I decided to stop wearing the shirt in there, and also, to not call attention to that. It took her over two years to figure out that I'd stopped wearing that shirt, and in the meantime she and other employees decided that there was some kind of running feud with me, and they treated me accordingly.
She seemed happy about my decision to stop wearing that t-shirt, and I gathered that she decided that she no longer had a problem with me. The trouble is, I've decided that I still have a problem with her. I took her newfound niceness as an effort to sweep all of her nastiness under the rug. I went along with it for a couple of years. I didn't see her much.
Here's the thing, in last week's posts I talked about having one of two tough options with women who didn't like me and tried to shit on me: either have them behave in a hateful manner towards me because they tried to shit on me and succeeded, or have them behave in a hateful manner towards me because they tried to shit on me and failed. It's a tricky proposition to learn how to prevent these women from shitting on me in the first place, and often times they don't like me much for winning.
And so it was with this waitress over the two-plus years she tried to shit on me and failed, over, and over, and over again. She didn't like me much at all, until the revelation about how much of a sweetheart I was for not wearing the shirt. That's all great, but I was once again faced with two tough choices: Do I let her sweep all of those bad times she instigated under the rug, or do I speak up and say something.
I don't have much experience with speaking up and saying something, somehow or some way. I did so on this blog, and then last week I went into where she worked just to take everyone's temperature. She didn't want to engage with me, and others waited on me as she went about her business.
That's fine. It's a tough choice I have to make. I have no idea who reads this blog. Her frostiness may have stemmed, instead, from how I rebuffed my former neighbor. That was the gal who had kept me at arm's length the entire time she'd lived next door to me, only to show a newfound friendliness towards me when I ran into her last December at Vulcan Video. I had no idea where this friendliness was coming from. I thought it might have been some kind of a trick, so I didn't ask her out or anything. I only put it together months later that my former neighbor roomed with this waitress' sister while they lived next door to me for a time.
Anyway, it's a tough choice. Do I speak up somehow about my resentment about how she and some of the other employees treated me, or do I just let her get away with murder? The problem with the latter choice, which I've made with other women in other circumstances, is that the shit can really hit the fan that way; an overture to sex that the girl reads as a rape attempt in my truck one night, as an example of the first time this happened, or a crude sexual proposition in a car one night, as another example, or depicting the transgressors as victims of the Whitman massacre in one of my comic books, as yet another example.
Sooo, I"ve learned the hard way that sweeping this shit under the rug and offering up my forgiveness too freely can have bad consequences, so I'm not going to do that again. Not this time, at least. If I go into this person's place of employment, and she continues with her frosty reception, that's fine. I guess the civil rights protest I've talked about regarding her and others will continue. I will be as polite as a customer in her place of work has to be towards her, other employees, and customers. If just leaving her alone is as polite as I can be towards her under these circumstances, so be it. At least I'm calling the shots more with this course of action than with the other course of action.