ass comment/joke out about it. Something about would she like them to just stay home from now on so they don’t have to drive anywhere.
Altho one of the friends, at the first opportune time, had privately come up to the girl to apologize, the girl finds herself now resolving to allow her boyfriend to drive like a speed demon, and she finds herself hoping that they are met with some misfortune due to it, just so he knows that he’s wronged her.
The injustice that the above is an analogy for kept my heartrate up more effectively than my weightlifting and biking did at my lunchtime workout.
i think that’s bizarre.