Feeling like a child

To my elders,

I don't deal well with being patronized. Nor to be pandered to. People often make assumptions about flat questions. "What should I do?" Does not necessarily mean "What the hell do you expect me to do?" nor does it mean "Well then why don't you just swoop in and fix my problem?" sometimes, just sometimes, it means that I am out of ideas, and a couple suggestions would be great. Really. I promise. Questions can be flat and exactly how they sound. I know I'm a woman. But I promise, sometimes, we're not out to confuse everyone.

I have a friend who was once dumped because the guy she was seeing could not honestly believe that she just wanted a casual-ish relationship and when she said she was busy, she wasn't fishing for him to invite her somewhere. He once blew her off and then didn't call for a week because it was Valentine's Day and he couldn't believe that she had plans with her friends and had no desire to do anything with him. Crazy, eh?

So what this really is about, is doctors. Not The Doctor, as in, Doctor Who Doctor, but regular, boring, M.D.s. Apparently "Well what should I do then?" means "Just write me a prescription because I'm going to sit here until you do." Or maybe they just don't know of anything between "Deal with it and hope it goes away on its own" (which I am fond of in life, but not so much in medical issues. This logic once gave me a kidney infection) and "Here is a prescription that will fix all your problems." Something in the middle would be awesome. No, Really, it would. And I, being the malcontent, the rebellious, the anti-authority, and the totally-cries-when-challenging-the-say-of-the-authority-figure-I-don't-know, cried in front of a doctor while trying desperately to stop myself. Embarrassing. Seriously. Oh, it was over something boring too. Minorly inflamed ear canal. Yawn.

And then today (yes, I realise this post is more of a rant than anything anyone cares about, but deal with it), I had an 88 year old woman tell me that while my uni is prestigious (sorta) they ought to require that all their students be fluently and perfectly bilingual, because otherwise how could I possibly be able to work with records in the future. As if a) archivists actually are the ones doing research, and b) google translate didn't exist. Duh. (mostly joking, but you know what I mean.)

Maybe I should stop listening to pop-punk-ska (aka "skunk" as me and my bff used to call it). It might be giving me attitude.

-K