Nicknames

Some nicknames I don't mind, but sometimes they go just a little too far. Last night one of my roommates was talking to either her mother or her boyfriend [she talked to both] and her phone had just cut off the conversation again. She decided to inquire about my well-being, asking, "Whatcha doin', baby?" I replied that I was cleaning [putting clothes away]. She was asking because I had taken to one of my quiet spells again, and when I do that I'm fairly sure that she thinks that I am mad at her [which is usually the case, but that isn't the point].

At that moment when she called me baby, however, I paused and thought about whether she had meant something deeper than just referring to me by a pet name. I wondered if her subconscious was peeking through. I see her as a very demeaning individual. [Side note: 'demeaning' is from the Latin minare, meaning 'to drive animals by threatening cries.'] Oftentimes the things she says make her sound like she thinks that she is older and knows better than the rest of us. It's like she's trying to be motherly in a snide sort of way; she acts superior to all of us much of the time. It bothers me.

At any rate, I let it go [after writing a bit about it on a post-it so that I could write about it today] and returned to my cleaning. A few minutes later, she was talking to her boyfriend. He had just told her something or other that he had done, and she called him a good boy. I felt that this reinforced my theory, and then I began to wonder what in her childhood had turned her into this mean-spirited and self-centered person. It may be the fact that she's the oldest child of three, but then I didn't really turn out that way. It may be that she moved around a lot during her childhood, which I did not do. I can't imagine having to try to make new friends every few years. [She tells stories of Texas, too, about them making fun of the way she pronounces the word 'aunt' as 'on-t' instead of 'ant' ... she says they put it up to snobbery, but she told them that she was from Minnesota and that that's how they said it.]

And that's what I have to say about that.