Since I’m sure no one is reading this far down, I’ll continue to talk about myself which is really going to make you all realize why I irritate people in person.
When my mom was freaked out about my chosen career path for college, she had me go do one of those personality inventories to decipher what careers you are best suited for (I’m sure there is a range of opinions on the effectiveness of such testing). It was a LOT of tests. Ranking things, true false statements about me, yada yada yada. We went back a week or two later to have the full 60 minute debriefing with all of my results which was also tape recorded for us. I wish I still had the tape.
They said, “You have the most unusual results for a woman that we’ve seen in a very, very long time.” They assured me that there was nothing wrong with me. (Just kidding. They never actually clarified that there was nothing wrong with me.) But basically, I’m very high on the risk-taking spectrum, and I’m crazy practical, and I only like to deal with tangible things that truly exist. I don’t care to think of new ideas. I just like to improve current ones, type of thing. I can lead if I have to, but I really prefer not to.
They gave me a top ten list of best career paths for me…and from what I recall in no particular order: auto mechanic, pilot, landscape architect, investigator, drill sergeant.
I wish I was making up the drill sergeant part. My family won’t let me forget that detail.
Your description sounds very similar to my spouse. She is also a Guy’s girl and dreads navigating the girly waters of the subtext sea. She too is a thrill junky, practical planner, and an amazing forensic accountant who is frustrated when unable to find the last 1/2 cent error in the proverbial checkbook. The woman scares the heckout of me with her crazy ass stunts, then afterward is on a 2-3 day adrenaline high. At least she lives life with no compromises and deceptions. More than I can say for many I know.
She sounds awesome!! And I take that as a flattering compliment.
My husband was apparently researching local go kart racing options for me today. He thinks that would be a good outlet for me and that I’d hold my own. If that actually pans out, who knows. Not a lot of room in our schedules.
I hope you do take it as a compliment! Skydiving, bungy jumping, surfing, racing of any kind, all good. Hope you find one you enjoy, and Kudos to hubby for looking! The hubby is always the unsung hero (support person)
I am probably similar to you in that I often feel nervous and awkward with the other moms at my son’s school. My recent personal hell was attending a field trip all day with my son’s class, having to make awkward small talk in between yelling things like “stop licking his ear!” and “get off that giant pole!”
In college I did tend to gravitate towards guy friends but I found it’s really difficult to maintain those friendships as you get older. And I find myself missing my good girl friends – and making more of an effort to keep up with them – than with my old guy friends.
What I try to tell myself when I’m in that horrible school-mom setting is that lots of women are just like me on the inside even if they seem standoffish on the outside, and I’m just projecting my fears onto them. But probably there are some cliquey moms in the mix too. That said, I’m super socially awkward in large group settings. I’ve always done better in one-on-one situations where the other person has to talk to me, LOL. So maybe it’s just that the mom-social-setting is really poorly designed for people to strike up meaningful and non-awkward conversations.
haha! I remember getting “private investigator” and “landscape architect” on my personality assessment too! But I’m probably not the same personality type. Especially in college, I was very impractical and theoretical and only like abstract things that could conceivably exist in some alternate universe but definitely not in this one.
Ha, I do like Valentine’s Day, but not the go-all-our thing. Just appreciation for each other acknowledged between my husband and I (and he often does buy flowers and maybe a small gift), and I love seeing my daughter’s reactions to whatever we’ve gotten her. This year, I made her a card, and we had donuts for breakfast (her request). I say we because dangit, it was Valentine’s Day for me, too, so I was going to indulge. I did buy powdered sugar donut holes in addition to regular donuts, though, so that I could feel like I was eating multiple “donuts” and still eating less than a whole donut. 3 donut holes, a lower carb scone, and my coffee substitute with full sugar cream…didn’t go much above 120. That’s amaaaaazing for my average morning, regardless of what I eat! I’ll just keep the numbers from our pizza dinner to myself, since my formula was thrown waaayyy off due to the crust being abnormally (and amazingly) thick…
I’m not seeing much of a common thread, which confirms my theory that they administer these fancy tests and then pull results out of a hat. Mine came back with furrier and priest. I was excited at first, because I thought it said farrier, and I was big-time into show-jumping in those days. (Apparently also needed glasses.) Needless to say, priest was also a non-starter.
His mom sent him an absolute ton of care packages in his first few months, totally loaded him up on snacks, and then I sent him 2 more around Christmas despite the fact that he was telling both of us he had too much already. So now he says he doesn’t want either of us send him more for the rest of the deployment it’s partially because he thinks they’re too expensive and partially because he only has so much room to store his snacks haha