The Nerve

So I'm in college.  This is my first time ever sharing a room with anyone.  This is my first time ever living in any kind of community housing.  The roommate thing is fine.  It's the community living that makes me nervous.  If you knew me at all through elementary or middle school, or you are part of my family, you know how easy it is to agitate me.  (I neglected to list "high school" there not because I grew a longer fuse, but because I stopped being friends with assholes).  If someone is humming under their breath and I can hear it and it's keeping me from concentrating, I will flip out.

Scratch that.  If someone I know well is keeping me from concentrating, or bothering me in any way, I will flip out.  It has to be someone I know well, because I am fairly confident that they will still love me after I'm done being mad at them.  It's not a good way to live, and I'll probably get ulcers soon, but it's how I am.

Here's the weird thing, though.  If I don't know you well and you're pissing me off, I get really depressed.  It's a chain-reaction thing.  I hear something that bothers me.  I start imagining myself getting out of my chair, walking down the hall and saying in a snarky voice, "can you guys please go somewhere else?  It's 11:00 at night and I'm trying to sleep/I'm trying to study/you're ugly".  But once I get that far, my anxiety gets the better of me.  What if I make her mad?  What if she beats me up?  That's unlikely to happen, sure, and if it does I can probably sue her, so I'm pretty safe.  But what if she's sneakier than that?  What if she want to harm me psychologically because I had the audacity to ask her to turn her music down, or stop screaming at her friend who's standing all the way at the other end of the hall?  What if she tells everyone she knows about this horrible, awful person who one time asked her to be quiet please.  What if she tells her sister, and her brother, and her aunt, and her grandfather, and her hot step-cousin-in-law?  What if I then meet that step-cousin-in-law and his favorite band is Green Day and he snowboards and fences and is really smart and loves to read and is a blogger and buys me sour gummy worms and he's perfect, but then he finds out that I'm that girl, the one who asked his precious step-cousin-in-law, Susie, to stop talking so loud one time, and leaves me?

That's what I told my R.A. when she asked me why I couldn't tell the girl down the hall to shut-up on my own.  She said, "that's a stupid argument".  I know, but I can't keep it from going through my head every time I want to ask someone I don't know to stop sucking.  Here's a better argument: what if the offender is a friend of mine, but not one I've known very long?  What if the offender is someone I like pretty well, but haven't known long enough to know if he'll comply or go on a passive-aggressive Facebook rant about me and hate me forever?

What if the offender is this guy:

He's not talking about me in this status.  He lives in a different dorm.  But he is a friend of mine, one I haven't known for very long but one I intend on keeping.  And he acts like this.  This is why I'm scared to knock on someone's door with a perfectly reasonable request for them to be quieter.  This is the kind of person who lives in my subconscious, judging me every time I tell a boy not to leave his backpack in my room or tell a girl I don't like loaning out pens or tell the guy on the street I don't have time to sign his petition.  This is the kind of person who makes me sad about the world.

This arrogant, angry, the-world-owes-me-everything kind of behavior is becoming more and more common, and I'm not strong enough to fight it, because it scares me.  So, miss R.A., that's why I'm asking you to go do your job and tell the girl down the hall that it's Quiet Hours and she needs to stop screaming.  That's why you need to remind the boys down the hall that they're not not the only human beings in the world, that the universe wasn't built to please them.

I'll just be here, sipping my tea.