Mustang Sally

I named her Mustang Sally. I did so because like in the song, I have a unrealistic compulsion to get her "flat feet on the ground."

I met her a while ago, although it seems I've known her for ages. She talks incessantly about her struggles with life, and it seems the more she talks, the longer I've known her. It is said that one's frustration and fury toward another is really the subconscious relaying to the conscious what you hate about yourself. If anyone knows, for any reason, ways in which I resemble Mustang Sally, I beg of you now, put me out of your misery.

She is an aspiring actress. Of course that came along after she was an aspiring teacher, which came after being an aspiring writer. Her passions have lain in a multitude of arenas and she has yet to achieve success with any of them.

More importantly, she has yet to achieve success in merely holding down a job to support herself and be a productive member of society. She claims that her body reacts to jobs that aren't related to her passion du jour. She therefore "listens to her body" (because she is kind to herself) and quits those jobs. I'll give her credit, though. She just started a new job a couple of weeks ago, and she's still at it. She hasn't clearly stated what the job is, but has clearly stated that she feels guilty because her boss doesn't know she's working there only to make money. (I ask you, what percentage of the American workforce works simply for the money? Um, that would be, most of them!) I suppose she feels she owes her employer her entire soul in order to earn the pittance of a salary with which she is compensated.

Mustang Sally is not an uneducated woman. She has earned a bachelor's degree, which is much more than I would have given her credit for, given the ADD with which she claims to have been plagued. Moreover, she has aspirations to return to school for a master's degree in fine arts. Admirable, I'd say. Problem is, she's well into her thirties and still lives with her parents due to the tremendous debt she has acquired since attaining adulthood and can't afford to attend school. I'd wager that her second problem will be getting accepted to a master's program, but that is yet to be seen. At the rate she's going, and at the rate her aspirations go whipping by, she'll probably lose interest in going back to school before she can ever afford to.

Did I say she lives with her parents? Yes. There were about ten minutes there where she had a place of her own. Of course with all the stress those piddley non-passionate jobs caused her, she was income-free before long and was forced to move back with her parents. Her mother seems to be an enabling door mat, while her father is an insufferable boor. She has siblings, but I've never heard much about them. My guess is they flew the dysfunctional family coop, never to return to the backwoods from whence they sprang.

Why do I tell you the story of Mustang Sally? Because she pissed me off. She pissed me off to no end. I feel for her the rage of a million white-hot suns.

Let's review:

A. Mustang Sally has no direction in life.
B. Mustang Sally won't hold a job because her body speaks to her.
C. Mustang Sally lives with her parents because she won't hold a job.
D. Mustang Sally can't follow her dreams because she has no money because she won't hold a job because her body speaks to her.
E. Mustang Sally's passions change with the wind because she has no direction.
F. Mustang Sally's passions are her passions because she will never, ever have to answer to them.
G. Mustang Sally's actual life will never be lived passionately because she does have to answer to it on an every day basis, and the prospect of facing her life (which she created herself) would make anyone retreat into a fantasy world.

Now, regarding my anger: Mustang Sally, in her daily spew of verbiage regarding how horrible it is to be her, asked advice from some friends. Her friends, me being one of them, gave her several different viewpoints. We were all kind and understanding, as we always are, in making suggestions and providing support. And then, she looked us all in the eye and told us we had no idea what we were talking about, that we would never understand her, that she needs to find better friends who can relate to her suffering, and then stormed off in a huff after threatening that we would no longer be graced with her presence.

You may ask, why does this make me so angry? I don't have to deal with that ingrate any more. If she thinks she can find better friends, let her. Right? Right. What makes me so angry is there are tons of people out there who do the same thing. And those of us who are kind enough to not blatantly tell them how effed-up they are are the ones who get shat upon. Shat, I say! I'm sick of the shat, and I'm not going to take it anymore!

You'll probably be hearing more about Mustang Sally, as I'm sure she'll return after unable to find those actor people she's set out to befriend. For one thing, she's scary as hell to look at, and anyone who doesn't know her will probably run away screaming before she can even say hello.

But now I'm just being mean.