I had to take a day to calm down before writing this post. Reason being, I tend to get quite passionate (read: self-righteously pissed) when people engage in behavior I find ridiculous.  Especially when it’s behavior I engage in/have ever engaged in/am prone to.  It’s called hypocrisy, people.  And if it were a paid profession, I would be eating pasta at Babbo tonight rather than takeout sushi on a friend’s couch.

And if passive aggression were a sport, my family would be overqualified to play it in the Olympics because we have taken it way beyond the amateur level.  Which is why I can recognize (and, apparently, condemn) it so quickly.  Which is why, when I walked into work yesterday and was greeted with it, my day went to hell in a handbasket.  That’s just how well I rise above my circumstances.

Here’s the deal: I hate Fridays.  This should not be so.  Fridays should be a blissful herald of the weekend and its non-work joys.  But there are two reasons for me to hate Fridays: one, I often work on Saturdays.  And if I don’t work, it’s because I don’t have patients, and I don’t get paid.  So…lose/lose.  Reason two: I work at NYU on Fridays, and I work with someone who seems to feel that when I am there, she can shift all her responsibility on me and disappear for long stretches.  At the beginning, I would grin and bear it.  That worked for about five minutes.  Then I got angry.  So in true family tradition, I dealt with it by disappearing on her.  Letting her charts pile up while I checked my email in a back room.  Letting the receptionist call her over the intercom rather than going to confront her myself.  And the thing is, it worked. A little.  But not completely, and it didn’t do anything to take the edge off my rising blood pressure.  I just got angrier.

SO.  This Friday was bound to be especially heinous because not only did I have my buddy to contend with as usual, but our department was being moved for the day to a different clinic.  Why, you ask?  Was it for a legitimate reason, like construction or lack of heat or dragons running rampant on our floor?  NOPE!  We were moved to another floor, an entirely unfamiliar-to-us, already partially occupied and therefore now extremely crowded, not-stocked-for-kids’-needs floor because an ABC news crew was coming to do a story on pediatric dentistry and The Powers That Be decided that our floor was not as pretty as the fourth floor.  That it wouldn’t look as good on camera.  For a two-minute spot that hardly anyone will watch anyway.

I had a conflict with this decision on the basis of principle, you see.  And, maybe just a little bit, on the basis of inconvenience. But mostly principle.

So I showed up to the fourth floor with coffee in hand, dreading what awaited me and what did not (a back room where I could escape to check my email).  And, to get back to the passive aggression, I looked around for my coworkers when a man unfamiliar to me intoned loudly to the woman next to him, “She must be pediatric faculty.”  I turned and smiled before he continued, “Because she clearly doesn’t know that we don’t carry coffee around this clinic.”

Two responses raged within me.  Shame, the reflexive reaction engendered by any displeasure expressed by any authority figure, pseudo- or otherwise, since I was a little girl.  And, well, rage, self-righteous and fiery to match my hair, causing me to burn hotter than the coffee I was holding.  Outwardly, I struck a compromise: I gave a two-second dead stare to Professor P/A, turned on my heel, and walked right out of that clinic.  And to the elevators.  And to the back room, where I resumed my fuming and checked my email.  And reminded myself, for the millionth time in my adult life, that living for others’ approval, or being ashamed when I don’t get it, is the following: stupid, inconsistent with what The One has done for me, and a total waste of time.

Thirty minutes later I headed back downstairs and watched the fanfare of fakery that was taking place.  Cameras, photographers, members of the board of the American Dental Association, balloons, some creepy plush life-sized bobcat (what the hell does that have to do with dentistry?), plastered smiles on faces and voices raised higher in pitch and decibel than I had ever heard them from their owners.  I watched it all and I felt…exhausted. And annoyed, to be sure.  Not to mention slightly nauseous.  All this effort expended to pretend to be what we weren’t on any other day, in a place we weren’t on any other day.  A big pile of steaming bullshit, built to win the approval of strangers.  Ugh.  I hate this kind of stuff.  It’s why I learned never to trust first dates, job interviews, or public appearances by actors and politicians (unless the appearance is a cameo on Cops). If turd-polishing were a pageant category, The Powers that Be would now be known collectively as Miss America.

I left that afternoon thinking about the people in my life for whom I don’t have to fake it.  I thanked God for them, then I gave him a Special Bonus Prayer of Thanks that I am now one of them.