Dear miyoid:

Good to read from you and congratulations for getting your job at a Health Tourism office- reads exciting to me! I am fine, thank you- winter is in progress here, in the Pacific Northwest, USA- recently I’ve been missing the warmer weather I knew elsewhere, although I hated the high humidity there.

Regarding the friend/ rival, there are a couple of issues here, as I see it, the first is clear to me, the second is not clear enough:

1. There is a lack of compatibility between the two of you: (a) you are very intelligent and educated; she is not (“she is not very literate”), (b) you are a hard worker; she is looking for the easy way (“she always tries to find the easier way”), (c) you look into the depth of things; her focus is on the superficial (“obsessed with titles and how we look”)- So, there is not much of a basis to connect with her, no mutual objective to tackle together.

2. You feel anger at her (“I feel the urge to make her feel like she is ignorant.. making me attack her.. I feel the need to argue with her most of the time.. her easy way arounds actually disgust me”), and jealousy (“I get jealous because I don’t really have those easy way arounds”).

An online definition of jealousy: an unhappy or angry feeling of wanting to have what someone else has.

I know, and I bet you know, that some people who are uneducated and not very intelligent- are very successful in real-life, at least from the outside. Take the president of the U.S.- exceptionally uneducated, ignorant, does not read, unintelligent, yet he got to be The President of this country and recently more than 70  millions voted for him. There are many lesser examples, yet infuriating. See, I wrote infuriating because it angers me. It angers me because it is not fair! This is not how things should be. The world would be a much better people if qualified (and good) people held powerful positions, be it a politician or a teacher, or anyone else whose work includes contact with the public.

Back to the friend- is it that you feel that even though she is ignorant, superficial, and looking for the “easy way arounds”-  she still may be more successful than you, which is unfair, similar to my sentiment above?

anita