Lapses in Communication

If men are from Mars and women are from Venus I might be from planet Zardock like my sister told me when I was little. I don't do it on purpose, but I just hear and see and think about things in a completely different way than most other people.   To me this is logical, but to other people (including my confused boyfriend) its logic along the vein of 1+2=7,000.  

This week, apparently God decided to punish me for secretly wishing Kate and Will would divorce in 6 weeks, because I had to sit through a tortuous two days of meetings which were so terrible and psychologically damaging they might be in violation of the Geneva Convention.  During the meeting, our fearless CEO gave a presentation, and she is (a self-admitted) appallingly terrible public speaker.    Even Stephen Hawking would have sounded less robotic.   But during a particularly terrible bit of meeting, I heard our CEO basically say she wanted us to be nothing more than means to generate numbers.  Now, this was hidden behind layers of "if you all don't do your job I can't do mine" but the message I got was very clearly, "do your bitch work, and do it happily, so I can change lives".   My Scooby Doo ears perked up. Hurr?!  I looked for outraged parties.   Nope.   Everyone was just smiling and nodding.  I had no allies.   I felt like I was at David Koresh's and I said I didn't care for kool-aid.

Sometimes my "reading between the lines" might be good old-fashioned paranoia.  I tend to jump to the worst possible conclusions.  For example, "I like you hair," might in my head mean, "Holy, shit. Is Helen Keller your barber?"  To my credit, I grew up around mean girls.  Remember the scene in the movie where Regina George tells another girl her skirt is "vintage" and "totally adorable" and then says, "Ohmigod that's the ugliest f-ing skirt I've ever seen," behind the girls back?   Ok, now multiply that by 18 years of awkward, pimply, and chubby and you get my childhood/adolescence.   My cynicism was a survival mechanism.    This cynicism still is with me--like a phantom limb. My dad calls my tendency to interpret everything in the most nefarious possible way, "jumping off bridges," which incidentally is what this particular tendency of mine makes me want to do when it manifests itself.    Like the other day when I spent a weekend crying and miserable because I was convinced my boyfriend had told me the night before that he didn't love me, and he was actually trying to be nice. Mind you, my boyfriend is an engineer, which is code for "somewhat lacking in any kind of human connection or emotion" but I'm my mother's daughter which means, "a bottomless pit of estrogen and emotion"--so there is a shared blame here.

Basically my off-kilter world view is an epic pain in my ass.   It causes me lots of needless frustration and other people to look at me like I'm a fucking sociopath.   But unfortunately, it's a double-edged sword (which I always thought was a stupid expression because Ninja swords are double-edged and the most badass ones possible) because my ability to see things in a unique way is what my makes my blogs so deliciously wicked and humorous.   Seriously though, one day I wish I could sit in a corporate meeting and think, "wow, the management really cares about employees" instead of finding the whole thing pandering and insulting to my intelligence.  You know what happened the other day?  I saw a bumper sticker that said, "I'm proud of my cub Scout" and the first thing that popped into my head was "yeah, wait five years until he knocks up some girl.  See how proud you are then."  Surely this isn't normal.  

My boyfriend thinks I'm unhappy with life when I make these comments.  I'm not.  I just see the world this way as clearly and indisputably as other people see "the sky is blue."  So to me, looking at a couple across the room and thinking, "Wow, how can she not know her husband wants to be plowing dudes?" is a factual observation.   It is therefore neutral.  I am neither happy or sad noticing this.  It just is to me.  My boyfriend, however, is an organizational man.   He's a team player.   To him: the government is benevolent, the military is noble,  and corporations are the cornerstone of the economy.   This makes about as much sense to me as my predicting a couple's divorce based on one partner's homosexual proclivities makes to him.    

Am I just crazy?  Crazy like a fox, says I.