Not a change of subject! :-)

I think a 180 degree turn of events in your financial/personal world happened faster than your "Self" can respond. When I said you were pretending, I mean your thoughts/feelings/unconscious self has not quite gotten use to the fact that you are now actually rich and famous. So, when you are shown to not have money at the moment, your thoughts/feelings/unconscious self is horrified that what you know intellectually is "fact" may not actually be so and you may be deceiving yourself. You can act confident and order an expensive meal with only $3 to spare in your account because you "know" you are getting paid later and all will be well but then things did not turn out that way.

However, the other people can't see inside of you so don't know all this is going on. They do not know you are acting confident or why and you do not know how to continue to be confident. Hence, you feel attacked by other people's words doubting you and your motives. If you know yourself and your motives well, it's like "Your mother wears combat boots!" -- crude, rude, and uncalled for but it doesn't distress you.

The other side is shown with your "your boyfriend got you pregnant?" response to your friend. I thought you were going to say you guessed right and she was pregnant You said it as a joke because you did not believe it could possibly, in your wildest dreams, be true of that friend. However, as you see, there's a whole lot going on underneath with other people and other people's responses are not based on what we think!

The responses of the people in the restaurant are theirs and based on their perceptions and what is going on underneath for them, not on who you are or how stellar a worker and friend you have been over the years, etc. I often (or almost always :-) forget that about other people.

Look at my original response to you and your initial feeling about it. As you know NOW I'm not a horrible person out to bust your chops. As I know now, you aren't an "idiot" who can't manage his money and see the "obvious". I responded to you, not with questions I had (I didn't have as many as I should have or state them as questions to get information; I know it all and my questions were to "help" you see the "flaws" in your thinking :-) but with my $0.02 opinion stated as if I knew your situation in its entirety. You responded emotionally to my lack of knowledge but were capable/wise enough to back off from how you felt and look at what I asked and see if what I said might actually be used to help you, to heck with the arrogant, condescending idiot behind those questions