I hate conflict. I’m not good at it. My voice gets high. I stutter. I can’t see straight. I spend the rest of the day thinking of the “could’ve saids / should’ve saids” and in extreme cases “could’ve dones”. Aggressive conflict resolution figures highly in my landscape of personal fantasy. Depending on the day, it’s somewhere above Athena from the original Battlestar Galactica but below flying the Millennium Falcon.
It figures into writing songs – some of my music is probably clinically, pathologically passive aggressive. It figures into my relationships, my open mics – I’m not saying I won’t stand up and fight for something, but it tends to take a LOT of angst before I really get into it with someone.
And so I’m sort of actually IMPRESSED with my neighbor this morning. Though I think by the end of it it seemed like she was really just blowing off steam at someone that she knew was home, the idea that she actually walked a couple of doors with her kid in her hands to give us a piece of her mind about how our cars were parked is kind of admirable. Misplaced, I feel, but she was standing up to us in a way that I would never do.
I argue to myself that’s because I’m sensible enough to never think “gosh, on our crowded streets THAT car is often parked in front of MY house instead of THEIR house they MUST be doing it on purpose” as if on crowded Catonsville streets there was enough parking free to GET passive aggressive with it… I think in order to purposefully park ANYWHERE repeatedly would require watching the street like a hawk and sprinting into action far too frequently… in any case, I’d LIKE to think we had a sensible conversation about it, and after she’d cooled down I feel like she left our doorstep NOT thinking we were horrible people who had something against her.
But it’s squirreling in my head. Should I have been friendlier and offered my number, offered to help some other way? Should I have made it clearer that I’ve been here a LONG time and it’s ALWAYS been a neighbourhood of “get along as best you can” – especially when it comes to parking? I probably SHOULD have commiserated about the across the street neighbor – the idea that SHE’D have the nerve to bitch at the neighbor who’s now on MY doorstep about parking – when the worse nights of parking are during their parties that leave trash all up and down the street, no parking for blocks, loud music till midnight and the stink of pot all through the block….
Ahem.
It’s clearly better to know one’s neighbours. I should probably be a LOT more proactive about it. I know Butch, I know Brian, I know Denise… and I know a couple of others by sight but would never remember their names. I feel bad about it. But it’s like, I only get to know the crazy ones (like John, who was convinced that the plot of Die Hard 4 was true and that Social Security was an NSA front) and everyone else is just a blur as I shuttle stuff to and fro from my car (which is often parked about a block from my home… and yet somehow *I* don’t go door to door demanding to know who’s parked in front of our house).
Suburban verging on urban Living sucks. But we’ve been here a long time. The neighbor today mentioned that “we’re all just getting along in this shithole neighbourhood” – and I’m kind of of the opinion that there’s a LOT worse places to get along in.
In RPG terms “there are no lasting consequences to your actions” – but at least I know the woman two doors down is named Denise. I’m writing about her now so I can go back and look up the name if I have to because I never remember ANYONE’S names and it’s awkward.
In any case, passive aggressively I’d like to state – I have learned my lesson and when I come home and the street is wide open I will NOT park my car in front of Denise’s house even IF I really feel the extra hundred steps of exercise would do me good!
