I need an outlet

And here it is, in the blog that I haven't posted to in over two years.

But I just have to say how incredibly proud I am of some of the things I said tonight in a situation where I would have previously acted completely opposite. Here's the interesting thing: I live with three other 20-somethings, the oldest of which is 29, and in my opinion, entirely too old to be living with roommates and spending hours a day playing war video games (that's just my opinion though). I mean, I hope in four years I'm stable enough to at least have my own place. Anyway, said roomie said he would mow the lawn this last weekend. And he did. But only the front lawn and the strip by our front sidewalk. He then wrote on our community whiteboard, asking if someone else would please do the back yard. OK, to clarify, the yard itself is not very big at all, and mowing the back part as well would only have taken an extra ten minutes. Before this, my roommate Molly and I had each borne the burden of taking care of the yard, each of us mowing the lawn multiple times, me getting my dad to donate his old mower since the one our landlord had for us was broken...

So he writes this note, asking if someone would do the back lawn. And I like being outside and keeping the yard nice, so the morning after said note, I went ahead and mowed it. No big deal, but I had previously had a HUGE problem with passive aggressive notes written on this board by said roomie, which happened WAY too often. So Molly comes home, shocked that I actually mowed the yard instead of saying something to Lee, and she confronts him about it, asking him why he couldn't just finish the job. He acted like there was no problem... I pointed out the fact that last time I mowed the lawn I mowed the whole thing... And that was the last word I had in the conversation.

Long story short, on the way home from trivia tonight, Molly was still visibly and verbally upset about the whole situation and I said to her something to the effect of, "Ya know what? We can't control how people have grown up, how many siblings they've had, what kind of financial situation their family was in and what they expect of other people in their life. All we can do is live up to our own standards of what it means to us to be a good, respectable person and be glad that we're not as oblivious to other people's feelings as people like Lee are."

And I mean that too. Recently I've really grabbed onto the adage that you should "pick your battles." Some people are beyond convincing. Actually a lot of people are. And the sooner you accept that with those people, the more likely you are to avoid unnecessary stress. If you say to yourself, "Hey, that's a dick move but you know what? I'm OK with picking up the slack to avoid the potential hurtfulness it will bring me if I think about it too much."

I guess moral of this jumbled, not very well written story is that you just gotta hold yourself to your own standards. If there are people out there who don't value everyone's feelings as much as you do, then how sad for them, right? You will live a more fulfilled life having really tried to make others happy and be a generous person without expecting anything in return. I really believe that.