how's everyone doing? good i hope. i'm good, i think i have lost about 10 pounds already in the last 2 weeks, i'm feeling good about that. i got in a weird sleeping pattern the last few nights. started my class yesterday. the first week was about how to say hi, 3 verbs, and pronouns. they have f-in 40 pronouns. i have this page printed out and it's incredible. i'm trying to figure out the number in english. ok, in english we have 20. So basically they have double the amount and you have to figure out which one to use based on where it is in the sentence. it's funny, in old english it was the same and we had almost exactly the same words. i recognize them and how weird they are - for instance, "us" is "okkur" and i think that used to be the same word in english. but english got rid of all that because it's not an easy thing for a language to keep up over thousands of years with millions of speakers over the whole world. the reason icel. could keep it is because they're a tiny nation with virtually no outside cultural influences.
anyway, the past couple of days have been interesting at work. joel has been wearing me down with arguments. last week sometime he was talking to me about something that really pissed me off. here's what it was. i work in support which is a section that's sort of offset from everyone else. a contention point, at least with he and i, is that he does not think my group needs to know anything about what they're doing in his world. i maintain that my group supports his world and we need to know what they're doing so we can fix it when they screw up. he flat out told me "i don't see how it's any of your business" which really pissed me off, i was angry for a while at him. since then, we have been in this ongoing conversation for days and days and days. it is physically wearing me down. i can't argue this much with someone. yesterday we must have argued for 4 hours. i have never known a person like him! he is a unique character.
i think i finally was worn thin late today...something else happened at work which involved somebody else yelling at me, which as you all know i don't deal well with, and i went off on joel. he's been talking this whole time about how my side lives in a culture of corruption, and everyone is vindictive on my side, and everyone is always pissing him off. he's very negative. i finally told him to cool it, because when i'm hearing that everyone in my group is a terrible person, i have trouble believing the whole "but not you" scenario...i don't like the whole victimization thing he's doing, because it's really hypocritical...he said "i'm tired of all the crap i get about my team" and i said "all i've been hearing from you for the past week is crap about MY team!!"
i think quite a bit of the problem is in his head...he's so worried everybody hates him, and that's not the case. i told him that my group is not out to get him. nobody over here is vindictive, what would we have to gain by that? we do our jobs over here and we do what we need to to get the work done. there are exceptions, but for the most part i think my group runs really well. i'm talking about the big group, not my little 3 person group. i mentioned that in my year-end entry, how i greatly prefer where i'm working now.
i don't know how joel can function being so angry all the time. it could be that i opened myself up to it so maybe it's just the concentrated force of a lot of built up frustration.
but back to this afternoon, i was worn thin and i got frustrated and left, then he sent me a long email about some of the same stuff, which was nice and thoughtful. i have been thinking about it, not sure what to reply with yet.
my friendship with joel is weird. i don't know anyone else, besides sarah to a much lesser extent, who i have had an extended argument with for days and days. and i get really pissed at him and yell at him all the time and he does the same, but it's just all part of the deal. hardly anything he says fazes me, which i think is the most interesting part of all. i have friendships with people where everything they say fazes me. but i don't know, i guess this is a different one. as some lady said one time, "i guess we'll live it this way". those people who know how i roll with sarah, it's like that times ten and without as much of me crying about guy issues. nancy said today "i sensed tension between you and joel" and i went "i just didn't feel like talking to him right then" which was true...i didn't have any tension in my brain, i just went to talk to nancy so that's what i was doing. it was weird, i couldn't get over that.
well, i hope that wasn't too disjointed. i have a lot of thoughts about it that don't really exit my brain in any kind of order.
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