Blog by Numbers

Sometimes I feel the urge to blog but really don't have anything to say. Many of you will review past posts and think to yourselves, "Hmm, that must happen A LOT."

I think it's just the catharsis of the writing. There's something comforting about letting the thoughts escape out of my head and run around on the screen and play. Sometimes while I'm in this process, something noteworthy (or blogworthy as Dave would call it -- by the way, he finally started posting again so you may want to drop by the Conch sometime... don't get cozy though, he's bound to abandon us again!) will pop up and I'll rant about that for a while.

Today, my thoughts wander to my "familiarity phenomenon". Or at least to a better way to phrase it. It's like this -- I will meet someone and within a ridiculously short period of time they will treat me as if they have known me for a long time. Either by teasing me or joking around with me or asking my advice about something or giving me advice about something or going into long drawn out stories about their personal lives, and my (internal) reaction is somewhere along the lines of "have I met this person somewhere before?" I can't figure this out, but it does happen frequently.

Two recent examples... In my Dwelling training class, my teacher started making remarks about how perhaps I should avoid caffeine, given my talkative nature and so forth -- and this was before she even knew me for two full hours. I commented today that generally people know me at least for a little while before they start giving me a really hard time and she shot back that even though it's been three days, it feels like forever and she's wondering why she's still talking to me. And that's about right, as many people who have in fact known me forever often wonder the same thing! Which is what I said.

Then, last night when I was at the doctor's office I asked him about how dieting could affect my, er, cycle (a story you DON'T want to hear) and he wound up going off on this tangent telling me about HIS trials and errors with dieting and trying to lose weight through exercise and the Atkins diet. Even complaining about how he had ran for 20 minutes on his treadmill the other night and figured out that he only burned 250 calories. I just wanted to flag my arms in the air and say, "Hello? What about me? What does this have to do with ME?" The one situation where I should have felt comfortable being like this as I was actually paying him to talk to me about me.

I have a fear that if I ever did go into therapy, the therapist would wind up doing one of these things too. "Yeah, Heather -- that traumatic thing from your childhood, that actually reminds of this thing that happened to me last week. Let me ask you about this."

These things happen to me more often than not and I can't figure out what it is about me that invites this behavior. Sure, I'm friendly but it's ultimately in a bitingly sarcastic, self-centered and bitchy kind of way. Are people drawn to this character type? Because it's not warm and fuzzy by even the broadest leap of the imagination.

I'm not even saying that I mind it, per se. I like people for the most part and while I don't want to take on all of their problems, I don't mind hearing about them. I don't mind being teased or I wouldn't have the friends that I have and I CERTAINLY wouldn't have the fiance that I have. It's just that it's odd. Sometimes I will be out somewhere with other people and something like this will happen where someone will start chatting with me like they've known me for years and the person I'm with will ask me later if I knew that person and it's like "nope". Never seen them before in my life but apparently I was the one they needed to share the news about their boyfriend cheating on them with their mom with. What're you gonna do??

Anyways, I was just wondering about that and remembered that I wanted to blog about it because of the brainstorm blogging thing...

Gotta roll because I want to hit Target before I go to class tonight. FYI, hearing still not back and it's getting more and more annoying. My left ear is getting a little tired of all this listening and sometimes it just tunes out. I'll keep you posted.