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Do you ever just not like someone? For no good reason?

I have this problem with some people. I have no idea what it is that causes it, but there are some people that I just can't stand. They've never done anything to me. They don't treat me badly. My friends like them just fine. I couldn't think of good enough reason not to accept a friend request from them. And yet, pretty much from the second I meet them, I feel an instant, visceral dislike. Maybe it's just bad chemistry, maybe it's the alignment of the stars, or maybe I'm just crazy, but every time such individuals are around, I end up locked in an epic battle with myself. On the one hand, I feel like a cat who's been rubbed the wrong way. All my emotional fur is standing on end, crackling with static-y hatred. On the other hand, society frowns on humans taking random swipes at people just because you feel prickly. So, I wind up caught somewhere between displaying active dislike and active friendliness. This look is also known as "resentful apathy." I call this special attitude the Margot Tenenbaum:

Needless to say, this completely fails to conceal my rampant dislike. I end up feeling like a huge bitch, because I can't feign interest in someone I find so completely distasteful, in addition to feeling the aforementioned static-y hatred.

Through intense reflection (generally done while staring at a hated acquaintance with the closest thing to a blank look I can engineer), I've deduced that there are three major categories of these auto-hated people:

1) Reminders

These are the people that, through no fault of their own, probably remind me of someone else who I disliked, usually for good reason. I've had a couple of classmates who instantly remind me of H, my ex-best friend, and I can never really like them once I figure out why they seem familiar. This also applies to people who remind me of myself at my most irritating ages. There's nothing worse than being forced to confront both an unpleasant person and a reminder that you used to be just like that person.

2) Bitches

I'm sorry, okay, but some people don't deserve for me to like them. With these, it's really a chicken or egg kind of thing. They're rude to me, I'm rude to them, they're rude to me, and so on and so on...but is it because they know I don't like them? Or do I not like them because they were bitchy because they didn't like me? Fortunately, this group is the least guilt-inducing, because generally at least some of my friends also aren't so fond of them.

3) Puppy people

Sadly, this is by far the largest group, and yet also the group that I don't have a logical explanation for. These people have done nothing to me. They're not rude. They don't remind me of anyone I hate. Regardless, they bug the crap out of me. I call them puppy people because they act just like puppies - eager to please, a little slow, and blissfully unaware of any dislike directed at them. The Margot Tenenbaum goes right over their over-friendly heads. Some are too loud, some are too quiet. Some laugh too much, some are too self-conscious. Most are really bad at reading social cues. And they all seem to really, really like me. I can't be mean to them to make them go away. I would get this:

And so I sit there, thinking, "Go away. Goawaygoawaygoaway. Go away. Go away. Don't you see the Margot? WHY WON'T YOU LEAVE ME ALONE I HATE YOU."

Once they finally slink off, I'm left wondering what the hell just happened in my brain.

Twitter

So, I got a Twitter account about a month ago in order to follow feministhulk, who I read about somewhere on the internet during my endless hours on the internet. I signed up, clicked follow, and told myself that that would be all - I would not tweet. Ever. But then Trueblood told me (on Facebook) that if I tweeted their stupid message about whatever, I would get to see an Exclusive Scene from the New Season (which premieres Sunday! so excited!). So I did. But! I said, that is all. No more tweeting. We are done.

And then my friends at work starting asking me if I had a twitter. "Yes," I'd say, "but I only got it to follow feministhulk." Totally justified, I'd think smugly. They would then urge me to actually, you know, use it. Finally, I broke down. (And when I say broke down, I mean I wanted to be included in all this @whoever in-joke stuff that was going on around me.) I logged in, changed my username from my actual name to a fake name, and randomly tweeted an excerpt from a story I'd told my friends about T-rex. (It involved how after a fourth night in a row of pacing, I discovered an Eastie Beastie (don't click the links if you hate bizarre awful centipede creatures straight from Satan's nightmares) in my room, freaked out, killed it, and then sort of...left it in front of T-rex's door in a sleep-deprived act of revenge.)

From that point, I sort of threw myself into the whole endeavor. I changed my background to a picture I selected. (Cookies, obviously.) I changed the colors of the fonts and boxes. I found every member of the Glee and Community casts and am now "following" them. I found B and now we follow each other, which seems like a dog chasing its own tale, but whatever.

But now I'm sort of floundering. There is too much internet for me. Twitter asked me to list my "website, or blog." Wait, I thought. Should I list this blog? It is my blog, but... Then, I had a link I wanted to post somewhere. But suddenly, I had an overabundance of places to post it. When is it appropriate to tweet vs. facebook something? Can I do both? Is that redundant? Should I tell my Twitter about my blog? Should I tell my blog about Twitter?

I'm still not sure, but I have come to some semi-conclusions. I won't list my blog on any of my public profiles, for now. However, I will list my Twitter on my blog, in case anyone is interested, since there is no more information about me there then there is on here. I'm pepperpentangle, and if anyone is on Twitter, we should follow each other! It will be like the blind leading the blind! Doesn't that sound fun?

What is it with me and the T-Rex?

I'm staying at Bryn Mawr for the summer, as you may know, and for the past week my room in the summer housing dorm has been just fine. It's big and unusually cool considering the temperature outside, but most of all, it's quiet. Or at least it was. However, I acquired a new neighbor over the weekend, and I can only conclude that one of her parents is a T-Rex. No, seriously. I have never heard anyone with a heavier step in my life. And I've seen her. She's tiny. She must be the densest person ever. I should call the record books.

Now, let me explain. She appears to be a pacer. I can hear her at all hours, pacing along the wall that our rooms share. She thunders five steps towards the door, then four steps back. Five steps to the wall, four steps back. Thunkthunkthunkthunkthunk pause thunkthunkthunkthunk. Over and over and over, interrupted occasionally by a drawer opening and closing or her throwing things on the floor. (I don't know why it takes her more steps to walk in one direction than the other. I really don't.) This wouldn't be so bad if not for the aforementioned improbable density. She walks so hard that it rattles my chair. Literally. You know that scene in Jurassic Park, when you can tell the giant T-Rex is coming because the water in the cups starts shaking? My cups of water do that. I'm not even joking. And her steps actually sound like the T-Rex - more boom than thunk, really. Over and over and fucking over. And I have no idea how she manages to be so loud. I stood in my room and tried to recreate the noises she makes. It required a weird jump-step-stomp to make quite the same echoing bang, and I could only keep it up for a couple of strides. What is she made out of?

But, I thought, how bad is it, really? She seems to stop around midnight to go to sleep, and start up again around 8 or 8:30, usually waking up me up by slamming her door and stomping down the hall to the bathroom. But that's 8 hours of sleep for me. Sure, I would prefer more, but it's not going to kill me. And she leaves for work around 9 a.m., and I don't come back from work until 9 p.m., so I decided to just deal with it: clamp my headphones over my ears and ignore her. It seemed too awkward to go knock on her door and be like, "Hi, I'm your neighbor, and I was just wondering - do you think you could walk differently? I don't know what exactly you're doing, but it's fucking loud and if you don't stop I think I'm going to end up sleeping outside just to get away from you. Thanks!"

And then. I was woken this morning at 3:25 (let me repeat: 3:25 IN THE FUCKING MORNING) because my bed was shaking. Well, not really shaking. More rattling every other second. As I woke, my first thought was, of course, "Shit, it's a T-Rex! Or an earthquake!" Alas, it was just my neighbor. She was up and pacing. AT 3:25 IN THE FUCKING MORNING. I tried to ignore it and go back to sleep. But the boomboomboomboomboom pause boomboomboomboom was impossible to ignore. Finally, at 3:45, I got up and went to ask her to cut it the fuck out. Politely. I stood in front of my door inside my room, tracking her movements back and forth as I tried to compose a polite way to ask that she stop moving around. "Hi, I'm your neighbor next door. I know it's late," (EARLY!) "but I couldn't help but hear your movements in your room. Do you think you could quiet down, a little? I need some sleep. I'm really sorry. I don't really mind during the day," (you weird T-Rex-human hybrid) "but your steps seem really loud and it's so early and I just want to sleep." I am not very coherent that early in the morning.

So, I finally made it to the hallway. I really creepily looked under her door to see if her light was on to make really sure that she was the one doing this before I knocked on her door at 3:45 in the morning. It was. So I knocked lightly but firmly, four times. There was no answer. I waited for about 15 seconds, which is much longer than you think, and then knocked again, five times this time, and a little louder. Again, no answer. "Hello?" I stage-whispered. Nothing. I had no idea what to do. I stood there awkwardly for another minute, then went back to my room, crestfallen. I really psyched myself out for that, and then, nothing.

Strangely, when I got back in I realized she had stopped. I stood there for a couple of minutes to make sure it wasn't a fluke, but though I could hear rustles from over next door, (seriously, what are the walls made of here? Cardboard?) there was no more T-Rex stomping. So, I went back to bed.

This makes me wonder - did she hear me knocking? And ignore me out of terror/knowledge of her ridiculous stride, but quiet down because she knew why I was knocking? She was definitely still up and moving, but not nearly as loudly. And, what do I do for the rest of the summer? I'm here until August - do I just go and knock on her door when she's bothering me at ridiculous hours, and hope she never answers but is nonetheless quiet? Is it ever okay to bang on the wall to try and get her to stop? She might know that I'm irritated, or she might think that I'm hanging a poster or killing a spider or just being a bitch. What do I do?

Hola

Hi loyal blog readers (cause if you're reading this at this point, you must be loyal). Finals are going alright for me - only one paper left. However, the biggest obstacle currently in my way is moving. I have to pack up my room, separate what I need for the summer from I really don't need from what I want but don't need, move all the stuff I need to Brecon, and help my roommate move the rest, plus her stuff and B's stuff, to storage. I always forget until finals start that I will be completely and totally sore from head to toe by the time moving out is over. I get fixated on school work and forget the physical work of stuffing all my belongings into boxes, carrying those boxes down flights of stairs, shoving them into a 2-door compact, wrestling them out of a 2-door compact, and pulling them into a 5x10 room.Ugh. I will be more interesting later, but I'm at work and feel conspicuous when I blog at the desk.

Finals So Far

Thus far, I've managed to:

- Finally e-mail one of my professors about my thesis idea to find out if it's viable. Fingers crossed, everyone. Hopefully this blog doesn't turn into the thesis version of my old one when I was a applying for colleges - a constantly shifting list of which ones I would be or was considering applying to.

- Make a Done is Good list.

- Buy a 600 page book I desperately want to read but really shouldn't until it's all over.

- Inherit a hot plate, cooking pot, blender, knife, cutting board, and many spices from a senior as May Day gifts. Also, a set of bangles that has been passed down before, and crayons that are for toddlers to use in the shower. Yeah, I don't know about those either.

- Sob my heart out on May Day. I know that this doesn't count as finals, but seriously. It's like in order to answer Haverfest Bryn Mawr decided to follow May Day with Sob Fest at the end of step sing.

- Get tickets to see the midnight premiere of Iron Man 2 with my friends.

- Make this awesome background for motivation:

- Make a list of the nonproductive things I've done so far in order to make myself feel better about my lack of real progress.