i have become a complete recluse. i got two texts today. one from coleman asking where the hell i was and one from heather wanting to say that she hopes i am well. where the hell was i last week? i have watched so much crap tv. thats where i have been. in front of my tv stuffing my big fat face. i guess i am just not feeling motivated to do anything. im stressed (that word is way overused) about getting a new job. i feel kinda disconnected too. im just not doing what im supposed to be doing and i have no idea what the hell that is. everyday i change my mind. today on the train home i was thinking about keith, a man who comes into work who fell out of a tree when he was young and has severe brain damage. he calls me Foul Dog Mom because addie eats her own shit and farts all the time. i love keith. he hugs me when he sees me and when he leaves and he says "love..you....love..you....love...you...." i give him shit all the time. he has this three-wheel bike and it has pictures of jesus all over it and verses, so pretty much everyone in wheaton knows who he is. today i told him if i was ever driving hed have to watch out cause id run him over. he started laughing and told me id have to catch him first. he also told me that my mint hot chocolate that i made for him tasted like cowlacktaid (or however you spell it). so anyway i was thinking maybe i should work with adults who have brain damage or who are handicapped in some way. this job is going nowhere and i am going nowhere in it. i feel so dissatisfied and too lazy to even do anything about it. but i am looking everyday. thats all i can do pretty much. i fucking hate how society tells us we have to be happy! what the hell?! who says we have to be "happy?" and what the hell is that anyway? its fake. who do you know who is happy? my boobins are about to freeze off in here so bye.
posted by QueenAtotheM @ 10:55 PM
8 comments
8 Comments:
I have a hard time with Keith. I don't know how to respond to him. I have heard the same lines for about 5 years now and frankly, I get annoyed. I would ignore any other complete stranger who attempted to talk to me so many times.
Should I pretend to be interested in the same stories and lines? Should I pretend that I'm not annoyed that even though he feels like he can hijack my time and attention when he can't remember my name or who I am? Should I just change my attitude so that I make myself appreciate him and then I don't have to just pretend anymore? Should I give him license to act any way he wants to around me just because he's handicapped?
I do understand that his handicap limits him somewhat, but if no one tells him he's making them uncomfortable by the way he's acting, he'll continue to act the way he does.
I feel like I'm fairly gracious to most people. I actually appreciate and enjoy them without having pretending to be interested. But I have a hard time with Keith. And that makes me feel guilty.
I advise to hug Keith with caution.
He knows he isn't supposed to hug women because a lot of women have a problem with it and have even threatened sexual harrassment. When women make exceptions to that rule and give him a bear hug, he thinks it is ok to hug everyone.
And that, unfortunately, is not the case. I don't think he can make distinctions between who is ok to hug and who is not, and I would be a shame for him to get in trouble.
This is just as an fyi... the ONE thing you don't want his caretaker coming into Caribou and giving you the same lecture he gave Starbucks a few years back
*it would be a shame for him to get in trouble
(correcting my typo)
Also Andie, I'm going on a tirade here.
A: You're right in that people need to tell Keith if he's making them uncomfortable. Sometimes he will understand, sometimes he won't.. He's like a 5 year old, so take it with a grain of salt. Keith understands right and wrong, but he may not be able to distinguish why something is so particularly right or wrong.
NOW......
B) Keith *is* handicapped and whether you give him license or not, he is still going to have the mental capacity of a 5 year old-- he can't change that.
This is a telling sign for you. If you get annoyed and diappreciative of someone who acts like a 5 year old, you should never have children, period.
When Keith first hugged me he asked if it was ok to hug me. I told him it was, and for the most part, unless I'm crabby, it is still ok. If I feel like it's creepy I won't hug him anymore. From what I know from Keith all he wants is to love on people and talk to people. You're right, his social skills suck ass but I think he does ok for the most part with them. LIke I will just walk away from him sometimes when I'm working and he knows to back off. He also knows to stop talking to me when people come into the line.
It's my opinion he wants to make you laugh at something he personally thinks is funny so that's why he tells the same story. If people just nod and smile at him he probably won't remember. I dunno tho. Sandra was wondering to me the other day whether or not Keith turns people off to Caribou and affects our business. Personally, I don't really give a shit. He's in there at most 2 hours a day and all he wants to do is talk to people.
What did his case worker say to Starbucks by the way?
HAHAHAHAHAHA! Shut the hell up, Steve! Everyone knows you're impitent anyway.
In seriousness, my mom said the other night that you can judge a society based on how it treats its weakest members. I thought that was interesting and true. I call the crazy homeless lady Scary Terri. I'd like to ignore her or push her down.
I can't rememebr what exactly Keith's caretaker said. It was to the effect of "Do not touch him because we don't want to give him the wrong idea about interaction with women".
Anyway, Sonda is partially right. I think the 'bucks actually told Keith to stop coming in because he was annoying their customers. Just like they told the PADS to stop coming in because their smell annoyed the customers.
I actually told Keith to come in more as a deterrent to bratty blended beverage tweens.
Dealing with a grown handicapped man and a 5 year old child are completely different.
The first difference here is power - physical power. A child may have the same mental capacity and the same capacity for moral understanding as a grown handicapped person, but if they decide to hurt you, the most they can do is hit or kick you, maybe bite you. They can't hold you down. They can't choke you. They can't rape you.
The second difference here is sex drive. Even though a person has the mental capacity of a child, they may have the sex drive of an adult male. Sex drive comes from hormones. Just because a person does not understand what their sex drive is or how to sexually express himself does not mean his sex drive is any weaker. If anything, it is more precarious because the person does not have an understanding of what the desire is or what an appropriate form of expressing the desire is.
One other thing that does not have anything to do with the handicapped person's personality or traits, but still affects my ability to be comfortable with Keith is lack of prior experience in interacting with handicapped people. Contrary to popular belief, I am not a social genius. I know. It's shocking. I'm not outgoing. *Gasp* Is it possible, then, that I would feel uncomfortable in a new type of social interaction? And don’t tell me that it’s not any different from interacting with a child. It is different.
The things that annoy me are not completely relating to his handicap. For example:
#1: He is loud. He is VERY loud. I don’t like shouting and I don’t like being shouted at – especially not, “YOU, HEY YOU! HEY YOU! HEY! HEY!”
#2: He attempts to regulate my lunch hours. He asked me one day how long I get for lunch. I told him I got one hour. He asked me how long it takes for me to get to Caribou from work at lunch time. I told him about ten minutes. So, he has deducted twenty minutes from my one hour lunch. And forty minutes after I get to Caribou at lunch time, he tells me I have to leave. I tell him that I can handle it myself. He tells me I will get in trouble. Then he keeps telling me I need to leave until I leave. I didn’t tell him it takes me five minutes to get there because I didn’t want him coming to my work or knowing where I work.
#3: He focuses his attention mainly on girls. You show me any man who is not handicapped who goes around and talks to all the women and girls in a coffee shop and hugs them and winks at them and I will show you one man who is kicked out by the Wheaton police and asked never to return. Now, using the five-year-old comparison: you show me one five-year-old who talks to every single woman in a coffee shop and tells them what to do and demands their attention, and I will show you one five-year-old who is sitting on a chair on time out. I don’t know what makes him do this, but I suspect that it has something to do with the sex drive I mentioned earlier. I don’t think that he thinks consciously that he wants to have sex with all these women, but somewhere underneath sex drive plays into things. That does make me uncomfortable. Just like a man coming up to me in a bar makes me uncomfortable. Or a man trying to flirt with me anywhere makes me uncomfortable. Neither of you ladies seem to have any inhibitions about being cold to men in bars. It’s a little bit the same for me with Keith. But I feel like I have a larger burden of responsibility in my relationship with Keith because of his mental abilities. I feel like I need to try to read what he is thinking and respond accordingly – not only with what is good for me but what I think is good for him.
Now, I do understand that Keith is handicapped whether I give him license or not, but I do not have to, nor should I, give him license to treat me however he wants. Being purely selfish, it is not good for me to let someone barrel over my boundaries. And taking his wellbeing into consideration, it would not be good for me to let him trample my boundaries because it teaches him that something is ok that is not. He doesn’t have parents to guide him, and he has limited mental capabilities, so if people let him do whatever the hell he wants, he won’t learn proper social behavior. If he learns what makes people uncomfortable, then he can avoid doing those things. And then his interactions with people will be because the people genuinely want to interact with him, not because he has demanded their attention by being loud and standing very close and touching them.
So, an appropriate replacement for your VERY inappropriate comment about me not being fit to be a mother, HEATHER, would be “This is a very telling sign for you. If you get annoyed and depreciative of a person with the sex drive and physical size and strength of a grown man but the intellect and moral understanding of a five year old, you should never work in a mental hospital or as a social worker for handicapped people, period.”
I know I am being a little bit harsh, but that is what I think and feel. If I don't ever expose that, then I won't ever be able to discern what of what I think is right and what is really just having a bad attitude.
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