Get away from me

This morning when I left to do my thing of meetings, planning and putting together some marketing material and goodie bags, I was planning a rather compassionate post about the ubiquitous beggars and the various attitudes towards begging in South Africa. But that will have to wait.

I need to vent.

Today I was reminded of how much I hate working with people.

And how I should never be put in a position that involves me giving my honest opinion. Because eventually someone will cry. Someone always does.

It's not that I (always) try to make people cry, it's something that simply happens. Oftentimes when I think I'm actually being pretty nice, and not even coming at them full force. Every once in a while I'll even do that 'criticizing by pointing out the good things first' tactic someone once told me to use as a buffer - to my personality - and ignore that little Scandinavian chick in my head that keeps saying: "This is not fokken high school. Pointless pats in the back belong in fokken high school. Don't fokken waste time. Just say what needs fokken changing and the working parts will be fokken implicit. For fok's sake."

Of course when she says it, being a Scand and all, it goes more like this: "Tää on ihan syvältä tää koko paska. Uusiks vaan koko homma. Mitä sitä jahkaileen. Mitä toi nyt tossa itkee? Voi helvetti," or like this: "For helvede. Det her ting sutter totalt. Det hele skal laves om. Hvad græder hun nu om? Fok."

The Scand in my head is a total bitch.

But she's mostly right.

And today I had to use up all of my energy to keep her silent. To everyone else than me. And without even completely succeeding in that, just the effort to constantly bite my tongue has exhausted me to no end. When I got back, I had to stop myself from SHOUTING at people on Twitter who had tweeted things while I was gone that I didn't agree with, or things that touched a nerve, or complain-y, negative, and inane things, or stupid things, or things I wasn't interested in, or, you know, things and shit, which pretty much summed up my entire Twitter-feed, and sent me to a tailspin that could only be cushioned with one of two things.

And since I couldn't be bothered to open wine, I made some coffee.

So what is it exactly that's gotten inside my head and by the feel of it laid a sizable number of eggs too?

Well. I guess it can be summed up with a little story of a minor detail I discovered about myself when I was taking psychology classes back in the day when I thought I might become a psychiatrist but then discovered that they weren't just going to give me the white coat and a cute little wild-haired patient of my own if I could confidently discuss the history of schizophrenia, but that I would have to take all manner of courses and classes that would involve complicated mathematics, and, well, that was the end of that.

But I did learn that I'm a man in a woman's body.

Not the kind who was born a male in a female's body, but the kind many of whose behavioral patterns are typical to those of males in what can be, in a very broad sweep, called western cultures.

I don't commiserate, I try to offer a solution, I don't make nice, I compete, I automatically challenge, I don't see disagreement as a disruptive element, I don't ask, I tell, I confront, and so on.

Ergo, according to many a theorist, I behave like a man.

Now whether that is just complete and utter psychobabble can and perhaps should be discussed at length (just not with me), especially taking into consideration how it seems that 'male' in this equation and many more like it seems to come across as the 'norm', and thus implicitly somehow as the better of the available possible categorizations, while simultaneously, me behaving in the way that I do, in this male-like way of the supposed norm, makes me a bitch. Especially in the company of other women.

So any which way, I'm screwed in the pleasantness department.

Which is exactly what happened today. And made me want to shake more than one pair of shoulders, drink a whole bottle of wine and then top it off with some amazing tequila, go hit some balls on the driving range, rip someone's head off (or actually, again, more than one), and just generally keep telling people to fokken shut up.

I didn't. I really did manage without a definite, relationship forever-altering blowout.

But I don't want to go back either.

I fokken hate working with people.

AAAAAAAAARGH!!! Now what's this guy so happy-go-singy about? 

What?

So what's your take on this? Am I a bitch or just a man with a penchant for costume jewelry, and great Sauvignon Blancs? Or something completely different? What are you?