Tuesday, 14^th June 2005 | 10:44 AM
Two hours into work and it already sucks

My friend and I were in a food court yesterday, and she was waiting for me at the table while I went to order my food. I came back and she was seething. I thought she'd done something wrong. As it turned out she was slowly getting more and more angry listening to two guys beside us whom I'd easily guess to be American, but to be fair the were simply speaking in an undistiguinshable North American accent. As we ate I hadn't heard anything that I figured would incest my friend as much as she'd been. One of the guys were working with a church of some kind, and his job basically was to travel here and there to.. "convert people". I swear, that was what he said, and I heard. All that grated on me was how they spoke, you know, the whole 'everyone is beneath them' attitude and everyone other than them is an idiot who doesn't know better.

Basically, the infamous American foolish and offensive attitude that one encounters worldwide, unfortunately.

After we left the food-court, my friend could barely control her annoyance. This is typical of her and her type-A personality. But apparently while I was away from our table, ordering my food, the two guys had been talking. One of the guys had said to the other, of how the people in Saudi Arabia were basically poor nomads until they discovered oil. And they had done nothing with them, until the Americans came and helped to build the infrastructure and everything so that the Saudis can benefit from the oil. Hearing this, I just said retorted cynically, "...and we just know that the Americans did that out of the goodness of their pure hearts." My friend was incensed enough to go back down to the food court to put that point across to those two guys, but I stopped her. It was my usual natural hate of confrontation stopping her, but she said something that silenced me, "you know, if they had every right to say what they said, we have every right to say what we have to say."

In the end we didn't go. Curse my cowardice. I wonder if an argument to set our points straight will outweigh the futility of arguing against two guys who were, basically, rednecks.

Sometimes I sympathise with Americans and with the seeming wave of dislike around the world against them. Sometimes I wonder if their outright self-confidence is often mistaken as arrogance around the world. And then I come across obnoxious Americans who annoy me so much and make me wonder if it's not taught to young American children how they should or should not behave when they are in other's homes?

In other news, I was very much hoping that I could leave the office on time today. Considering I'm really trying to clear my desk today because it's really driving me crazy, I think that's the only way for me to accomplish all. By working late. As sick as I am of that.

I forgot to mention here the catastrophic experience I had with my French exams last week. I think I did very badly in oral, because I was so nervous (typical me at oral) that I couldn't lay out my thoughts properly and kept tripping over them and also over my words. I couldn't lay out my points and arguments as my teacher taught me to, and so I'm so disappointed with myself. To make it worse, a classmate of mine who was preparing for her oral in the same room as I was taking my exam in also asked me what was wrong after my oral. The implication was that I sounded horrible. So yeah, I felt like crap for the whole day. The written exams and the listening comprehension sections were tough, but I tried my best to answer everything the best I can. On the bright side, one of the invigilators was quite cute.

Back to work now.

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