phlebotomy.

If only Beth hadn't gotten fired, I never would have had to be her friend.

Beth is annoying and has low self-esteem. I can't tell which symptom caused the other, but in either case, I don't enjoy her company. She sits next to me in psychology class. She is a phlebotomist, which makes her sound like she should be really cool and interesting, but, alas, she is not. She tells very long stories in a meandering and half-stuttering style, and once you get to the end of the story, you find it wasn't even worth it.

We talk about our feelings a lot in that class. One day, Beth made some mention of how she'd had a really terrible day. I sit right next to the girl, I'm not without feeling, so I sighed inwardly, prepared myself, and asked her what happened. She told me she had gotten fired. I've been fired before, and it's one of the worst feelings in the world, or at least one of the worst that I've ever felt. Again, I am a nice girl, or at least I try very hard to be friendly to my fellow man, even if I do only cancel out my good deeds by blogging about how I really feel later. So I played the sympathetic friend while Beth told me about her career trauma.

Man, that was a long story.

Because of this, I became Beth's friend. No longer just a nearby classmate, we were supposed to fall into natural conversation at the beginning of each class, and I was expected to ask about her life. Which would be fine, except for the fact that she answers.

What I also discovered is that Beth is the type of girl who likes to peek at the papers of others. She doesn't exactly cheat, because she doesn't look at my answers when we're turning something in. She looks when we're just filling something out to discuss later. She apparently does not have enough confidence in herself to trust her own answers or to come up with something interesting to say on her own. Upon discovering this, my first impulse was to start being very protective of my paper. But then I just felt sad for her, because she knew she wasn't interesting.

One class, we took a break from talking about our feelings to take a quiz to determine if we were Type A or Type B personalities. Frankly, I was surprised that I only scored 9 out of possible 25 on the Type A scale. Any quiz that doesn't mark me as clear Type A is obviously faulty. One of the questions that added to my Type A score was the following:

Do you often feel impatient and restless with people who speak slowly or are slow to get to the point?

I checked a big fat "yes" on that one. Later that very class, Beth told a story to the entire class that made me want to cut her off, finish her sentences, prompt her with the words she seemed to be struggling to find. I may have developed a noticeable eye twitch. For some reason, it was even worse listening to her talk to the whole class, as if I thought they all blamed me for the fact that the girl next to me was talking at such length. The question from the quiz kept echoing in my mind, keeping me silent, reminding me that the fact that I was so restless was really my own issue.

Look, I do feel bad for feeling so irritated by Beth's very presence. I told you how nice I was to her, how I patiently and sympathetically listen to her problems week after week. I know that she is a nice enough person just trying to get by without the gift of gab. I need to not hurt her already-damaged self-image. I am trying, and it's a struggle, which means it's probably good for me in the long run, personal growth, blah blah blah. As long as she doesn't read this blog, she has no idea that she drives me nuts. And if she does read this, well, I was just talking about some other phlebotomist.