song of the day: "jersey clowns" -- josh rouse
i really hate new jersey. i do. it should be no surprise to anyone i know by now. it's cramped. it's ugly. it smells...bad. but what bothers me most about it is not so much the place itself but how it has the capability to affect me. there is a negativity here unlike any place i've ever seen. it just lingers in the air. you can almost feel it. (you might think you can almost smell it, but that's just staten island.) i take responsibility for my own actions but you know when you're concentrating really hard on doing something and someone keeps repeating your name or poking you in the back over and over and over and over.... and then you just snap and say "knock it OFF!!!" you know when that happens??? that's kind of like what it's like to live here. someone is almost always poking you in the back. over and over and...you want to ignore the little obnoxious things but they build and build until you do something absolutely unnecessary that almost borders on crazy. oh, it's a fun place to live.
today, i yelled at a remarkably old lady (not directly) who was going 5 miles under the speed limit. who does that?? well, people around here do it all the time. it's not just me, although that doesn't make me feel any less ashamed for having done it. i have tried, i mean really tried, to not let stupid things bother me in such a volatile way but it is harder than you'd think. when you're surrounded by intense negativity, it takes a lot of energy to not fall into the trap and become negative yourself. what's so weird about it to me is that i would have thought that being a witness to all this negativity would be a catalyst to become more positive. you see all these nasty people walking around and you think to yourself, "i'll never be like that." it's not so. at least not for me and not on such a large scale. i can handle one or two or even a dozen negative people in one place (let's use my job as an example) but after a while, it gets tiring and i start to get discouraged. that's ususally when my fall from grace occurs and i join the ranks of the bitter and disheartened. i become the kind of person that i just hated. that feels pretty crappy.
i don't ever want to be put in the same category as the majority of the people that live around me. unfortunately, i can't very well say to every single person i meet "yes, i'm from around here but i don't fit in. i'm not like them." it's just not possible...especially when i yell at elderly women through my windshield.
i'm not trying to put myself in the victim slot in this scenerio, although it may seem that way. but i really do believe that the kind of person you are and the kind of decisions you make are at least partially based on the environment you are in. it's that whole nurture/nature deal. both are important and i think it really has to do with how easily you are affected by your surroundings. when i lived in pdx, i rarely found myself getting angry at strangers for exhibiting largely acceptable behavior (except perhaps when i worked at the kk but that's a whole other story). for some reason though, it's very easy in nj to curse out someone who takes a millisecond longer than you think it should take to make that right-hand turn. (you will notice an awful lot of my frustration is driving related...if you have never driven in jersey, put it on your "1000 things not to do before you die" list.)
so, with all that said, i am trying again to break free of this cycle. everytime i realized i've fallen below the caliber of person i want to be, i begin again. fall down seven times, stand up eight. well, actually i'm working on falling down roughly 34,000 times, stand up 34,001. hopefully, i will only have to continue doing this until i graduate in 2 years. then we'll see if a change in venue will actually alter my behavior. i hope so. it's so much easier to blame jersey for my downfalls.
No comments:
Post a Comment