Wow. Ok, so I was telling Noah that there just weren’t any problems with Puppy that I knew about. Well, now I’m starting to learn about some problems and the vast majority of them can be summed up as, “Wow is he young.” I really have no experience dealing with someone who is as young maturity-wise as Puppy is, I think that is making things harder.
What was last nights bump you ask? Well. It was related to my gun squick. Most people don’t know much about my gun squick, owing mostly to the fact that I am a semi-rabid libertarian and I am very firmly pro-gun rights. I believe that people have the right to bear arms. It is in the Constitution. End of story. Now, we get on to my personal feelings… guns freak me the fuck out and I hate hate hate hate hate them. I can handle brief theoretical conversations about them, but I can’t do graphic or in depth conversations about shooting. I just can’t handle it. I will freak out. My father held a gun to my head when I was a child and asked me if I really deserved to live. He was a psycho gun collector in general so I just don’t have positive associations with guns. I think I tolerate the fact that there are fourteen guns in this little apartment pretty well. I haven’t had a total panic attack–I just don’t think about it. la la la I don’t see anything.
So anyway, last night Ken was over (Puppy has this friend. I’m having problems with the guy because he is racist, homophobic, and sexist… not to mention that he rants fucking constantly about how all people who were born/raised/choose to live in California are stupid, rude, assholes who should all be shot to make the world a better place. Great guy, huh? I don’t know what Puppy sees in him.) and the first while was fine. They were watching the dvd of a tv show that I think is stupid “Sledge Hammer”–anyone heard of this piece of shit? I ignored the idiocy and tried to be vaguely social and polite, well at least until they switched to talking about the machine gun shoot that they are going to. There is some event in Nevada that they are going to attend where you get to shoot a bunch of really serious assault weapons and I don’t know what all psycho crap. Ok, those two sentences are about all that I want to know about this event. Guess how long they talked about it. Guess how long they both actively were trying to provide me with excruciating detail of what you can do to someone with most of these weapons. 🙁 At one poing I looked at Puppy and told him to stop the stream of horrible shit coming out of his mouth and he didn’t understand. I told him that no really, I’m done just stop. I called him by his name and asked him to stop. One of our agreements is that I won’t use his name in front of people–he didn’t catch on though. I got up and went in his bedroom and shut the door. I picked up a cd so that I could play it in my computer so that I wouldn’t hear their conversation. I should have just walked out of the apartment and gone home.
After Ken left Puppy and I had a long serious talk. He had not understood what I meant when I previously said that I have gun squicks. He apologized over and over again. He asked me to commit to taking him aside in the future when he is doing such complete asshole things and let him know that he is doing them. He doesn’t seem to want to be an asshole, it just kind of happens sometimes because he is an oblivious boy. I don’t know that I can commit to telling him to stop when he is being a dick. My response is entirely to walk away and take responsibility for my feelings that way. I don’t want to tell him how to behave. But it seems like it is more fair for me to talk to him when I am upset about stuff–that is just so freakin hard for me. 🙁
He won’t let me stew when I am upset. He asks me questions until I talk to him. I have managed to train him basically entirely out of “you” statements–which I consider really amazing. He talks about his feelings and why he is behaving the way he is without blaming me for anything. If he fucks up in any way he is very ok with accepting responsibility for that and he tries to rectify the situation. I’m really impressed by that.
He is still young, and he fucks up quite a bit… but I don’t think he will do the same thing twice. That counts for a lot, right?
