Conflict

It's not easy being me. (With no due respect to Rodney Dangerfield.)

It seems I can't get over one crisis before jumping into another one.

A week ago I was freaking out about K wanting a break from me. We seem to have recovered from that. Last night she surprised me with an unscheduled call. The last time we talked, on Thursday, we had both looked at our schedules and realized we wouldn't have time to talk for the next week and a half. But after I failed to email her all weekend, she was worried, canceled her Sunday plans and called me. I hadn't intended to neglect her, I'd just had a busy weekend and had been planning to email her that night. But I guess my absence did have good consequences for me.

We talked for 2.5 hours.

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One of the things that K and I fought about during our tense weekend was fighting itself. K feels that I trivialize fights in my family. I have a large, diverse family with lots of different interpersonal styles and priorities. Someone is always mad at someone else. It's not so much that I trivialize the fights, but that I see them as inevitable. Like thunderstorms or the flu, they are an unavoidable fact of life. So you might as well get used to them.

As if on cue, my family is at it again. I escaped my crisis with K to walk right into another family feud. It took us all of five days after returning from Snarkfest last week before we started bickering about plans for next year's reunion. I won't go into the details, since half my family reads this blog. But things have escalated and I spent an angry weekend stewing about an issue that is disproportionately bothering me. I mean, I lost sleep over it.

Much of it is my fault. I have a bad temper and often feel slighted among my four older siblings. I'm the pit bull of the family. I have a reputation for saying stuff that other people don't want to say (but are thinking.) In all fairness, I'm not always at the center of it. Many times I can stay out of the fray, and in some cases I've even played the role of the mediator or peacemaker. Other times I'm the instigator.

In this case, I'm the one who's angry and on the attack. If there was one thing I could change about myself, it would be my temper. I hate hate hate that I get angry so much. And I hate that when I'm angry about something, I can't stop obsessing about it.

I don't understand why I get tangled up in conflict so much. I very much identify with Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm. People who know me probably don't believe this, but I really do hate conflict. Or I think I hate it. Maybe it's really something I crave, because I seem to be a magnet for it. Whether it's personal slights or politics or religion or judging others or family disputes, I can't seem to help myself from jumping right into a big pile of conflict.

Maybe I need to join Conflicters Anonymous. "Uh, hi, everyone, I'm Snark, and I'm a pain in the ass."

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K has a black male cat who is... spirited. She has bite and claw marks all over her ankles to prove it. When I visited her in January, he took a chunk out of my face. My next visit, in April, he clawed up my wrist so bad it looked like I'd tried to kill myself. I still have the scars from it. And he likes me. Whenever K has someone doing work (construction or painting) on her house while she's out, she has to lock up her cat, lest he tear them a new one.

But K loves and is totally committed to her feline darling. I consider her loyalty to her cat a good sign-- she's not the type to just dump her furry, cuddly little man when things get difficult.

I'm hoping that she feels the same way about me. Although I can't help myself from biting people's ankles (metaphorically), I hope she'll be loyal to me, because I'm her other cuddly little man.