An Ending... in Everyday Rants...

No, not to me, or to this blog. Unfortunately for you.
I’ve been kinda on the fence about S a lot lately, and been primarily avoiding her. Friday she started getting insisty that I come out with her. My way of being polite was “let’s see if I have energy after work”, and after work I told her I was exhausted. Which really was not a lie. I came in, let the dog out, we came back in, and I unintentionally fell asleep on the couch. I didn’t wake up till I heard a voice that wasn’t the alarm system telling me what door opened saying “Hello??” That more or less jolted me awake unpleasantly. Okay, it was less unpleasant than the dream I was having, but that’s another story.
So at that point, I’m told “it’s just a quick dinner and I need run into WinCo for a couple of pet things.” I grudgingly went along with it.
Dinner was not quick. It was anything but. I rode with her (mistake), so the ride there and all through dinner was about her problems. Mind you, the majority of her problems are all things she’s done to herself against the advice of myself and others. This has become a more constant problem that I’ll get to in a minute. So we finally got done with dinner, and her making mention of me coming down there and bringing Muttley and yaddah yaddah and we continued onto WinCo - where it was not a short in and out.
She himhawed and dragged her ass and continued her line of complaints and subtly badgery (yes, I’m aware that I’ve made up two words in this entry so far, and frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.) about me coming down there. When I say down there, she’s an hour and a half drive. 90% of the time, I don’t feel like driving 5 minutes to the store. She paid, and I quickly bagged everything and put it in the cart, to which she proceeds to double bag everything. Given she’d not asked me to double bag anything, I was at the end of my patience, and I was getting a bit short with her. We get back to my house, I clicked the gate open and she pulls in, parks, and turns the engine off. I asked if she needed to use the bathroom or something, and she replied she was gonna wait for me to get my stuff and the dog and she’d drive me back to her place tonight. As much as I tried to remain calm, I more or less lost my shit at that point. Told her that I wasn’t going down tonight, and if I were, I’d drive myself cause I didn’t want to not have my own car down there. (Yes, I am in all honesty not really the type to go somewhere with someone else and not have my own vehicle to leave if I feel the need to.) But the other end of this is I don’t trust her driving.
She scares the hell out of me half the time when I ride with her. Accelerates hard, brakes hard, brakes late, seems to not pay attention to other drivers around her, and I’m gonna ride an hour and a half on poorly lit, twisty winding back roads after dark!? Me thinks not. Plus me, and dog (who has never gotten carsick with me, but might with her at the wheel.) in a fully packed car? Yeah, no.
So she left, I let the dog out, and I proceeded to have a smoke. I was going to write this that night, but my mind was so frayed, I came in, took a shower, and went to bed.
Oh, but I was keeping M updated as frequently as I could. She found it funny.
So, to that constant problem I mentioned earlier.
S complains a lot. That on its own isn’t that big of an issue. I work with whiners. My issue with it is we used to be really good friends. Best friends, to be honest. Now… Not so much. It’s all about her now. Her problems, her ailments, her issues, her job… yeah, you see where I’m going with this. But if I try to mention anything about something going on with me, bad day, not feeling well, my mind playing up on me, it’s like she tries to one up me on the problem scale, or thinks that her problems are the only ones that matter. Yeah, a lot her her problems do have a physical manifestation and mine don’t, but that doesn’t make one more or less valid than the other. This has been going on for several months, and it’s to the point that I’ve avoided being around her at all costs. Which reminds me, I need to delete her gate and alarm codes. I get that people have problems. We all do to some extent. But I feel like I’m just the punching bag to her, the way for her to feel better about herself. For someone who calls me “friend”, she makes me feel pretty damn unimportant.
So I hit a point where I couldn’t get my mind around how to handle it, and asked M for advice. Basically, she told me to keep my answers to one or two words, and just be bluntly direct. Well, so far her advice works. I’m at the point with S where I’m not really worried if it just ends. I know that’s cold, but I cannot have the negativity in my life anymore. To be honest, she makes me feel the way B did. I’ve described B as an emotional vampire, because she almost literally just sucked the joy out of life, and my energy right along with it, and that’s the way I feel with S now. I’m working on getting myself better, and making my life better, and I don’t think that’s possibly if I’m hanging around S, and being made to feel the way I did this weekend.
It’s funny. M was stagnant in her life, not going anywhere, and just kinda wallowing in her own pain, and S was getting shit done and doing well, and now it’s the other way round.
Crap, I need to get ready for bed. My timing gets all screwed up when I have a long day. Sometimes being a creature of habit is a bad thing.