Barbara

The woman who sits behind me annoys me unmercifully.  She makes loud personal phone calls that would embarrass me were I the subject of them.  She repeats stories to everyone around until she knows everybody has heard.  I know about her husband’s drinking problem, her father’s rapidly waning life, her rocky relationship with her sister, her powerfully troubled daughter, and her triglyceride count.  Do these things bother me?  Of course.  Do I want them to continue?  Of course.  She offers me a window into a severely dysfunctional family.  I didn’t have one of those.  The best part is that I don’t even have to try to eavesdrop.  Her eaves drop themselves on me.  They stumble over the cubicle wall and distract me from doing my work.  John said he tunes her out these days.  I wonder how a person can do that.  I understand how one is able to not pay attention to something, that’s not the issue.  What I wonder is why wouldn’t you want to drink in every last bit of it.  This is pure gold, comedy of the most human variety.  This is real life.  The reason it entertains me is that it’s not my real life.  I get to observe from a distance.  I don’t care if her daughter brings home another D in band (seriously?  A D in band?).  I don’t care that her husband (ahem, her illiterate and out of work husband) is a recovering alcoholic.  It turns out, though, that he is only re-covering his hiding spot every time he sneaks a drink.  He’s not supposed to drink on his medication, so he told his therapist he was going to stop taking it because he is “feeling better.”  He also told him he had learned that he doesn’t need alcohol to be happy.  Quite a revelation for someone who was hiding beer in a cooler in the basement.  Why do I know these things?