Diana's Diary

2001-03-09 - 00:36:12

Condamnation?

condamnation (con-dam-na'shen) n. 1. A cross between condemnation and damnation, esp. the state where one is condemned to some kind of damnation.

I dunno if that's a real word or not, but it works for me. I started thinking about it in my seminar on Wednesday. We're studying Henry Fielding, who was really big on benevolence, and somehow, the discussion turned to definitions of success and happiness.

Flashback: June 1997. It's my senior year of high school, and I am the editor of the school paper. Our final issue of the school year is dedicated to the senior class, and we run one of those polls--you know, "Most Likely To Succeed" and all that stuff. When I start counting the ballots from the other honors English class (that is, the one that I was not in, but most of my friends were in), I notice something odd. On a significant portion of the ballots from that class, my name has been written in for "Most Likely To Succeed," but has been scratched out and replaced with the name of a girl who I will call "H.P." ("Hypocrite Princess"--that's one of the nicest names I have for this girl.) Naturally, this made me curious, and so later on I asked one of my friends from that class about it. She told me that the class had sort of been discussing the ballots, and my name came up. (Hey--the AP tests were over and not a lot was going on at that point.) H.P. (who didn't like me) apparently pitched kind of a fit over all of the people who were voting for me, and said something to the effect of, "Yeah, Diana is smart and she works really hard, but do you ever think she'll be happy? I don't, and that's how I define 'success.'" Apparently most of the people in the class agreed with her--not only with her definition of success, but that I would never be happy.

What the hell? Am I that big of a Misery Chick? It's like, all of these people were basically telling me that they don't think that I have the capacity to be happy. Almost like they're condamning me to be unhappy. And that really sucks. H.P. didn't know jack shit about me, other than that she didn't like me, and she certainly didn't know what makes me happy.

The back story with me and H.P.--She was a grade behind me, but at the end of her sophomore year, her mother pulled all sorts of strings (including H.P. getting high school credit for math and language classes taken in junior high--something no one else got) to get H.P. moved up a grade, so we were seniors together. Apparently, that wasn't good enough, because H.P. also wanted to be valedictorian. She wasn't. She claimed that she was automatically discounted from the running because she'd skipped a grade. Maybe that was part of it, but most of it was that she didn't have the grades--she wasn't even in our academic Top Ten. Anyway, H.P. and I had a lot of mutual friends, and most of these friends were incensed at the "unfair" treatment of H.P. I wasn't. I never made any sort of public statement regarding the matter, but H.P. saw me as being "against" her.

Anyway, H.P. had a whole lot of people convinced that she was just the greatest thing in the universe. H.P. happened to be a member of a certain church, and she was trying to convert a bunch of our mutual friends to said church. At least one came very-very close, but changed her mind after she got to college and realized that H.P. was the only reason she planned to convert. H.P.'s whole religious holier-than-thou attitude bugged the hell out of me, because she was treating these people, my friends, like they weren't good enough to really be her friends unless they converted to her religion. Ugh. Complicating matters further was the fact that my mother happened to be of the same religion as H.P.--but she didn't go to church. My father wasn't of that religion, and let's just say that there are some people out there who told my mother that she would go to hell for marrying outside of the church. Lovely, ain't it? Anyway, somehow H.P. found out all of this (I have no idea how), and decided that I was even more hellbound than she had previously thought. She actually sent missionaries to my house. Heh. The poor missionaries came to my house when only my father and I were home, so we just sent them away politely. My mother probably would have let them in.

Let me just say that I have no problem with organized religion per se, nor do I have anything against the religion that H.P. and my mother subscribe to. It's just...I have very little patience for closed-minded people who try to force their beliefs on others.

So, obviously, there was no love lost between H.P. and me. And so she decided that I was not worthy of being happy? Ew! I'll be as happy as I want to be, dammit! What a bitch.

Anyway, I've been thinking about this since definitions of happiness and success were brought up in my seminar. It's old high school bullshit, but dammit, my definition of personal success is mostly based around being happy. And I have every intention of being happy. So take that, H.P!

-Diana, who is listening to Dave Matthews Band on the radio...and that makes her happy!

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2003-12-16 - Ow! My Nose!
2003-12-15 - 'Tis the Season...For Moving
2003-11-17 - Rush, Rush
2003-11-03 - Apartment Hunting Sucks
2003-10-22 - Apparently, "nauseated" is a good look for me.

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