Disappointment.

I'm all settled in at the computer in my jammies, with a glass of ice water and a bowl of creamy woof. (It may be "creamy wolf" - I'm not sure exactly. It's a term coined by one of my cousins when he was very young; it's family slang for Thanksgiving leftovers, all enjoyed together in one big messy serving. Yes, I'm aware that it's not Thanksgiving, but I am eating leftover turkey and potatoes mixed up with a little bit of gravy, so I think it qualifies as creamy woof. Or wolf. Whatever.)

Jesus, that was a long parenthesis. Anyhow...


Being a grownup is disappointing.

When I was little, I assumed that adults knew how things worked. In school I learned about reading and writing, and I just sort of figured that all functioning adults knew the things Mrs. Pantos was teaching me in the fourth grade. I thought that adults had to be kind to kids, unless perhaps the child was in trouble. I accepted that from time to time kids were dishonest and mean. I had no idea that adults could be the same way.

I'm sad when I see signs with lousy punctuation and misspelled words hanging in local businesses. It bugs me when I see that people have added unnecessary apostrophes to plural words, as though those little plural nouns were proud owners of something.

I was dumbfounded the first time I saw a mother being mean to her daughter. Not firm, not admonishing - mean. I watched this woman belittle her daughter; the girl couldn't have been more than 15. Dumb, she called her. Told her she looked horrible in the clothes she was trying on. Swore at her, calling her names usually reserved for use on the Springer show.
If my mother had said anything like that to me it would have crushed my heart.

I wonder what that woman's mother used to say to her when she was a little girl, and it makes me sad.

I work as a receptionist for an urgent care facility, and I'm a nursing student. I chose this field because I'm facinated by it, and because I wanted to help people. Most people come in because they need medical attention. The others come in because they need a fix. People lie to me about money, about their health, sometimes about who they really are, in hopes that they'll get a prescription for some percocet. The other day a woman came to the desk to pay for her visit with the doctor, and she said she didn't have any checks in her purse. She handed her wallet to the girl on duty and said she'd be right back. She left and never returned. Later we opened the wallet - it contained about twenty cents in pennies and a grocery store shopping club card, and nothing else. No ID, personal notes or items. That woman planned ahead to lie.

I'm sad that I'm losing my faith in people. I always felt that people were good. I believed in the human spirit. Sometimes bad things happened, or bad situations happened, but on the whole, most people were good. I thought that if given the opportunity, people would do what's right. Turns out that lots of people do whatever benefits them, with little consideration of others, and some just do whatever's easy. Why?

Help me. I don't want to be jaded.