2/10/98
The other day after my dad and I both got home from work, we intercepted one another in the kitchen. It was one of those unfortunate situations that pops up every so often. All we wanted was dinner, but we’d made eye contact. We had to talk.
All evidence to the contrary aside, I don’t have much trouble talking to my dad. (If anything, the ease with which I say things I probably shouldn’t to my dad is my trouble.) As long as I seem to be working, and thus making money, and thus not spending his, and thus making it possible for him to retire with all due haste, we are best friends. Well, that’s not true. Even then, we don’t always get along. For us to get along, my dad has to get the sense that I am working as hard as he was when he was my age. Unfortunately, when he was my age, my dad was working in a mine with a paper route on the side. As far as I can tell, his youth was a nightmare. In the true spirit of this great nation, he tries to ensure that his children have better lives than his by making our youth even more nightmarish. I appreciate the spirit behind it, if nothing else.
Dad’s relationship with Jim the Working Man was rocky at first. See, no matter how hard I work, I will never truly impress Dad as being a professional in any way. I don’t wear a tie to work. When you get right down to it, in fact, the root of every disagreement I get into with my dad is probably the fact that I don’t wear a tie to work. I can tell from the way he looks at me when I come home that I’m too comfortable to have any credibility. I might as well have training wheels on my shoes. Part of working is walking around all day in a tie without killing yourself or others. It’s like a game.
I offset my tielessness by staying late at work (to play video games on the network with Jerry, but no one at home needs to know that) and talking shop with Dad whenever I get the chance to show him that I actually do something. The fact that I’m easily doing something he can’t even understand doesn’t hurt either. Over time, he actually started taking me seriously. He was impressed. Before I knew it, we were having pleasant conversations.
(If nothing else, he stopped handing me articles.
For a while after I got my job, I was obviously on Cloud Nine. I was elated. I was contributing to society, and everyone could be proud of me again. Almost immediately, though, Dad began approaching me with newspaper clippings. They were typically titled, "90% of Recent College Graduates Are Making More Than You," and subtitled, "experts agree: you are a loser."
He would hand these clippings to me and say, "I’m not saying anything…" and he would trail off and leave. And I would think, "Well, you’re saying something just by handing me the clipping in the first place!" And I would search the paper for articles titled, "Son Brutally Slays Parents, Escapes," but I never had the energy to clip one out and give it to him. I was never sure what the point was in trying to reduce my self-satisfaction, but I was so glad when it stopped I looked forward to talking business.)
The night we crossed paths in the kitchen, though, it finally happened. He said something to me that made my blood run cold. He said the six little words that I’ve been dreading for almost seven months now.
"I saw your web page today."
Yeeg!
Those six words are the words that repeat in a mental echo every time I write about anyone in this journal. Many moons ago, at least once, I gave my parents the web address for this page (although that was long before the page had a journal on it). I have always known that it was only a matter of luck and good memory before my dad got a faceful and I got an earful. Most well-prepared people have a kit ready for emergencies, like an earthquake kit or flood rations. I have a "Parents Found the Journal" bag packed, so that I have at least a fighting chance when they kick me out.
Not that it matters now. But I digress.
When Dad mentioned that he’d seen my page, I yipped out loud like a dog with its tail stuck in a door. I thought for sure I was busted, like I was still in junior high instead of a grown man. (It’s a mentality I slip into all too easily at home, a good reason to move if there ever was one.) I very nearly dropped dinner on the floor. I would have felt particularly foolish if I had, because it turned out he wasn’t actually talking about my web page. He was talking about my company’s web page. Shop talk as always; thank the Lord. I was so relieved, I began to laugh. I must have looked like a lunatic, but I didn’t care.
(He didn’t care for my company’s page, by the way. I’m willing to bet he would’ve liked this one a lot less.)
Even though it was a false alarm, the whole thing got me thinking. This web journal business is quite a delicate affair sometimes; while it is very personal and often brutally honest, it is also something people read. Something strangers read, actually; I was at a party last night, and two different people came up to talk to me about my web page, one of whom I barely knew and one of whom I had never seen in my life. You want a disconcerting experience? Try having a drunk guy come up to you slurring, "You and Jabba the Hutt, man! His big body, and your l’il head, maaan! That’s funny!" I almost drove home and took the site down right then and there.
The part of the whole journal experience that entertains me the most is when people try to influence the way I write about them. It’s like they want to edit their lives for broadcast. I understand, to a certain extent; I never really ask anybody’s permission to be included. Then again, I stay away from full names, too. Still, I have to laugh when my girlfriend tries to chide me and ends up talking to herself… "I read your Year in Review, and you don’t even mention my birthday! What, was my birthday not notable enough?… Oh, God, you’re going to put this in, aren’t you? You’re going to put this in, in an entry titled My Girlfriend the Bitch! Oh God! Forget I said anything! I’m sorry! I mean, I love you, pooky! Put that in! Put in how sweet I was! Oh, crap, it’s all going in now, isn’t it?! Oh, crap!…."
Only one person, however, has actually gone so far as to demand better write-ups. This person even submitted a sample paragraph of more acceptable text, which could be used to combat his depiction as a "potato gun-wielding fanatic." This person shall remain nameless, even if I do honor his request.
Meanwhile, Greg (my professionally certified ski instructor friend) had just finished upholding justice and was on his way to a People for Puppies rally (you see, Greg routinely delivers puppies to orphans to alleviate their loneliness) when he encountered a mountain bike convention. After stopping briefly to sign autographs for all his fans at the convention, he performed an emergency appendectomy while simultaneously playing "horsey" with a 3-year-old child. Unfortunately, all this activity made him late for a banquet honoring his recent Nobel Prize, but all those uberclass oppressors could kiss his butt anyway. But, again, I digress.
As a writing experiment, I think the whole thing has been a smashing success. For me, anyway. If nothing else, the three people that read it are constantly reminding me to update it, which is kinda what I had in mind when I put it online. If it was all up to my willpower alone, this whole thing would have been over fifty pages ago. It has its failings, of course. I’m less than honest when I want to write about people who I know will see the entry. Sometimes I’m too harsh on people like my parents and Tom Brokaw, who will (hopefully) never see the journal at all. I drone sometimes, like now. And, yes, the page as a whole is pretty ugly. In my defense, I keep it plain so it downloads faster. (Oh, and also because I’m lazy. Just ask Dad.) In the near future, I plan to screw with the format and appearance, maybe make entries shorter and more frequent (HA HA). In the meantime, if you’re out there, thanks for reading. Unless you’re one of my parents, in which case… um… sorry.
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2/14/98
Lately, I’ve found myself in a strange mood. I can’t quite put my finger on it. The mood is familiar yet not, like something out of a dream. You know those dreams where you meet your friend Bill, and you know it’s your friend Bill, despite the fact that Bill is a short blonde guy and the person in your dream is a 47-year-old woman? You know those dreams? That’s what my mood’s like lately. I don’t feel like I’ve seen it, but it seems really familiar… we used to have a word for it…
Happy? Yes, that was the word I think. I suppose I must be happy.
It’s not like I thought it would be, My New Place. Several times when I lived in my parents’ house and found myself extremely irritated by something, I would think about what it would be like to live on my own again, and I would laugh. For, like, half an hour at a time. And I would think, "When I move, there are going to be entire days like this. I’ll come home without waking anyone up, and I will waste entire days watching bad TV without anybody criticizing me, and in the middle of it all I will remember what it was like to live here. And I will laugh all day."
So far, I have not laughed all day. In reality, moving was more like finding a really old tape on the floor of the car and putting it in the tape deck, only to find yourself transported in time to where you were the last time you listened to it. A kind of wake-up. "Hey… yeah! I remember this!" I should feel like I’ve made a big adult step. Instead, I feel like a freshman in college again. Except, of course, that my neighbors no longer throw up in my toilet. Not yet, anyway.
In my zeal to live lazy independence to its fullest, there were a few events in the recent past that I failed to mention here. The first of these events, the most momentous of course, was moving day.
Moving day sucked.
Moving day would have sucked under any circumstances, but it was made even more annoying by the fact that I couldn’t seem to get a truck rented. In addition, I had made the brilliant move of instructing my friends not to help me. Sainted martyr that I am, I figured, "I hate helping other people move, so surely they would hate helping me move. I won’t call them; it will just be me and my parents. Why should I finish things up in ten minutes in the company of friends, when I can spend all night hurting myself alone?"
Of course, my parents are old and decrepit. My mother has a condition called fibromyalgia, which I think is the term doctors now use to describe random, chronic pain. Not a lot of heavy lifting to be gotten out of Mom. Her soreness actually works out well, though, because it gives my dad an opportunity to overcompensate. He tried to carry the couch without me; he tried to carry the TV. When we were done, he carried the truck to my apartment.
He does it because he’s stubborn and he likes to do things his own way, but he also does it to say, "Look at me! I’m in better shape than a man half my age!"
Of course, he is in better shape than a man half his age, that man being me. There are days when I break a sweat checking my mail. (In all fairness, I get a lot of packages.) By simply walking up and down a single stair several times moving into My New Place, I managed to do something so dreadful to my right knee that I still sometimes fear it’s going to crack off. It feels like acid has been heated in a microwave and somehow inserted right into the middle of my leg. My dad thinks I should have played more sports growing up. I strongly disagree; in fact, I don’t think I should have been allowed outside. My joints would be much sturdier if I hadn’t squandered them on all that running and jumping.
I was exhausted after I moved (especially considering that I did it on a Wednesday after work), but I made a point of getting everything organized before I went to bed. The place looked, and looks, very nice I think. I need some picture frames, of course (I vowed that once I moved out of the dorms I’d never see that sticky tack gum stuff again), and I still need some shelving for my Star Wars figures (which now have a room of their own). The phone hanging on my wall has a big web of wires sticking out of its back because I brought the wrong sized wire. Oh, and I still don’t have a single pan or pot. (Which is okay, because I still haven’t been shopping for food.) All in all, though, I am elated. Just not in a laugh-out-loud way.
The other thing I wanted to mention before I forgot was Greg’s birthday. It was last weekend; Nicole threw him a surprise party, which she’d been planning since about 1989. That is Nicole’s way; she is a master of the bizarre, elaborate plan. It’s great to have her as a friend, because I never have to worry about what I’m going to do on the weekends anymore. I haven’t had to read the Arts and Entertainment section of the newspaper in over a year thanks to her.
I’d feel bad if she didn’t love it so much. Last year, she planned her own birthday party. She planned it right out from under her boyfriend’s nose.
"Hey, Nicole, we’re going to take you out for your birthday!"
"Great! I’ll pick you and Andy up at your apartment, then we’ll go back to my place and catch up with everybody else. Then we’ll take Jim’s car to the Loop, where…." There are times when I think about offering to let her pick out my clothes for the year, just to make her happy.
Anyway, she planned Greg a surprise party. (They weren’t seeing each other when she began making the arrangements; I wonder if dating him was part of the plan.) Let me see if I can capture the "feel" of this plan:
I was supposed to go to dinner with Greg. For reasons that are no longer clear to me, Nicole and my girlfriend and some of our other friends were supposed to agree to come along; they were all to then back out for various reasons. I think this was so Greg would not suspect anything was "up." To further obscure that something was "up," Nicole then told him she was too busy to eat (something about work), but that we should pick her up afterwards and go to a jazz club. This pick-up was her sly way of getting him to come to her apartment, where he would be showered with balloons and noise.
My main job, besides feeding Greg, was to call Nicole’s before we headed over, to warn them and shut them up so Greg would not suspect anything was "up." Unfortunately, there was—cue dramatic music—no pay phone at the restaurant. So, I had to whisk Greg over to My New Place, where he politely admired my accommodations and arranged my Star Wars figures into sexual positions. I had to sneak the whispered phone call in while he was in the bathroom.
(Greg is still bitter about this phone call. The way he envisions it, I called Nicole’s and whispered, "We’re on our way! He’s in the bathroom!" and she announced to the entire party, "Greg is going to the bathroom!")
In short, I took him to his party and he had a wondrous, almost unhealthily self-conscious good time. As a bonus, one of the guests was his junior high chum Jay, who has been spending the year in France. Jay, not even knowing that it was Greg’s birthday, randomly showed up in St. Louis on a visit that weekend, and Nicole sweetened the surprise by hiding him from Greg all day long via what I’m sure was a spectacular plan.
Greg did not even notice Jay when he came in. In shock, he went around the room and thanked everyone for coming. When he got to Jay, he just assumed that Jay was someone’s anonymous date; his brain, you see, had filed Jay’s face away for the year. Of course, everyone in the room was watching to see what his reaction to the well-hidden Jay would be, and they all laughed hysterically when Greg failed to notice him, causing Greg to feel incredibly nervous and self-conscious. Wanting to ease his pain without ruining the exquisitely-planned surprise, I approached him to say, "Greg, are you sure you’ve said hello to everyone???"
That was where it got sticky. My friend Katey (who keeps secrets about as well as a public address system) decided that I was trying to ruin the surprise, and that she would thwart me by vigorously covering up my mouth. I was taken by surprise; I’m not sure anyone’s dared hold my mouth shut in years. Losing my oxygen supply and my First Amendment rights simultaneously, I got mad, madder than I would have guessed. I was only trying to help Greg, after all. So… well… I bit her hand. I bit it pretty hard, actually. I didn’t mean to. I did feel bad about the whole thing. Nevertheless, she was a little annoyed with me for a while afterwards.
Later, I too was annoyed, but not with Katey. It was the alcohol. I hate alcohol, and I hate being around alcohol, and I think deep down inside a part of me hates everyone who drinks alcohol. Thank God, this does not inconvenience my friends, who greatly enjoy drinking around me just to watch my face change colors. "Look how tolerant he’s gotten! He only got three shades darker this time!"
Of course I’m tolerant. It’s either that or sit at home for the rest of my life. I could always make friends with the other people who don’t drink, but the Amish don’t take kindly to strangers and I could never grow a beard. We never even discuss it any more. People got bored with me and all that "standing up for my beliefs" crap, so now I wave the white flag and everybody’s happy. Oh, except me. Not that that’s important.
I would have been okay if it weren’t for the Jell-O shots. I mean, what the hell are Jell-O shots for? A yummy taste? Oh, wait, I just thought of something that tastes even better than a Jell-O shot: Jell-O all by itself! I mean, people were actually going, "Ug! This is awful! It’s so strong! We’d better finish these off!…"
Maybe it’s worth the shitty taste, if the shots accomplish something else. But what? Oh, you take them to be social. Oh, wait, I just thought of another way to be social: develop a personality!
Sorry. It really was a good party. There were a few brief seconds though, about three of them, when I looked into the wobbly Jell-O and saw the state of the world, and it made want to puke forcefully on the coffee table. Didn’t plan to end the entry on a down note, but hey, growin’ up ain’t all apartments and promotions, ya know.
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2/20/98
In my zeal to keep from glossing over things here, I seem to have glossed over some other things. Valentine’s Day, for example.
For a bunch of reasons, I greeted Valentine’s Day this year with a great deal of trepidation. I’m told that most non-single straight guys get nervous around Valentine’s Day; it’s apparently been recognized as the one day, after all those months of surly macho stoicism, when men are supposed to be as mushy as possible or else. The card companies have won.
For me, Valentine’s Day involves even more peril. See, I missed Valentine’s Day last year (out of town, as avid readers will recall). Plus, Valentine’s Day is the anniversary of my first date with my girlfriend (I still can’t decide whether that was an act of prosaic genius or boggling stupidity). Without even having necessarily done anything "wrong," I already had a lot to live up to.
Furthermore, it turns out that my girlfriend’s family celebrates Valentine’s Day as a holiday on par with Christmas. My girlfriend’s name, you see, is Valentine.
(I had to struggle long and hard with divulging the above info. I try to keep full names out of these pages. Plus, I’ve always tried very hard to spare my girlfriend the scorn that comes with dating me. Oh well.)
Anyway, Valentine’s Day turns out to be this major league festival with my girlfriend, which she was more acutely aware of because her family has just moved away. And because it’s her name. And it’s her anniversary. Which her boyfriend missed last year.
You can only imagine the pressure. I don’t mean to say she put pressure on me, of course; I don’t need help finding sources of pressure. I’ve always done fine on my own. Still, I wanted everything to go well. So I let her do the planning.
The first part of the plan turned out to be celebrating the anniversary on a different night than Valentine’s Day. Just as Christmas and December birthdays must struggle to keep from being lumped together, Valentine’s Day and our anniversary have now been officially separated to increase the partying and gift quotient.
On the night of V Day itself, it was decided that we’d go to Shu Shu’s, the magical Mongolian barbecue restaurant deep in the heart of Illinois. In college, we used to mount these massive pilgrimages to Shu Shu’s, piling into car after car in groups of 10 or more under the watchful tutelage of Lord Shu (Greg, who discovered the wondrous cavern of delights by means he has never divulged). Shu Shu’s isn’t a conventional sit-down restaurant; you decide what you want, pick it out from a kind of raw-meat-etc salad bar and put it in a bowl, then you take it up to a guy who cooks it in front of you on a huge mushroom-shaped skillet-thing. Still, it’s expensive, it’s exotic, and it’s far away from everywhere we usually go. Shu Shu’s screams "special occasion."
So we went.
How did it go?
Allow me to share with you a very important tip about Valentine’s Day, a tip that I myself often forget: Everyone goes out to dinner on Valentine’s Day. Everyone on earth. You know all those people who wear black and call it Love Sucks I’m All Alone Day? They go out to dinner on Valentine’s Day. As far as I could tell that night, law enforcement releases people from the jails, just to go out to dinner on Valentine’s Day. It wouldn’t matter, except that restaurants have in the last few years adopted a "No Reservations" policy as a part of the "The Customer is Always Screwed" campaign that’s been sweeping over America for the last few years. (More on that another time.)
Was the restaurant crowded? Oh, a little. We waited to be seated, but only for about 75 minutes. After that, we only waited 5 minutes to see a waitress. And 20 minutes to have our food prepared. People grew old, raised families, and died waiting to get into that restaurant. Because it’s out in a small Illinois community, my girlfriend later hypothesized, it is the only place in town to have a nice dinner, which is why everyone in town was there. We actually waited in line to pay our bill and leave. It was quite a spectacle.
Normally, I am a big proponent of waiting and being leisurely. On V Day, though, we had plans after dinner. Plans that involved driving back to downtown St. Louis by 8:30. We had agreed to meet Nicole and Greg for a night at a nearby upper-class jazz club, because we all apparently have too much money.
Although we had an absolutely splendid time at the club, the subject of money was one my mind kept going back to all night. I looked around the table, and I realized that none of the people I was with really had a steady job. I mean, we all had some savings, but for the most part none of us had any business in a jazz club after an expensive dinner. Everyone at the table had, at some point in the past week, talked about how poor they were and how little they could afford. And yet, there we were again, having an expensive evening. I mean, sure it was V Day, but we seem to go out to dinner like twice a week as a group. Lately, it almost seems as though someone keeps making expensive suggestions just to see what people will agree to, and everybody else keeps spending just to keep up. It’s like a poker game, except nobody ever walks away with money.
So, before we left the club that night, I vowed on behalf of the ol’ gang that we would have cheap, Taco-Bell-and-videos evenings for the rest of the month in the interest of belt-tightening. The others agreed. Later that week, we went out to dinner. If anyone needs me, I’ll be selling my plasma for appetizers.
I later learned that my girlfriend thought our V Day date was the most romantic one we’d ever had. Quote, "We actually went a whole week without going to Friappihan’s* and a movie!" Add that to the list of reasons why I love her.
*(Coined by my friend Greg, "Friappihan’s" is a term referring to establishments in the style of T.G.I. Friday’s/Applebee’s/Houlihan’s, which are all essentially the same restaurant and practically inescapable to people going on dates. Try to use it in a sentence today.)
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2/26/98
Preparations begin for the big trips of spring break. It’s funny; I went to college for four years and spent every spring break in my dorm room, waiting for the cafeteria to reopen. This year, I have a 9 to 5 job, and I’m going to L.A. It’s a business trip of course—a trade show called Internet World—but I’ll be with my favorite coworkers, my boss will be taking us out to expensive dinners, and I’ll get away from the office and the cold for a week. I’m actually excited about something.
I write this, however, not because I’m excited but because I am annoyed. See, my girlfriend is going to her parents’ for spring break. This alone does not annoy me. What annoys me is the fact that her mom, knowing full well that my girlfriend is taking two passengers to and from Dallas in her car, along with their considerable luggage, chose to order my girlfriend a giant computer.
"What?" you say. "What do you mean? Am I understanding you correctly? Her parents are buying her a computer, to replace her broken one, for no reason other than generosity and warmth? Why on earth should that be upsetting? Are you twentysomethings really that spoiled?"
Yes, I guess we are. Don’t get me wrong; I think it’s great that they’re buying her a computer. Wonderfully generous. Perhaps not as generous as if they’d help her buy groceries instead of buying themselves a big Dallas swimming pool with a separate jacuzzi and hot tub and a brand new car while she starves to death back home, but that’s a different journal entry altogether. Anyway, yeah they’re great. The thing is, she lives in St. Louis. She’s here 51 weeks out of the year. Now, instead of having the computer shipped to her doorstep during one of those 51 weeks, when she’d only need to get it on the elevator and through her door, her mom went ahead and decided to have it shipped to Dallas during the one week my girlfriend is not in St. Louis. As a result, my girlfriend has to spend ten or more hours crammed into her car with two newly-crowded passengers (have you ever seen the size of a computer/monitor box?) and a very heavy, very fragile $2000 piece of machinery on the open road, extremely vulnerable and tempting to criminals at every rest stop. After she actually gets it home, she has to find a way to haul it from the parking lot of her building in Gunshot Alley all the way up to her apartment.
Pop Quiz: Which is most vulnerable to attack/rape/robbery/mayhem?:
If you answered d), you’re smarter than her mom is.
Now, the mere fact that her mom arranged things this way only slightly annoyed me on her behalf. What completely pissed me off was, after my girlfriend expressed concerns with this "haul it across the country" plan, her mom condescendingly replied, "Well, I know it isn't the way you want it, but it's the way it has to be."
Ooooooooooooooooh, that makes me mad! F@#$ you, "the way it has to be"! What is she, nine? How mature of you, to see the big picture like that! Funny how this greater good doesn’t inconvenience or endanger you in any way. Hmm… come to think of it, it makes things a lot easier for you. No pesky "the address on my credit card is here, but send it there" explanations. Funny how only your daughter is inconvenienced by "the way it has to be."
One of the biggest problems I have with parents (mine and other people's) is the fact that all the bad parenting habits are the last ones to go. All that supporting and helpful nurturing crap goes right out the window at the first sign of pubic hair, but they still do things to you "for your own good", as if you aren't capable of deciding what that is, until you're 47. From my college applications to the rental of my moving van, my parents to this day constantly go out of their way to teach me "lessons", all of which involve causing me great pain for the sake of demonstrating what it supposedly is to be an adult. And I’m not alone; my mother and I had a conversation along the same lines about my sister, who is currently looking for an apartment in Kansas so she can attend summer classes.
MOM: Well, I know she’s going to be a full-time student, but she has to pay for it all herself and get a job too.
I would like to go around, walking the earth and teaching lessons, so that all Baby Boomers understand what it is like to be a senior citizen. We must talk to them as if they've lost their faculties. Shout into the phone. Discourage them from driving. Tell them how to manage their money. Offer to talk to people on their behalf, as if doing it themselves will confuse them.
Actually, that will never happen. Just writing this has let off enough of my steam. Which, you know, isn’t the way I wanted things, but I guess that's the way it has to be.
a) a young woman
b) a young woman alone at night
c) a young woman alone at night with her arms full
d) a young woman alone at night with her arms full of a $2000 piece of machinery.
ME: Why?
MOM: She doesn't need to be there. She can spend the summer at home. We
can't be paying for all that stuff for her, despite the fact that we have to have enough money to roll naked in, so much money that we periodically set it on fire to make room for more. Your sister has to learn.
ME: Learn what? That you guys are @$$holes? She knows that already.
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