Whine and whine

Okay, I changed my mind. After the laundry incident, I have to vent and whine.

This harder than I thought.

It's not that Ranger Man's parent's aren't lovely, because they are and they're nothing but nice to me. But they're not my parents. And my 'parents' as a unit don't exist anymore, so quite frankly seeing people being all family-family makes me feel rather ill.

And that's not just it either. We know how Ranger Man loves his food and he's very concerned with the presentation of the plate etc, right? Keep that in mind.

At work a few weeks ago, we had some professional development and we took a class on race relations. Intrinsically, when talking about race relations you must also talk about class- and there was one part of the discussion that hit home. Some of the materials we received had a table that compared attitudes toward different things among different classes- one was food. People who belong to a lower class tend to focus on the quantity of food they have i.e. do they have enough. Middle class on the other hand tends to focus on the quality of the food i.e. do they have good food. Upper class people have the luxury of not having to worry about quality or quantity thus they are more concerned with the presentation, or the look of their food.

We know where Ranger Man falls on the spectrum... I'm not there. I grew up pretty solidly on the lower end of middle class. We always had what we needed, but we didn't really have anything else. It's really weird for me to be here, not just because everything feels wrong with my family, but because I feel so out of place.

His mom has all of these plans for my birthday. Starting with moving it up a day so we have time to "recover" in time for Christmas. umm... what? She has plans to take me to a yarn store and buying me yarn, and then going to some store that only sells cakes and buying me a cake and then some uber-fancy dinner at an uber-fancy restaurant with Ranger Man's brother (they don't even like each other!) and his girlfriend. I've never met either of them. Its freezing, I don't have anything to wear, and I certainly don't have anything WARM and appropriate to wear, so instead I freeze to death and am the most uncomfortable I've ever been in my life.

They're loud- maybe it's because I grew up in a smaller house, maybe I just have a quieter family, but raised voices scare the crap out of me, and all they do is yell across the house. It's not good.

There's all this talk about all this people coming for Christmas, and going here and there and having dinner with this group of people and that... first of all, I hate meeting new people. And when I do, it is imperative to take a day or two of time spent alone in my room with the door shut hiding from new things to feel like normal again. So essentially, I've gotten myself into a situation of two straight weeks of nothing but the most anxiety inducing thing I can think of, with no way to recover.

Oh yeah, and the noise and the yelling? Makes it impossible to get my reading done for school.