Red Red Whine

As I mentioned in a haiku yesterday, today is Blog Share Day! In case you were too lazy to click the link to the explanation of what it is, I’ll (sort of) explain here. Basically, the lovely and talented -R- is the most organized person I know. As a result, I have anonymously posted on someone else’s blog today. (Don’t worry – I’ll post the list of participants below and you can spend the entire day puttering around trying to figure out which post is mine while also reading everyone else’s secrets that they don’t feel comfortable posting on their own blogs.) And – the post you are about to read was written by someone else, not me.

Oh! I should warn you: my comments are a bit wacky these days. I found someone on craigslist who is supposed to be fixing it, but she’s super-busy apparently and I made the mistake of telling her to take her time. As a result, if you don’t regularly comment here, your comment will be trapped in “moderation”. I promise, though – I will email your comment to the author of this post and ensure that s/he gets it.

So….have fun. With no further ado…:

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Hummer Lady Meets a Freegan

My husband and I were lucky enough to have simultaneous midlife crises. After ten years of running our Internet business together, one day we’d just had enough. Life had become mundane, and time was flying. So at the ages of 38 and 41, we sold our business and our home, and hit the road in a small biodiesel powered RV, to travel, take time out, and figure out “what’s next?”

But finding the answer hasn’t been easy. By seeing so much of the country over the past year, and eeeking out some money through various Internet ventures, we’ve presented ourselves with more lifestyle options than we ever anticipated.

Should we stay mobile and run a business from the RV? Should we buy land and settle down again? Maybe we should just go back to the coast?

All we know is we want to stay self-employed.

With so many questions left unanswered, we’re going to stay on the road a little longer. But we’re not independently wealthy, so we’ve taken seasonal jobs at a dude ranch in a Colorado resort town. Now we have a little more time, and a little more fuel money, to put off the inevitable until sometime next year.

For two people that haven’t punched a clock in over ten years, fitting into the role of subservient employee once again is rough, but the bigger challenge is getting thrown back into the employee relationship game.

Here at the ranch, hubby’s a ranch hand, and I’m a housekeeper. And for the next couple of months, I’m stuck working with a woman who’s my polar opposite. Coping with her personality has done more to challenge my beliefs and behavior than anything I’ve ever experienced.

One the one hand, you’ve got me, essentially a Left Coast hippie from San Francisco. I love thrift stores and consider myself a freegan. I’ve been a vegetarian for almost 20 years, drink my share of good booze and smoke my share of good pot, dig the blues, believe in left wing principles, don’t believe in debt, and try to let the wisdom of the Dalai Lama and Deepak Chopra guide me through life.

On the other hand, you have my co-worker, aka “the Hummer Lady.” She’s 62 years old, and hails from North Dakota. Hummer Lady is a fulltime RVer who lives in an expensive, behemoth of an RV. The first time we met, our personality conflicts showed up immediately.

She explained to me that when she and her husband travel, he drives the 40′ RV, which tows their cargo trailer and ATV. She follows behind, in her Hummer emblazoned with yellow ribbon magnets, pulling their motorboat.

I found out later that she doesn’t drink, and refuses to eat Ben and Jerry’s ice cream because she “despises their politics.” She appears to have money, but I suspect that there’s a lot of debt behind those shiny toys. Otherwise, why would she be working as a housekeeper in the first place?

Although I’ve worked on my own for a long time, I have had to work with conservative people in the past, so I’m not new to navigating those landmines. But whenever I worked with neocons, we usually managed to stay civil to one another because we each made an honest effort to be considerate, civil, and work as a team.

But this time, despite my best efforts, I’m having a hard time coping with Hummer Lady. I’ve done my best to be nice and look past her politics and her environmentally irresponsible behavior. I ignore the fact that she only talks about herself most of the time. And I believe I’ve made an honest effort at digging for something good to appreciate about her. But I’m having a helluva hard time moving past what I see on the surface of her personality.

The fact is, the “me first” gas guzzling Hummer that she drives is an outward reflection of her nasty, selfish inner self. Every day, she rarely manages to say anything positive, constantly criticizes “the Mexicans” who work alongside us, and her whiny voice rivals the sound of nails running down a chalkboard. She’s simply a big bundle of negative energy, and it is so hard not to let it rub off on me.

Whenever we go into a cabin, she’ll instantly judge the previous occupants. “What slobs!” “Wow, look at this toilet, what a bunch of pigs.” “This couch is disgusting!” “Oh, that sloppy cleaning job was the Mexicans’ fault.”

Negative comments run out of her mouth like a river, and I just want to scream sometimes. So I tell myself this situation is temporary. I ignore her, and silently chant my new mantra: “freedom from within … freedom from within.” I think it was Deepak that said you can’t truly be happy and free of antagonism, blame and negativity, unless you stop it from within first. And as my friend Coffeesister says “True independence is a state of mind, not of being.” I’m trying my best to be independent of her negativity, and stay silent as we work.

But she can’t stand my silence, it drives her nuts. So she goes on, and on. And in my own head, I go on as well, chanting the freedom mantra to myself. Sometimes it stops my anger toward her, sometimes it doesn’t. Most of the time I go home and bitch about her to my husband, for no more than the five minute time limit I put on myself. But the next day, it starts all over again.

I realize I’m straddling a fine line here. For how do I keep from becoming just as judgmental, self-centered and self-righteous as she is, when I question her character?

The short answer might be simply to not criticize her ways.

But I’m finding it difficult to recognize her negativity for what it is, and refuse to participate in it, without falling into the trap of believing that I’m superior to her.

These are the big questions I ponder while cleaning toilets this summer.

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Ensuring that you get absolutely no work done today, here is the complete list of Blog Share participants:

Vent Vox
Turn On The Stars
Trudie – Life After AC
Swimming With Sharks
Stefanie Says
Shhh! Librarian-In-Training
Sauntering Soul
Sass Attack
Reflections in the Snow Covered Hills
Red Red Whine
Our Simplicity
One New Duck
Oh My Seven
The Occasional Truth
No Lady
Nancy Pearl Wannabe
Muse On Vacation
Messing With Texas
Melliferous Pants
Lizland
Live Work Dream
Just Below 63
Jonniker
Java Literally
Heidikins
Full of Snark
Face Down
Ex Everything
Everything I Like Causes Cancer
Did I Say That Outloud?
The Daily Tannenbaum
The Coconut Diaries
Citystreams
Catheroominations
Bright Yellow World
Breath Smiles Tears
And You Know What Else
Alyndabear
3 Carnations

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 at 9:17 am and is filed under Blogroll, Miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.