can't take abbagirl down! don't even mess wid'!

it's going to be nice and warm this week. it should top off at 99 degrees fahrenheit by friday before cooling down into the eighties by the weekend.

the price of gasoline has been inching up in my town. i have yet to see regular unleaded hit $ 4.00, but i think it may happen by the end of today or the start of tomorrow. of course, super unleaded has topped the $ 4.00 mark for quite some time.

i have yet to go visit the beehive state this year. i love taking that road trip across the vast desert of nevada. but those trips get fewer and fewer each year as i realize that my emotional attachment to the hive and a lot of people i knew there has waned.

nonetheless, i'm longing for a road-trip there -- not because i want to go there per se, but because i just like taking those kinds of road-trips -- not too long, not too short, but just right. :)

anyhow, guess what: i formally made an enemy at work yesterday.

war has been declared. take cover -- peace time is over!!

it was bound to happen. laotian girl was really starting to bug me, and i was actually starting to bug her.

it's not only a personality conflict -- but a clash of social, cultural, and class values, too.

she is nice and funny -- but all our interactions were underlaid with a weird current. it was not until last week or so that i kinda began understanding why.

jealousy.

i swear i'm not trying to flatter myself. i'm not putting myself up on a pedestal, and i don't think people should kowtow to me.

but the girl has been a bit jealous of me, even before i started working here, and to be honest, i can understand.

no, i swear i'm not flattering myself! just being reasonable.

it all goes back to the ABCD's, first of all (recap: A and B interviewed me, then fought over me, but then i was snatched up by C and D).

it seems rather unprecedented (or at least it seems so, thanks to the smallness of this office) for there to be so much hullabaloo and (polite) in-fighting for a new hiree (moi). so laotian girl was curious about me, and as a result, the office technician showed laotian girl my application for the job and my resume.

confidential documents! i told my mom, who's also a state worker, and she said that was just inappropriate to do. applications contain all sorts of sensitive data, like home addresses, social security numbers, and the like.

it's really no big deal. but the thing is, i wouldn't have told anyone about, you know, the kind of education i've got, the degrees i hold. the people who interviewed me and my bosses know. but i don't go around flashing my degrees.

i came into this job as a rank-and-file employee. in short, i'm no different from anyone else as a rank-and-file employee. a lot of people, in state service in general, don't even have college degrees. even a lot of the higher-up management folks are those who worked straight from high school and slowly climbed their way up, seeking promotion after promotion.

so it really is no b.f.d. what people's education is, how little or how much.

but it's starting to become an issue for me in relations to laotian girl because of stuff that happened last week. then things ended up getting pretty tense and testy yesterday, and if i had to hazard a guess, i'd say it's because the girl is intimidated by me -- because of my education, my looks (i'm not hot -- but i think i'm cuter than she -- and definitely skinnier and healthier-looking ;) ), my superior writing and grammar skills, my better social skills, my lack of ghetto talk, my comparatively higher level of social sophistication, and because i work for the chief and had everyone fighting to have me assigned to their unit.

ya'll know i've got low self-esteem! but if even i can notice that the girl is jealous of me for all these things, you must know i'm not spinning! i'm just calling it like it is!

at the root of it all are the vast array of differences between us -- class, social, cultural, educational all that.

i swear i don't go looking for trouble. maybe it seems like it, but i really don't. and while the girl is born in the same year as me and also the same sign (cancer), that's really where the similarity ends.

there's just such a difference between her values and mine. if anyone tries to say that all asians are the same, i beg to differ -- because she and i are good examples of a counter-argument to that. laos is NOT the same as vietnam!!! if anyone ever tries to say anything of the sort, i'm going to have bust out with a baseball bat and start knocking out knee-caps!

O_O

but . . . i don't want to get into all that. i know i'll come off sounding like a vietsupremacist. ha ha! maybe in another post i should address that issue -- asians taking pride in their own particular cultural heritage and how that often can be manifested into a sense of cultural, um, superiority. . . .

:-T

but for now, suffice to say that, um, at least from my perspective, some of the stereotypes that others have told me about laotians seem to be holding true -- at least in regards to this co-worker of mine. . . .

:-T

or maybe it's just me . . . . but really, it does explain why things seem to have come to a head yesterday.

not that i care. if bitch wants to bring it, she better bring it good and hard. otherwise, i'll just be sitting back and laughing in her face at her pathetic little attempts to top me.

*evil, determined glare*

she's already begun talking shit about me to her b.f.f., that OT. it's pretty obvious.

i said "hi" to the OT when i saw her at the end of yesterday after the laotian girl and i had had the precipitating event that led to the new Cold War. the OT is ghetto, too -- and something i noticed about her, right after i met her, is that she doesn't have that ability to put on social masks. so when i said hi to her, i could see her eyes flit nervously, and she looked everywhere but at me -- just like she did during my first week of work when she didn't know what to make of me. i had thought that she began warming up to me since then because she had stopped flitting her eyes around the more we got to know each other -- but now she's back to being corrupted by the laotian girl.

psh. not that it's a loss to me to lose either of those girl's company. but it is just funny to me that i now have enemies. i rarely ever have enemies. people just tend to like me too much to want to be my enemy, even if i treat 'em badly.

what makes me laugh even more, though, is that even if these two girls work together to try to bring me down, they won't be able to. there's no way. i know exactly how laotian girl thinks -- and i know how she likes to create drama, tattle on other co-workers, and put herself on top. it's pathetic really.

but that's why no pathetic girl like her will ever be able to bring someone like me down.

i ain't no "real" attorney, i ain't makin' bank, i ain't high up on the totem pole -- but what i am is better than that girl in every possible way.

uh-huh. yeah. that's right.

:)