1/10/98
This is going to sound uncharacteristic, but:
I realize that we still live in a world of racism, war, hunger, and poverty, but I realized this weekend that there is a place for absolutely everyone. It doesn’t matter how marginalized you are. You can be the biggest weirdo anyone around you has ever met; somewhere, there are hundreds of others like you and there is an environment in which you are normal. Even if you are a tap-dancing bumblebee girl, there is a meadow somewhere full of dancing bumblebee people. You just have to know where to look.
I first grew to appreciate this by working on the internet. The internet, after all, is the place where crazy pedophile conspiracy theorist bomb-building neo-Nazi Barbie collectors go to exchange recipes. Just ask Tom Brokaw. Every once in a great while, I will come across a page wherein the author catalogues and praises every facial expression the Little Mermaid makes—and I mean every expression—throughout the entire movie and every episode of the syndicated Little Mermaid series. And this guy will rave on for fifteen pages about what a pure perfect woman this cartoon character is, and how his love for her transcends anything physical or immature, and just as I’m thinking he needs a punch in the head and a dictionary definition of the word "reality," I look at the bottom of his page and see he’s linked to 45 other people who feel exactly the same way he does. They have a club. They go to Disneyland together, often to protest the closing of its "Under the Sea" shop.
I guess the thought that 35-year-old men are fantasizing about the Little Mermaid in groups should make me afraid, but instead I find it strangely reassuring. From the time we are very young, all any of us supposedly wants is to belong and be normal. Nobody wants to go through life being labeled as an outcast (or so psychologists claim; all I ever really wanted was to be left in peace, but I guess that’s a branch from the same tree). So, it feels rather life-affirming to know that people who are totally abnormal still manage to find a peer group. There is a niche for everyone.
Of course, when you run across people like the zoophiles (an alarmingly large group of people who believe it is possible to have monogamous consensual sexual/dating relationships with members of the animal kingdom), the whole thing is a lot less reassuring and a lot more… ucky. Most of the time, though, it gives me comfort.
The reason all of this is on my mind is that, this weekend, I went to my first Star Trek convention. I fought long and hard to avoid it at first, not because I was ashamed to be among the Trekkies but because I thought the $25 cover charge was obscenely high. My girlfriend managed to persuade me, however, by using a combination of the old "we never do anything interesting" argument and a steadfast refusal to get the hell off the phone until I said yes. She was right, of course; we don’t ever do anything interesting. She was also right about the convention being a lot of fun. But $25 is still a lot of money to pay for the privilege of walking through a door.
It was at the convention that I realized there was a place for everyone, or at least everyone who has money. The dozens of booths full of merchandise showed me that much. These sci-fi dealers knew their customers well; all the t-shirts came in XXL, and many of the booths were selling CD-ROM pornography. I passed up my chance to get the infamous Pamela Anderson Sex Tape (the one of her and her husband that was stolen from her house and bootlegged), choosing instead to buy the Star Wars Holiday Special (the one from Christmas 1977 on CBS that featured the entire cast of the movie, including Harrison Ford and a very obviously drugged-out Carrie Fisher, in a two-hour production that was far more embarrassing to everyone involved than the Pam Anderson Sex Tape could ever be).
I was really pleased to find a copy of the Holiday Special after all these years, partly because of the Star Wars connection, but mostly because it will probably go down in history as the Worst Thing Ever. And I don’t just mean the worst Christmas special, or the worst performance. I mean the Star Wars Holiday Special may very well be the worst event in human history. It inflicts more suffering than either World War. I mean, Star Wars was huge in the 70s, and yet nobody has ever heard of the Holiday Special. There’s a reason for that. Everyone who tried to sit through it in 1977 died in agony. Over my years as a collector of Star Wars stuff, I have never met anyone who enjoyed this show. Even the people who try to sell it to you can’t make it sound good. They don’t even try.
"Star Wars Holiday Special?" a kid asked one of the dealers at the convention. "What’s that?"
"It’s bad," said the man who was trying to sell the videos to feed his children. "Oh, it’s bad. It’s… it’s just… it’s soooo bad. Don’t even pick it up. You might get some of it on you."
So, of course, I bought a copy for $15 and watched it later that night. It was everything I’d heard about and so much less. It cheapens the Star Wars legacy. It cheapens CBS as a network, and all of the actors as people. It cheapens Wookiees as a species. It cheapens everyone who sits down and watches it. It was the first time I’d ever watched a video entirely in fast forward. I just couldn’t take it. (Actually, we played some of it at regular speed; it still had the original commercials from 1977, and some of those were pretty cool.) If I hadn’t paid $15 for it, I’d set it on fire to keep it from hurting anyone else.
That’s what a Star Trek convention is, at its heart: dealers with things no one on earth should want to buy gather together all the town geeks, and we lap up all their stuff like dogs at a toilet bowl. The twenty-five bucks I paid to get in was nothing compared to the fortune I spent once I was inside. In addition to the Holiday Special, I bought a copy of "The Spirit of Christmas" (the original short on which "South Park" is based), an action figure that cost a lot more than it would have if I’d gotten it at Toys ‘R’ Us a few years ago, and an autographed picture of Deanna Troi for Nicole. My girlfriend, I believe, just took out her rent money and started throwing it to dealers at random.
Besides shopping, Star Trek conventions afford one the opportunity to look at people from all across town who secretly wish they were from outer space. It’s almost like a form of intimacy. There is really nothing quite like standing in a room with a gang of people dressed like Klingons. And I do mean a gang; at these conventions, apparently, people come dressed up as various alien races and then gravitate towards other people who came as the same type of alien. By the end of the day, they’re all best friends based solely on makeup. Like I say, a niche for everyone.
What I loved most of all about the costume people were the glasses. I mean, these people are all at this convention, living the fantasy, dressed up like Klingon warriors and Starfleet officers from the future, and they’re wearing glasses. I just wanted to go over and say, "Psst! There’s no nearsightedness in the future! They’ve cured it! You spent $65 for a big rubber forehead and greasepaint; invest in some contact lenses!"
The highlight of the afternoon was the appearance of Michael "Worf" Dorn and Terry "Dax" Farrell from "Deep Space Nine." They’d obviously done the convention thing a million times; they were full of anecdotes and made it seem as though they had an easy rapport with one another. (My girlfriend leaned over during their talk and whispered, "Look at how well they seem to be getting along. Wouldn’t it be hilarious if they actually hated each other?" After she said that, and I started watching them in that context, the whole talk was ten times more entertaining. I wonder what it must be like to spend a weekend marooned at a midwestern Holiday Inn with a coworker, surrounded by people who think you’re from outer space and want to bear your children.) During the question and answer session, I found myself squirming with uneasiness at the weirdness of my fellow audience members; people kept asking them "Why did you do such and such in episode 121" instead of "Why did your character do such and such", which was made alarming only by the fact that they kept answering as if they were their characters ("I had to do such and such; the Romulans were attacking us"). I guess they were afraid that the fragile sanity of the audience would be shattered by such harsh truths as "it’s only a TV show."
I especially liked when the Star Wars bigot in the back of the room shouted, "A lightsaber could destroy a Klingon Bat’leth!" and a fight almost broke out. Just then I wished a lightsaber would destroy me; at that moment, I was more embarrassed for humanity than I have ever been. I wanted to go up to "Worf" and "Dax" and just say, "I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry." Dorn, who plays a Klingon, good-naturedly looked down at some of the Klingons in the front row and said, "Seize him, my brothers!" and I was pretty sure they were actually going to seize somebody. Nothing good would have come from that. They might have broken their glasses.
Since we’d paid $50 between us, my girlfriend and I decided to get Farrell’s and Dorn’s autographs. We stood in a very very long line, behind a six-year-old girl who was holding a place in line for her dad, who was sitting comfortably across the room. As we stood in line, I noticed that a few people held pictures of Farrell in various states of undress. I had seen similar autographed pictures of other cast members being sold by dealers throughout the day, and every time I wondered the same thing: what must it be like for some teenager to come up to you, hand you a picture of yourself half naked, and unflinchingly ask you to sign it? It has to be really dehumanizing.
I decided, therefore, to treat these professional space aliens like real live human beings rather than autograph-signing machines. By the time we got up to them, they’d been signing their names for bespectacled Klingons for about an hour and a half. Dorn looked like he was ready to snap at any minute, so I turned my attention to Ms. Farrell.
"So, do you have some kind of personal record for how long you can do this without cracking?" I asked her as she signed a picture of herself fully clothed.
"This is nothing compared to San Diego, actually," she replied. "I think we were at that booth until… how long were we there? 11:30 at night?"
Six hours, signing my name over and over again until my hand cramped, for people who didn’t even seem to realize I was a human being. "Good God!"
"I know," she said. "But, you know, I figure these people have been waiting in line all day with their kids. This is all I have to do."
Although I’m not the type to get starstruck, I was impressed. I’d have liked to stay longer, but the line needed to keep moving. My girlfriend later admitted she was jealous of our conversation "for any number of reasons." Like Dax was gonna invite me up to her hotel room or something.
Did I say Dax? I meant Terry Farrell.
It might not exactly be my niche, but I don’t think I’ve seen my last Star Trek convention. If nothing else, I need to go back and sell this Holiday Special to somebody.
You know, if you know where to look, the world can be a pretty livable place.
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1/23/98-1/24/98
I’ve already forgotten what made me decide that this would be the weekend.
I say it every weekend, of course: "I have had enough. I have to find a place to live this weekend, or I will hack my family to bits with a toenail clipper. This is it." And every weekend, my friends and parents look at me and reply, "Blah biddy blah biddy biddy blah blah." Their confidence has been inspiring.
But something was different this week. Maybe I walked once too often into a bathroom with inexplicably open blinds. Maybe I finally got tired of my answering service. (If someone calls for me at home and I’m not there, my mom gives me the message and then proceeds to ask me every twelve seconds for the rest of the day, "Did you call ____ ?", even after I’ve answered "yes" several times. Those of you who complain that your family never gives you phone messages don’t realize what you’re asking for.) Maybe I just got tired of feeling guilty every time I came home late.
Actually, I remember what set me off: I got tired of feeling guilty for not coming home at all. This weekend, you see, my girlfriend needed a ride to the airport so she could visit her parents in Dallas. Her flight was at something like 8 a.m. Since we were going out Friday night, I thought it would be silly to leave my girlfriend’s apartment at midnight on Friday, only to wake up five hours later and drive all the way back. It seemed especially impractical considering that my parents’ house is in the middle of nowhere; I practically have to pack a map and some meals every time I get in my car. Damn suburbs. Anyway, it seemed logical to me to just sleep on her futon that night instead of driving home.
"Well," my mother said in response to this information, "you’re too old for me to stop you." The volume of implied discouragement and moral judgment in that brief sentence is rather hard to describe on paper. At the risk of losing any writer’s credibility, you really had to be there. Mom has long been an outspoken opponent of people living in sin, although she’s too agnostic to call it that. (Don’t ever tell my mom she’s agnostic, by the way. She’s not sure what the word means, but to her it sounds an awful lot like "going to hell". She is one, though.) Through the years, premarital fornicators in our family have met with many a huffy silent glare from dear old-before-her-time Mom.
The whole five minute exchange got me really aggravated. The way she was reacting, I knew from previous experience, was meant to teach me a lesson of some vague Old Testament sort. It aggravated me because it’s too late to teach me a lesson. The parenting part of the program is over. If I haven’t picked up on what is good and what is bad in twenty-two years, there is simply no more room in my head. One would think my parents would have more faith in their own parenting skills, but apparently they think I’m a slow learner.
The really frustrating thing about it is, I don’t want to have sex with my girlfriend. Driving home from her apartment involves the use of three different interstate highways. Sex, shmex; I want to get to bed before 3:00.
That was the turning point. I thought, "If I lived alone, no one would ever know or care where I was. I really miss not having to explain myself to anyone." And so, as the weekend drew nearer, I got my hands on an apartment guide and started checking places off. I narrowed my search down to three places. Two of them were places I’d looked at in August. Like an idiot, I’d passed them by so I could mull over my other options, only to end up living at home for five more months. I made some appointments for Saturday afternoon. I vowed that I would have my checkbook with me. I would not go home without giving someone a deposit. Playtime was over.
The week came and went, as it usually does. There was one deviation: I got my oil changed for the first time in a long while. I waited so long because I fear the Family Auto Shop guy. Every time he touches my car, something breaks a week later. Last time he changed my oil, a hose broke three days later and I ended up overheating in Midtown St. Louis. This time, he wanted to get his hands on my tires.
"When was the last time you got new tires?" he asked.
"Uh… never," I said. (In college, I drove about ten miles a year.)
"Never?" He was in shock. "Son, isn’t that car four years old? And you never got new tires? Son, them tires are about as bald as my daddy. Now, I need to get you a new set on there before the next drizzle, or you’re gonna skid into a semi and die in a ball of fire!"
I was, as always, very suspicious of the Family Auto Shop Guy, but my parents trust him with their lives, so I gave him several hundred dollars to take away the daddy-bald tires, ignoring the fact that not even my dad calls me "son" anymore. While he was changing my tires, he discovered that my brakes were also quite old, and that my new golf cleat tires might not be enough to save me from the fireball death. So I gave him several dollars more and drove off before he tried to replace my windshield with anti-tank armor.
Friday was pleasant; on a whim, my girlfriend and I joined Greg and Nicole at a lecture entitled "Only a Cartoon: The Simpsons as Social Text." That’s what we get for letting Greg read the Arts & Entertainment section of the newspaper. It was fun, I must admit; we got to watch a sitcom and intellectualize like Ph.D.s all night. Nicole and Greg kept looking at me from across the room for no reason I have been able to deduce. Maybe I was being too cuddly with my girlfriend. It’s an oft-grumbled-about issue.
Later, we went to see As Good As it Gets, which should have been called Not As Good As Everyone Says it Gets. People have incredibly miserable lives for two hours, and then everything is suddenly okay. I half expected Jimmy Stewart to be in it. Afterwards, we went back to the apartment, where it was announced that my girlfriend had not yet packed. She stayed up all night throwing things around the room into a bag, and I ended up getting about as much sleep as I would have if I’d driven home.
The next morning, we went to the airport and said our goodbyes, which were somewhat emotional only because flying to Dallas involves getting on an airplane. Every time I think I’ve thoroughly catalogued my girlfriend’s phobias, a new one comes out and says BOO. She apparently doesn’t fly well, although given the unusual nature of most of her phobias, it could be because she’s afraid of the airline peanuts for all I know. Nevertheless, she boarded without incident and went off to have what was doubtless an enjoyable weekend with her parents. I’m afraid I wasn’t so lucky.
On my way home from the airport, in the middle of the highway, my car began to shake violently. A foul automotive smell started coming from somewhere, a smell that would have been even more unpleasant if I hadn’t stopped breathing when the shaking started. Hoping to avoid death by fireball, I quickly exited the highway and pulled over into the parking lot of a discount store. I got out to survey the damage, knowing full well that I was unable to diagnose nine tenths of the things that go wrong with cars.
Luckily, my problem was one even I could diagnose. I had a flat tire. A one-day-old, expensive, foot thick, bulletproof, structurally reinforced flat as hell tire.
I stood there, unshowered and sleepy, with less than an hour between me and my apartment appointments and my checkbook sitting on my desk at home, and shouted at the sky "Well, WHEW! It’s a good thing I replaced those bald tires! Otherwise, something bad might have happened to me!!! Thank God I was safe and bought these BRAND NEW TIRES!!! AUAAUAUAUAURRRGH!!!" I very nearly shook my fist in the air and cried, "I’ll get you, Family Auto Shop Guy! I’ll get yooooo!!!"
I went into the store to call the auto club. My day had already sucked enough without me crawling around on the ground changing a tire. Plus, I am so poor at mechanical things that I’d almost certainly screw it up, causing my wheel to fly off on the highway and causing mayhem for all kinds of people.
I got inside, only to realize that I didn’t have change for the pay phone. I had to go inside and get change. They made me buy something, because quarters are apparently too valuable to give away unless gum is somehow involved. This would be a good time to mention that while I lived in downtown St. Louis at the corner of Mugging St. and Random Shooting Ave., my sister has had a car phone for almost five years now, and that she even took it away with her to college (in rural Kansas), because bad things only happen to girls.
I called the auto club and was asked to describe my car in greater detail than I thought was possible. The woman wanted to know the shade of my car’s paint. There are police sketch artists who don’t need that much information. After a delightful discussion about whether my hubcaps had locks, and how I could tell, and who on earth would put locks on their hubcaps, I called my folks. I figured I’d need a ride, since I was going to leave my car in the Family Auto Shop Guy’s parking lot until Monday, when I planned to shove a brand new flat tire into his esophagus. My father was annoyed to hear that the auto club would be changing my tire, although I’m not really sure why. We do pay for the auto club to do things like this, don’t we? Then again, my dad’s the kind of person who buys brand new leather luggage and won’t let my mom take it on trips because it might get damaged.
The tire guy was at my car before I even got back to it. I was impressed. He was a nice guy; he didn’t laugh at my mechanical stupidity, and I didn’t laugh at his job. It went really smoothly. My mom came with my checkbook, and we drove my car to the shop for its soon-to-be free tire. Since I was late, my mom also drove me to look at the apartments.
I had thought in the beginning of my hunt that bringing Mom would be wise. This was mainly because I thought she’d go on and on about what a rat hole it was unless she thought she’d had some input in choosing it. I reasoned I wouldn’t be happy unless everybody was happy, if you take my meaning. Saturday, though, I was in such a foul mood I didn’t even care. I hadn’t showered, and I hate to feel dirty more than just about anything. I tried to be as polite as I could.
We looked at a couple of places, all of which had the same layout. They all followed my only rule: there were separate rooms. After four years of dorm living, I vowed that I would never cook, sleep, and watch TV in the same room again. I am tired of using my bed as a couch. I think I’m pretty easy to please. Since all the places were the same, I set my sights on a favorite location, and we went to the leasing office. On our way, my mom did what she always does in the car, namely give me arcane driving directions. She’s always convinced that she’s discovered amazing, wormhole-like shortcuts through the city, most of which are inefficient at best and fantasy at worst.
"You take the highway to West County? Oh no, honey. That’ll take you forty-five minutes or more. You need to go down route 104 to Illinois until you hit Chicago and the Great Lakes. Put your car on a ferry and ride the river until it spills into the sea. Circumnavigate the globe, then use the Bering Strait to…"
"Mom, I think I’ll just stick to conventional land travel this trip."
"Oh no, honey. There’s so many traffic lights…."
So, as usual she was doing this to show me a fast way to work from the apartment complex, and as usual I was murmuring "mm-hmm" every few seconds while thinking very hard about something else. In particular, I was thinking about what a good day it would have been without the flat tire. I was also thinking that, if I had driven home instead of living in sleepy sin the night before, my girlfriend never would have gotten to the airport. I kept that thought to myself.
As promised, I wrote a check to the apartment people, giving them the means and the permission to rummage through my finances and police record at their leisure. If they don’t find out anything, this could be the big turning point. To say my hopes are high is almost patronizing.
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1/28/98
With just a credit check between me and my apartment, I got an early taste of solitude and independence this week as my parents went out of town on a business trip. Dad’s company has been subjecting him to something called a 360, a touchy-feely kind of analysis wherein his superiors and subordinates evaluate him as a boss, an employee, a communicator, and a human being, and then they help him use what they’ve said to analyze and improve himself. Every time my dad receives one of these evaluations, he makes all the people in the house read them and add their input, which is pretty funny considering how vocal we tend to be when displeased with one another. As my mom said while reading one report, "I’ve been telling you you’re closed-minded for thirty years now, but you were too closed-minded to listen to me!"
For some reason, the final chapter of my dad’s 360 involved flying him and my mom out to Captiva, an appropriately named island which I believe is off the coast of Florida. Apparently they thought the final self-analysis required a vacation setting; they must have really wanted to tell him off.
No matter what the reasoning might have been, the result was that I found myself rattling around the family hermitage all alone during one of the few times I was actually nervous about something. Having been plagued by a particularly nasty form of anxiety attack in high school, I swore off allowing myself to get nervous a long time ago. But it always helps to have someone around the house.
Actually, it’s probably best that they left. My mom probably would have been asking, "Did they call? What did they say?" every day until I went crazy. The TV never asks, "Did they call?", and as such has turned out to be a much better dinner companion for the week.
The one time I really missed my parents was during my dealings with the Family Auto Shop Guy. Thankfully, after driving my mom’s Chrysler DeathTrap GLX around town all weekend, I did end up with a free new tire. Of course, the tire wasn’t really free. I paid for it emotionally. The Family Auto Shop Guy, upon seeing what had happened, actually had the nerve to tell me I’d hit something.
"Oh, I’m about to hit something," I thought, and apparently he could tell I thought it, because that’s when he backed down.
The tire conversation was on Monday night, when I was already on edge. Monday morning, the apartment people had called me at work to tell me the credit check was about to begin. It was really freaky, mainly because no one on earth knows my work phone number. Not even my closest relatives. I don’t even have my own phone at work, which is how I know it’s a good job. If anyone did know my number, my mom would be calling every day for some ridiculous unnecessary reason, and I’d have to go use Jerry’s phone, standing over his shoulder at his desk and saying, "Yes, Mom, I’ll be sure not to park on Dad’s side of the driveway tonight…. Yeah, I’ll pick up some milk and a TV Guide on my way home…."
The call was also freaky, of course, because a stranger was about to research me, and the product of that research was to determine my living status. I didn’t think I really had anything to worry about, really. Nothing serious. Sure, my savings account only had three dollars in it, but overall I was in good financial shape. Everything would be aces as long as they didn’t find out about the cable bill.
When I was a youngster at SLU, in the days before SLU struck a campus-wide deal with the cable company, each individual student had to deal with the cable company one-on-one. At the end of every school year, one had to announce to the cable company that he/she would be moving out of the dorms and hand over the cable box. I did this after my sophomore year, only to discover in September that the cable company had billed my empty room all summer long. They seemed to think I owed them money.
"Our records show you as having cable from September to August of this year," the woman said when I called them angrily.
"But… dorm… moved… whole campus… canceled service… same day… logically…" I sputtered through disbelief and fury. My former roommate, whose name was not on the cable bill, sat beside me and watched in great amusement.
"I’m sorry, sir," she snipped nasally. "You owe us for everything after your last transaction in May."
"And what," I asked, "was my last transaction in May?"
"You turned in your cable box."
I coughed, having suddenly choked on my own saliva. "I turned in my cable box?"
"Yes sir."
"I turned in my cable box, the thing that enables me to watch cable, in May, and then proceeded to keep cable for an additional three months? That is your assertion?"
"Sir, it’s not my business how you…"
"I want you to understand something, ma’am. I will never pay this bill. Ever. There is nothing that can happen to me that will make me give you this money. And, well, I just wanted to make sure you knew that." Click.
Letters came every once in a while, first from the cable people, then from some larger professional threatening company, then from an even larger professional threatening company. Every letter was addressed to a Jim Mrzkcowiczic. Since that is not my name, I thought it best to leave the letters, unopened, on the floor of the lobby. Eventually, I moved out of the building.
No one had spoken of the cable incident in years. But, with my luck, the apartment people would somehow end up on the phone with the nasal cable woman and it would be just enough to keep me at home for another few months. This is the way my mind works in an anxious situation. So I fretted.
They told me Monday morning to call back that evening, that things should be settled by then. When I called back, I was told the woman in charge of such things had gone home early, but that she’d be there first thing the next morning. The next morning, the person who answered the phone had no idea who I was and could find no record that a credit check had been performed. She could, in fact, find no record that I had ever even been in the office at all. I asked if she had a record of the check I’d given them, and if maybe the bank might have a record of them cashing it. She promised to call back very soon.
While this did not inspire much confidence, I had other things on my mind. Jobst, a coworker of mine, announced that he had received a better job offer elsewhere and would be leaving us. While such a departure is like a death in the family to an office as small as mine, my sadness over seeing him go was mitigated by a covetous lust for his parking space. My office is so small, you see, that the parking lot only has room for eight cars. There are eleven of us. As the office youngster, I found myself parking in the mud across the street at a spooky-looking printing press for four months. Even though I usually got to work before several other people, while several good spaces remained available, I still had to park across the street. I guess the fear was that latecomers would pull into the good lot, only to find themselves without a space and needing to somehow turn around and back out of the narrow lot. The easy way to prevent this confusion, clearly, was simply to make me hike through mud every day (yet another way in which going to work was like hanging out with my friends.) The last time somebody left, Jobst got his space. I was due.
My boss Chris came in this afternoon and said, "Jobst is leaving. You know what that means."
"I get his space!" I trilled.
"Actually, no," said Chris. "You get his job. And his salary. And his space."
"Shwe huh?" I said.
"You’ve always done more than we expected you to since we hired you," Chris said. "Technically, you’ve never actually done the job we hired you for, especially since we found out you could write HTML. You practically do his job right now. It’d be easier to train a new person to do your job than it would be to replace him with a new guy. So, congratulations."
And that was that. A few hours later, the apartment people confirmed my acceptance, and in one day I’d gotten a promotion, a raise, an apartment, and a mud-free parking space. If the nasal cable woman would have called to apologize and SLU had burned down, it would have been the perfect day. I even got a free tire.
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1/30/98
It’s been a blur these last few days. There are mornings when I get to work, and it feels like I never left the night before. I don’t do enough interesting things during my off hours to make them memorable; they don’t act as bookends to my workday. It’s especially bad with my parents gone. When I have the place to myself, I rush straight home and sit there like a lump, enjoying the silence/television all night long. God only knows what I’ll be like as an apartment owner. I suppose I’ll get a phone.
I think I’ve been having such good luck lately because I brought my bad luck to work and spread it around. On Saturday, as I mentioned, I had a flat tire. Since that bit of dismal fortune, things have been going really well for me. Not so for my coworkers. Like all sympathetic comrades, they’d thought it was hilarious that I had to stand at the side of the road with matted hair, waiting for a man in a tow truck to come and change my tire. Oh, the misfortune of a coworker! How hilarious! They laughed at me all morning on Monday.
On Tuesday, however, Chris was not laughing when he came in half an hour late. The first thing he said to me was, "Good morning. I hate you."
It seems that Chris’s tire had gone flat on the way to work. He had to pull over and fill it with air just to make it into the office late. As penance for cursing him, I had to drive behind all the way to his auto shop, which turned out to be in Buenos Aires. It was not one of my more productive days.
The next day, Mike came in complaining bitterly of a tire that would not hold its air. We thought he was joking, but he hadn’t even heard about the other car problems in the office. A few hours later, Steve came in late. His tire was flat.
People in the office started looking at me funny. No one was laughing anymore. For a while, I worried that people were going to start frisking me at the door, looking for blades or jagged glass.
It blew over in a day, as these things often do. Today, however, Dan unpredictably stormed in from a late lunch and swung his arms around like some kind of broken turnstile. He was breathing hard; he didn’t seem to know how to talk anymore. His face had a little more pink around the eyes than was probably healthy.
"Should I call a doctor?" I asked.
"You greasy little toadfaced monkey!" he spat at no one in particular. He started to look a little like the Unabomber. "I… have… a flat… tire."
He pivoted on his heel sloppily and lurched out of the room as if he had an invisible rocket around his neck. He didn’t come back into the room all day.
I’m still not sure who he thought the toadface was. I think he blamed Chris. Memories around here are short; maybe I’m off the hook. Still, I hope Jerry’s tires don’t go flat. He might retaliate by giving me the flu.
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1/31/98
My parents have returned unscathed from Captiva. No word on how the 360 went; nobody’s sulking, so it must have been okay. They’re too tired to help me move at the moment, but I wasn’t quite ready anyway. This whole apartment thing is overwhelming now that it’s happening. One thing’s for sure; I’m actually glad I never unpacked after college. It takes quite a burden off of my mind.
One sore point: Dad won’t rent the U-Haul. Even though I promised him they won’t rent anything to me until I’m 25, he wants me to call around until I find someplace that will. I told him I’d pay him back, but he said it wasn’t about the money. Apparently, it’s about the chance to cause me inconvenience/pain for perhaps the last time. One more irritation for old time’s sake. In Dad-ese, it’s almost sentimental. I think it loses something in the translation.
To prepare, I measured my furniture and dragged my girlfriend over to My New Place. As we looked around the place, I realized that I really can be mental putty sometimes, no matter how strong I claim to be. The day I looked at My New Place with my mom, you see, she kept going on about how small it was; when I looked around that day, it was a little cramped. When my girlfriend saw it, however, she said it looked really roomy; when I looked around that time, it seemed huge.
I used to have my own opinions. Really I did.
(Later, I heard my girlfriend describe My New Place as "small" when she didn’t think I was listening. I don’t know what to think now.)
Growing Old Moment: In measuring, I marked my dresser as being 49 inches high. When we got to My New Place and I took out the tape measure, I thought, "That must be wrong! 49 inches is barely past my midsection! That dresser is huge!" When I got home, I remeasured, and it was indeed a mere 49 inches high. It seems that my mental picture of the dresser was still unchanged from when I was little, when it used to loom high over my head. I took it as a potent reminder that I’m not a little kid anymore.
Later, we went back to my girlfriend’s place to drum up some evening plans. That’s been harder and harder to do lately. See, my girlfriend lives in the same apartment building that houses my friends Greg and Nicole. For one reason or another, these are the only people on earth who I ever see anymore. Everyone else on earth could be dead, charred in a nuclear holocaust, and I wouldn’t even know about it unless Greg told me. Anyway, despite the fact that they all live about 60 yards away from each other, I never see more than two of them at once anymore. And I’ve been feeling lately like trouble’s a’brewin.
Last week, Nicole invited me and Greg and some other people to dinner. She did not invite my girlfriend, despite the fact that she (probably) knew my girlfriend was sitting alone upstairs wondering where everyone was. This morning, when I asked to join Greg and Nicole in a visit to the museum, Greg said matter-of-factly, "Well, you could come, but you’d be uncomfortable." It was a bad omen; I could see a juggling act in my future. Clearly, hostilities were bubbling, and it was only a matter of time before Nicole decided she hated my girlfriend or my girlfriend decided she hated Greg or Greg decided that he hated them both. And then, I would have to juggle.
Greg is my friend; Nicole is my friend; my girlfriend is… well, my girlfriend. If they started going at each other’s throats, and they all lived in the same building, I would have to join the Mission: Impossible team to hang out with any of them again.
"Was that your car I saw out front last night?"
a) kill them all
I knew d) was a long shot. Surely, it would be easier to kill them all. Unfortunately, I was fond of the shirt I was wearing today and didn’t want it bloodied. So, when we got to my girlfriend’s, we got on the phone with Nicole and she ended up coming upstairs. And, quite unexpectedly, we talked.
We talked as if we only had one hour to live, as if we were trapped in an elevator without fresh oxygen. Nicole had been waiting for an opportunity to get some things off her chest; it seemed like she’d been a genie bottled by her fear of how my girlfriend might react. (While my girlfriend is no Hurricane Sister, she has a reputation for being somewhat… volatile.) Nicole seemed to feel (and I don’t believe I’m breaking any confidences here) like my girlfriend only seemed to put an effort into dating me, meaning that she didn’t put any effort into being friends with anyone else. My girlfriend felt like no one was trying to include her. It basically boiled down to:
"I want to be your friend, but you don’t act like my friend!"
The womenfolk exchanged a level of comfortable honesty usually reserved only for drunkenness and bad John Hughes movies. It was refreshing.
I used to be rather skilled at such talks. Tonight, I felt like Gomer Pyle. "So… uhh… y’all friends again yet?" I was really useless.
Turns out I wasn’t invited to the museum because it was a date. At the Simpsons lecture last week, they weren’t staring at me because I was being too cuddly with my girlfriend; they were looking over because they were being cuddly, and they thought I’d caught them. So, a whole new element has been added to the mix: apparently, Greg has finally been inoculated against cooties. Good for him, I say. Good for them both. Everybody seems happy. The only way it could have ended better is if one of them would have rented me a U-Haul.
"Uhhh… n-no…"
"It was! Yes it was! You were visiting your little girlfriend again! You were right there in the building, and you didn’t even knock on my door on the way out!"
"The last time I hung out with you, she yelled at me for not knocking on her door! I only came over last night to get out of trouble with her!"
"Well, now you’re in trouble with me!" SLAM!
Good God, it would be like living in the dorms all over again. I don't want to get into a situation where everybody wants my time and nobody wants to talk to any of the others. I don’t have the strength to play the friend-juggling game anymore, so clearly I had to
b) start parking my car behind the building and wearing elaborate disguises
c) start dating Greg and Nicole
d) see if there wasn’t some way to talk the whole thing out.
"I want to act like your friend, but you don’t act like my friend!"
"But I like you!"
"Well, I like you too!"
(hug)
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