Philothea
Life in the JVC

Sweetie

March 19, 2004
I realize I haven't talked about work much lately. Work is good. I'm in the groove and used to a 40 hour week now, and they haven't been overloading me with late shifts, so I have time to spend with Emily and my community.

We got three new residents, so now all ten rooms are full for the first time since I began. Now the 03 house has two women, which makes Laura happy, and the 01 house has a blind man who smokes, which makes Daniel happy, as he is a blind man who smokes too.

But the third guy has caused me some problems. He just doesn't seem to realize what's appropriate. When I first met him, he kept calling me sweetie, which I didn't like, but figured he didn't mean any harm by it. My boss told him very firmly the first time he did it to her that she would prefer to be called by her name. We have a lot of volunteers from Loyola and Johns Hopkins who come by for a few hours at a time, and he was always calling all the women "Sweetie", telling them they're so pretty, and demanding hugs. On Monday, I told him that he was bothering the volunteer a little bit, and he didn't believe me for one minute. "How could she be bothered by compliments? If she didn't like them, she could have said so," Oh, she was trying, but in that way where she says "Wow, I hardly know you and you're giving me all these compliments."

So I gave up on trying to get him to understand that and told him that I didn't want him calling me Sweetie anymore. He said fine. I realized I didn't like it because it felt humiliating when he called me sweetie and was asking me to make him lunch.

But after that, he gave me the silent treatment for an entire week, no mean feat when I'm there for eight hours. I would ask him what was wrong and still spoke to him, but he didn't say anything. I think he knew he was being ridiculous and had no good reason.

On Wednesday, he apologized to me and said I didn't deserve to be treated like that, and "I'm not the kind of person who does that". Except, he is, isn't he? He also said "I'm a nice person", which I have only known not-nice people to say. Because if someone's really a nice person, he doesn't think about whether he's nice or not, because he's thinking about other people.

Now he's calling me sweetie again, but he's saying it quickly so I can never quite catch him. Sigh. It's so silly, but I feel like I can't back down because feminist principles are involved. And just common respect.

I sent out my application for next year today. I'm a little worried because the priority deadline was March 1st, but Jon said he sent his re-application out on April 6th and they accepted him, so I hope they give me some leeway because I'll be a second year volunteer.

2:24 p.m.
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