"Regrets on the Stairs"

Have you ever poked yourself with a pencil, and then did it again? And again? It's annoying, but for some reason you keep doing it? Last night I laid in bed and realized that once again I was thinking about "what I would say if I ran into [any person from Cal]." I don't like thinking about that. First of all, I get all annoyed at those people, and second of all I know that it is totally unproductive to dwell on what I would say, because it's just not going to happen. And then I get annoyed at myself for being annoyed at them.

I seem to go into this dream world in which I can have a real conversation with my former boss, and I imagine all of the things I would say to her about what happened. I don't really try to imagine what she would say... And the problem is, even if I was somehow in a place with her and could say whatever I would say, I know that she wouldn't be able to respond to me as anything other than a representative of my former employer, which would effectively shut down that conversation. That's frustrating because I still don't really understand what happened there. I will never understand as long as I can't ask. And I'm not going to be able to ask. Another thing that's frustrating is that I want to be beyond all the crap, and I have a friend or two who tell me I'm evolving, or evolved, which makes me think I should be beyond all the crap. But I'm just not.

I imagine what I would say to this or that person, something different for each one. Without going into details - because it will just annoy me - I embroider a whole statement for each of, say, five or six people. There was one person who was honest with me when she was angry at me and I wish I could tell her that I appreciated it at the time and I still do. But not enough to overcome the rest of how I feel about that place and some of the people who work there.

The more I think about the situation I was in, the more I'm reminded of grammar school. In grammar school, I laid in my bed at night and thought of all the great or nasty comebacks to the mean girls in my class. The office I was in had some similar dynamics to the classroom, from my perspective, and here I am (and was last year) doing the same thing I did then.

I heard one time that there's a French word for the comebacks you think of after someone has insulted you. I have no idea what the French idiom is, but the literal translation is "regrets on the stairs." I'm spending less time there, but I still find myself on the stairs from time to time.