Suffering Fools...

You know when you look forward to something so much you just feel like the time will never come. Well, that's how I felt about this Friday night. So here it is Friday and I am home at 11 p.m. I guess that's late enough except usually when the girls at the book club get together we often gab way into the wee hours. I think for most of us it had been a hard week and I was especially looking forward to the evening.



We are a non conventional book club. That means we often pick a book but rarely read it. Maybe one or two out of the group read it and we have a brief discussion and then its back drinking and eating and venting. I don't think I have read the last ten books. I will shuffle through he Cole's notes on line and decide if I want to spend my time reading it. Honestly some of the titles and contents make me wonder who are these people I call friends.



So tonight I am excited about seeing everyone since it was last spring when we all got together. We had busy summers to catch up on, family changes, kids going off to school kids staying back from school and changes in jobs, houses, you get the picture. We do love to eat and since we have a vegetarian in group we have gotten better at making healthier choices. I had a client at 5 and was not done till 6 and had to go home and let the dog out so I was going to be late. My creativity for snacking extended only as far as Pizza Pizza and a couple of bottles of Innes and Gun. I have to say the girls out did me and we had wonderful goodies. Samosa, gourmet sausage rolls, humus and pita chips, veggie platter it was all yummy!



The conversation was light and funny as we shared our lives. However I began to notice that a couple of people were holding court. The more they drank the more they demanded attention. They became bigoted and judging while complaining about people being bigoted and judging. This is not new behaviour, I have seen it before at the same place with the same group of people. So I became quiet and just listened as I thought maybe it was just me, being tired and over sensitive. As the conversation became more judging and now directed at some of the folks in the room, using humour to deliver the blows I became frustrated at the lack of adult integrity. I was dismayed at the amount of attention this behaviour got and realised it was me that was having a reaction. I am fifty years old and I do not have to subject myself to people who have a good "education" slagging the rest of the world because of a different point of view. I know I can be a bleeding heart social worker and sometimes I want to fight for the little guy just cause the little guy gets beat on regularly. However, the banter was not productive and the topic shifted but the content did not. So I quietly got my things together and prepared to leave. There was a great flutter as I left and I felt the insincerity as I closed the door. I felt sad.



Over the last couple of years I have felt that I stand alone on how to have adult fun. When a group of women get together it does not have to be either a drinking session or a bitch session. It does not have to be that we share personal details or declare our emotional states as dictated by our hormones as if we can not control our actions. As a group of women we should be setting a safe place for us to be who we need to be without being hard on others way of life, decisions, choices and not imposing our point of view as the only point of view. What happened to tolerance and sisterhood?? What happened to personal integrity? What happened to the strength in being a woman and not selling out for a quick laugh?



I suppose some people might think I am writing this as I am better than all I have written about. Clearly I am not. If I was better, I should have forgiven them for their foibles and accepted them as the person they are and just know that they need to judge and complain and that sould be ok . But tonight I am not suffering fools at all. I am intolerant and insulted. It was not personal but it feels personal because this is not how I choose to live my life. So I am choosing only to surround myself with people who choose to do the same. The world creates enough conflict I will not participate unless the conflict is built to create change for all mankind.



So today I have learned that my shoulds, should be to fill my world with what makes me feel safe and happy. The short time I have left in this life I will no longer be filling my world with energy that sucks the life out of me.