Thursday, May 26, 2011

I need to anticipating

As an ABC, it is engrained in me to anticipate others' needs.  If someone asks me for help with something before I anticipate it, I am internally shamed (though not to be mistaken for having already mentally anticipated a need, but just waiting for them to ask - hey, we're not robots). 

It's like I go through life with one eye on the things I'm doing and one eye on the people around me.  If I'm buttering my bread at the toast making station in the cafeteria, I can feel exactly if the person behind me wants to squeeze in behind me to get their toast started in the toaster (that reminds me of one of my favorite puns: The phrase, "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" doesn't make sense - that's like saying, "Toasters don't toast toast, toasts toast toast."  Great...now the word "toast" just looks spelled wrong.).  Anyways, so I let the person squeeze in next to me, after all, efficiency, I guess, is king.

However, just because I can anticipate something doesn't mean that I'll meet the need.  I am an aggressive driver (not to be confused with an Asian woman driver), there, I said it.  And so when I see a fellow aggressive driver coming up behind me a lane over knowing that he wants to cut in front of me, I may speed up so that he gets stuck behind the slower car ahead of him in his lane.  There, I said that too.  Sometimes I can be a jerk like that.

But even more jerk-like, it's sometimes amazing to me how I can irrationally project this value I have onto other people.  I mean, if I'm working so hard to anticipate others' needs, people should at least return the freaking favor right?  That right there is the heart of the sins that I tend to confess the most during Confession.  If I'm next in line at the toast station and all I want to do is get my toast started, if only the person taking their sweet time and their sweet space could feel the wrath of my internal lambasting that I'm too non-confrontational to say.  Don't even get me started when I'm driving behind slow people.  <sigh>.  Sorry, Jesus.

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