Is ’schizo’ an acceptable Scrabble word?
I’m going to pretend it hasn’t been three weeks since my last post. There. That was easy!
I’m writing because something happened recently that I’m still trying to wrap my mind around. Saturday night I went out to a casual party - a Scrabble party to be exact. When I got there, the host said that there was going to be music later on - two friends were going to play for us. I said, “Great.” The host knows I also play and asked me if I would tune a guitar she had lying around. I said okay and did it, perfectly comfortable to just listen and not be asked to play.
Well the scrabble games got underway and the goddess of good letters blessed me and I won the game. There were several other tables going, and after they finished, the musicians came out, sat on the couch and played a couple of songs.
Then one of the songwriters asked me to play a song. ::Gulp:: It had been years since I played in public, but I screwed up the courage and did it. I seemed to get quite a nice response, and they asked me to play another one. So I did. They wanted me to play another, but I flipped it back to the duo, and they sang another. We took a few more turns each, and then the evening ended. It felt so great, getting such lovely praise from people for my music. It had been a long time.
The next day, the host posted a note on the email list we’re all on, thanking the duo for sharing their music, how wonderful they were, such evocative harmonies, they’re ones to watch for, blah blah blah. She then listed the winners of the scrabble games and then the attendees, and of course I was on both lists. However, she said nothing about my music.
Two minutes later, I got a private email from her apologizing for this, saying, “If you want me to write an addendum, I will.”
It is this sentence that has sent a knife straight into my gut and left me in a tizzy the last few days. Why didn’t she just post a note to the list apologizing for forgetting me, that I also played? And if she felt she had to describe me, that I “didn’t suck?”
But she didn’t. She remembered I was there, she remembered I had won one of the scrabble games, but she didn’t remember I had shared some of my original songs with everyone.
By saying, “If you want me to, I will,” she put me in a very awkward position. If I said, “Yes, I would like you to post something,” then I put myself in the begging position, having to ask for what should have been unsolicited PR, or at least saying, “Yes I do not want you to discount me.” And if I say, “Nah, don’t bother,” then I discount myself.
In her passivity, she was asking if it was okay for her to forget me. She was asking to be absolved for not writing about/not caring for my music by making it seem like it was an oversight.
Ew.
To top it off, she did post an “addendum,” saying that she forgot to mention me, that I played ‘quite’ beautifully (why did she insert ‘quite’? I’ll never know.) and thanked me for alerting her of the oversight.
As if.
Of course, no one else would know of this drama just from reading these posts. I alone am the sole beneficiary of this woman’s schisms. I am trying to let it go. Lord knows I would love to send her an email complete with the dagger she shot my way. However, I am trying to give her the benefit of the doubt, which is not an easy task. Imagining her with a DSM-IV diagnosis helps.
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