Rambling Rose

I enjoy my job, and let's face it, it is doing a decent job of paying the B-I-L-L-S, but it is taxing.  Sitting in front of all those people for eight hours, smiling, answering questions, some of which I'm receiving for the twentieth tie that day, processing requests, juggling priorities... it stresses this lil bitch out sometimes.  On a particularly busy day like today, I do not want to socialize.  I do not want to put on a brave face. I just want to come home, throw on my pajama bottoms, make me a drink and curl up in the darkness.  Luckily I have friends who understand and accept this about me, and on the occasion I need to hermit it up, they are pretty forgiving.

Does this mean I'm an introvert?  I know there is the old fashioned definition that an extrovert gets charged up from being around people, and an introvert charges up by being alone, but I'm not sure I buy that.  I don't think it's that simple.  There was a person at one point who tried very hard to convince me that it was true, but I think that was much more about making herself feel less alien, along with a good dose of projection.   Truthfully, I love people, and consider myself a people person.  I don't usually have  difficult time making connections, and I get a lot of mental rewards from being around them, and from pleasing them.  That said?  I also really enjoy when I don't feel like I have to be "on" and there is no pressure to be nice or to consider other people's emotions.  So yes, when I can sit and just take care of me, I re-charge so that I can bounce around and have fun later.  I don't think that makes me an introvert.  And yet, there are plenty of times when I'm at parties that I just want to pull away.  When I was in my twenties, at parties you would be just as likely to find me on the couch petting the dog, as you would find me laughing with people.  Sometimes that's still true.

But that said, I still really need social activity, and if I weren't to have it for a day I would probably go stir crazy until I got out of the apartment and stumbled onto the N Train for my daily dose of New Yorkers.  It's a conundrum... maybe I'm on the cusp.  But my Meyer's Briggs profile says extrovert.  I'm an ENFJ, for what that's worth.

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These days I seem to be a snot making machine.  I go through more than twenty tissues a day and am always finding rumpled up kleenex in my purse, or in my office desk drawer, or I'm desperately fishing for one in the garbage to empty more not into.  This is gross, I know.  And it's catching, so fucking watch out!!!  I was out for four days straight, knocked out with a combo of Day-quil and Sleep-Eeeze, which I think made the cold or whatever I had go away more quickly than it would have, but who really knows.  I've never been one who believes in slathering myself in anti-bacterial sanitizer, but maybe I should be.  Since moving here I have been sick three times.  Maybe it's just part of building up my New York immunity.  Is that a thing?

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There's a new book coming out in 2017, about which I have very mixed emotions.  It's called Judy and I, and it was penned by Judy's third husband, the now deceased Sid Luft.  Next post, I will give my thoughts on the book which is sure to be controversial amongst Judy fans, and which I will certainly buy, though I may hate myself for it...


Joe Hartman