Would you introduce your family to this guy?
Well, that's just great.
Long story short:
I really really don't want to write it again, so I'm going to look around when I have some more time this week.
For some reason, I have been unable to get internet access at home for SEVERAL days (I apologize now for any unreplied-to e-mail).
I could have sworn that the last thing I did online was post the July 4th entry.
But it's not here.
And I can't find it.
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Thoughts from today, as I began packing my life away again for next week's big move:
… Materialism is heavy. I'm never buying anything again as long as I live. After I get a DVD player. A light one.
… I should have never started buying these flippin' toys. I must have doubled my total since I got here. I don't even have enough shelf space for all of them at once; soon, I'm going to have to start rotating them like an exhibit at the Dork Museum. How am I even going to get them out of here without losing all the pieces?… This is penance for all the times I didn't clean my room ("but Mom, I'm only gonna take them out and play with them again tomorrow anyway!") and Mom got stabbed in the foot with tiny rayguns embedded in my carpet. I guess I'll have to Ziploc them all individually and toss 'em in a great big box like everything else… Why the hell is the Ewok holding a lightsaber? Does someone come in here and play with these while I'm at work or something? Or did I just not notice the Ewok Jedi in the last movie?…
…How sad is it that there are enough different Harrison Ford action figures to fill an entire case? How sad is it that I bought them all? Han Solo. Deluxe Han Solo in fighting stance. Han Solo in a giant brick. Han Solo in rugged snowsuit. Han Solo in "Kiss the Cook" apron with dough-kneading action. Deluxe Kiss the Cook Han with puffy chef's hat and a tray of muffins. $5.99, $5.99, $5.99, $5.99, $5.99….
Oh well. Some people spend a fortune on spoiled grape juice that's too expensive to drink. Some people have towels in their bathroom no one's allowed to touch. I have $1000 worth of little plastic men. (Probably more than $1000 if I'd kept them in their packages. C'est la vie.)
… I must have like 200 CDs here, and I can see about three I've listened to since I got out of college. I ought to just pull out the Sinatra and the Beatles out and sell the rest to skeet shooters. Hey, "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat"! Thank God those twenty dollars didn't stay in the bank! I don't know what I would have done without this the two times I listened to it! Ah, the "must impress Karen with my knowledge of Andrew Lloyd Webber" stage. What fun it was to be sixteen; too bad I got tired of listening to Karen before I got tired of listening to the CD… is it just because I'm getting old that I just do not get excited about bands anymore? I go to the music store at the mall every time I'm there, and I really really try to buy something every time, but I just can't do it. I can drop like thirty dollars on dinner and not blink, but hand me an untested CD and I can't make the commitment.
…I have more Greatest Hits CDs than anyone on earth. I hate people like me.
…Good God, look at all the Paul McCartney! I have just an inordinate amount of Paul McCartney solo albums. He probably doesn't even have this one himself. It is time to finally confront the fact that I really did go through high school with the musical taste of a 45-year-old woman. What, no Phil Collins?… Come to think of it, I could actually stand to listen to some of these again once I'm settled in. The fact that some of it is complete corn actually makes me like it more. Just reading these titles brings a smile to my face. Cheesy sometimes, doesn't take itself seriously… I could have listened to worse during my developmental years. I don't have the collected works of Tone Loc or anything. I believe I am comfortable with dorkhood. In fact, I think I'll listen to this one right now….
… I wonder where Tone Loc is at this very moment. Probably in a smaller apartment than this one.
… I should take care to ensure that this picture doesn't get ruined in the move. It's the nicest thing on the wall, even if it was an anniversary present. I guess I should be proud that I can look at it without getting upset. It's nice to remember what it means not to be angry all the time… I only have sparse surliness now, like when she comes to me with relationship problems, and the problem turns out to be "I don't know how we'll ever last; he's just so perfect!" and I have to struggle to say something diplomatic like "Please die now." I assure you, she never complained to anyone that I was too perfect. But once I get past that, I'll be golden. I'm glad I didn't tell her to go to hell during the breakup. We seem to have reached that rare plateau for exes, the past-all-that friendship. Like Jerry and Elaine on Seinfeld, but hopefully less shallow and self-centered. Maybe funnier. And with fewer sweaters. And without Kramer. Unless you want to think of her new guy as a Kramer figure, which actually has some appeal come to think of it.
I wonder when that happened. When it stopped being, "Sob!… she gave me this image of beauty, but when I gaze upon it I see only her betrayal! Sob!" and started being, "Hey, somebody else has to put up with all her bulls@%# now, and I still get this cool picture!"
Maybe I've just gone loopy. Must be the fumes from the new shower curtain.
…Gotta buy a battery for that smoke detector or they're likely to fine me. Or take me to court and sue me for the cost of a nine volt plus emotional distress. Funny how I'm finally getting around to buying fuel for a life-saving device now that I'm leaving the apartment, while it spent most of my stay sitting mute on top of my answering machine. One wrong move and I could have smelted myself. Good thing I never cook.
Yet again I turn into my parents, cleaning things up and making things livable so I can move away. I remember when my folks moved, and I'd go home and see Dad redoing the gutters or painting the living room and say, "Gee, professor, maybe if you'd done this when you lived here you wouldn't have needed to leave."
For no particular reason, that reminds me of when my dad was teaching and decided to buy a midlife crisis racing convertible to zoom around in, wind in his hair, shades on his face, cutting loose and breaking free, and then he came home with a convertible Geo Metro. He looked like he was driving a roller skate. It had a wind-up knob in the back. When he wasn't driving it, we'd give it to my cousin Timmy, who would push it around the kitchen floor and say, "Vroom! Vroom!" It made my car look like a Winnebago. When he got another job in finance, he sold the Geo because "a sports car isn't really fitting for an executive." If my transformation rate remains constant, I still have a few decades before I'm that ridiculous.
…What a nice change of pace it'll be to go from living within walking distance of a Jack in the Box to living within walking distance of an actual grocery store, with produce and fresh fruit and all the other stuff I'll walk past on my way to the TV dinners. Of course, if I walk to the store as often as I walked to Jack in the Box here, it won't make much difference. If I play my cards right, I'll be able to lie down and roll to the friggin' store this time next year.
…I wonder if I have room for a bike in the new place. Not a real one; one of those human hamster wheels for the living room. I don't feel quite comfortable exercising in public, and if I did, I wouldn't need the bloody bike in the first place.
…Note to self: see about keeping current phone number. You move and forget to update everybody, you end up dropping off the face of everybody's planet. No more planet dropping this year, thanks very much.
…Oh, and I need to mail the @%#$# card to the gas company. What a freak-out. This will be the first place I've ever lived with a gas stove. I don't know that I can be trusted with fossil fuels and fire. Sure, millions of people use it every day without incident, but millions of people can also have a pet for more than a day before trying to flush it down the toilet while it's still alive. Plus, you never hear about a city block getting evacuated due to a deadly electricity leak. Of course, again, it probably won't matter considering how often I cook.
How often I cooked. Past tense. New apartment, new habits. That's the promise to me from me. This time, it will be different.
Just like it was last time.
Except for longer. Probably.
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New winner for best way anyone has ever found this site (according to my visitor information)= typing "lingerie theft" into Yahoo. I come up #38 for "lingerie theft." This means a) someone was really, really looking for stories about lingerie theft and b) they thought that, from the looks of it, my site was a good place to find some.
I can only guess why I come up in the top 40 lingerie theft sites in Yahoo. (I'll probably be in the top ten soon if I keep saying "lingerie theft" on this page. Lingerie theft. Lingerie theft.) Almost makes me want to make something up, but even as a would-be creative writer I just can't convincingly tell a story about stealing bras.
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I've been thinking a lot today about entitlement.
For some reason, it seems like everyone around me is trying to collect some perceived debt from the universe. On the way to work today, I saw something that happens all too often, something which I may even do without realizing it. I was waiting at a red light that seemed like it would outlast my gas tank/my lifespan/the half-life of uranium. When it finally turned green for those few precious moments, there were about ten cars in front of me. The light allowed about six cars to pass unmolested before going red again. When it did turn red, the remaining four cars in front of me just went ahead and drove through it anyway. It seemed like more than just running a red light, though; it seemed very much like the drivers had decided that they had been made to wait unjustly, like the light had anthropomorphized Beauty and the Beast-style and done a little song and dance number about screwing them over. There was a definite sense of, "You've pushed me around long enough, Blinky! VROOM!" The point was driven home when I stopped at the red and the guy behind me honked at me for what seemed like ten seconds. "BEEEEEP! Dammit, you moron! That light owes me!!!"
(That ended up putting a big smile on my face, because when I did go the guy behind me quickly got fed up with the fact that I was gonna do the speed limit, cut me off, and flipped me off. The last thing I saw as he sped away was the great big Jesus Fish on the back of his pickup. "What a splendid endorsement! Jesus would be proud, but I'm afraid that's only half of the peace sign, sir! Go with God!")
You'll notice when this happens that it sets up a chain reaction. People in traffic decide that the light kept them down too long or was green too briefly, that they were made to wait unfairly and were owed the chance to run the red. When the light on the intersecting street turns red, all those people decide that they were totally screwed over by the jerks who ran the red on the first street, and so they get a free spin too. It's only 8:30 in the morning, and everybody on Manchester Road is already acting like it's the end of a Popeye cartoon. "That's all I can stands, I can't stands no more!"
I feel like I've gotten a pretty raw deal a few times in the last several months, both in traffic and in more personal ways I've beaten to death and buried poorly in earlier entries. But that doesn't give me a score to settle with the universe. I'm not going to get what's mine, whatever the hell that means. I just don't where everybody seems to be getting the idea that they have a "get out of jail free" card.
I might not have given it any more thought if not for an all-too-common occurence at work. I have a new client who has made a frequent habit out of the following behavior:
He will have some asinine question or concern, easily asked and answered in e-mails of approximately six words. I imagine him bolting upright in bed in the middle of the night and saying, "My site takes Visa! I wonder how THAT will affect things?!" and pacing his bedroom floor until he knows I'm supposed to be at work. He then calls at 9:01, only to call three more times throughout the day to see if my original answer has changed.
It should be noted that this client purchased the smallest available service from my company. It is essentially the equivalent of buying a small sundae at the McDonald's drive-thru, and then doing laps around the building in your car for the rest of the evening to ask the window guy a series of questions about the sprinkles and length of the spoon handle. And then calling the customer service line when you got home to schedule a meeting with the president of the company.
He is also fond of calling at 4:57 to read me a dissertation he has been preparing since our 3:00 phone call. The dissertation is usually entitled, "Special Treatment and Me: What My Grocery Cashiers and Bank Tellers Have Learned the Hard Way."
This in itself is merely infuriating. I'm used to being infuriated by clients. No worries there. What I can't deal with is how he handles it when I don't pick up. I'll be away from my desk, or on another call, or trying to stop the bleeding in my ear from talking on the @%#$ing phone all day, and the receptionist will suddenly be standing right next to me with a grimace on her face.*
He calls me, and if I don't answer, he hangs up on my voice mail and immediately calls back. When the front desk answers, he orders whoever picks up the phone go and find me, wherever I am, and take me back to my phone so I can answer his @%#$ing question, which is almost always some variation of "What's up? Any news?"
"Yes, actually. Lots of news. I was going to tell you about it sooner, but I was just getting fitted for the bell around my neck. The collar is lovely, by the way, thank you. I just got finished talking to my contact at Yahoo, and it turns out according to their studies that your phone calls actually make web business go faster. Normally, one of our campaigns takes about two months or so, but because of your prompt memorization of my extension, they have already decided to declare you the #1 Site Online tomorrow afternoon at a small ceremony in the White House rose garden. In other news, toothless bald septuagenarian women are now the most highly paid supermodels, and there have been riots in Washington demanding the return of Crystal Pepsi."
My mouth hangs open when this guy calls, because the words for how appalling I find his behavior just won't come. My coworker Jerry says to me, "I'm sure you've been on the other end of that phone call before." I then slap my coworker Jerry, because I haven't. Ever.
I just want to go shake him.
"What am I, your gardener? You don't get to make me run every time you tinkle a little bell! That's not in the contract! Don't you realize that every second I'm on the phone is a second I'm not working on your site? How can you not realize how irritating that is?! Don't you realize that you gave us your billing address, and that I know where you live?"
Maybe I'm wrong. I'm usually wrong. But I mean… he does it every single day. What do you think he'd do if I asked him, "What kind of parents raise someone like you? Were they wealthy? Are you an only child?"
It all gets back to entitlement. He paid us like five bucks, and he knows his site is the best site on the internet, and so he thinks he is perfectly within his rights to single-handedly make me want to quit my job and raise chickens. We owe him. The internet is being unfair to his site; the internet owes him. I just hope he doesn't have kids, and if he does I hope they pay their own tuition.
It suddenly occurs to me that it might be a lot of fun to find out his home phone number after all this is over. RING RING! RING RING! "Is your refrigerator running?"
After all, he owes me.
*Not the jolly purple monster who used to sell McDonald's milkshakes. She used to walk around with him on her face, but the lower back pain got to be a problem. The other kind.
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Well, people do that with apartments, too.
"I didn't want to say anything before, but MAN that place sucked. Whe-ew!"(holds nose and reacts to imaginary bad smell) "What a dingy little hellhole!"
"You… you told me you loved my apartment. You tried to sublet it from me!"
"I was just trying to be a good friend."
"Thank you for your benevolent dishonesty. Remind me to check your pockets for silverware before you leave."
My patience for it had dwindled by the time the mover said, "Dang! This is a step up from that last place!"
"Thanks. Thanks for your support. The bed doesn't go in the living room."
My mother, who gave my old apartment the Mom Seal of Non-disapproval as I recall, seemed on moving day to be incensed that I ever lived there. I think having a big house practically all to herself for so long has spoiled her; she tends to refer to every place I live as my "cell." They stopped allowing her into my dorm rooms after the third time she tried to dig her way out. My downstairs neighbor was rather insistent.
"How can you live like this?! Why didn't you have them replace this carpet? Have you gotten your shots since you moved here?"
"Mom, there is no shot for dusting. And take off that biohazard suit."
Of course, the situation was worsened somewhat by the fact the moving the couch and bed revealed the final resting place of one or two lower life forms. But still.
I am ashamed to note how many people dress nicer to buy groceries than I do to go to work.
I'm not fit to live in society with other humans as long as my hair is this freakin' crazy. I look like Animal from the Muppets. If it gets any longer/denser, I'm going to need a neck brace.
"Kennedy curse"? Listen. Flying a single engine plane at night in bad weather without instrument certification is not a family curse unless stupidity is congenital. Having to hear about it nonstop? Now, that's a curse.
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12:35 a.m.
Every once in a while, we have to accept some pretty hard truths about ourselves. As much as we like to think we're all well-adjusted, decent people, our lives are peopled with absolute twits who think they're well-adjusted, decent people, and the numbers suggest that just about everyone is someone's twit.
Well, not all of us. Some of us share twits. Some twits have a very wide blast radius. But chances are, you're guilty. The best thing to do is just face the inner twit and learn to live with him.
I have few illusions about my shortcomings, but recently I've been grappling with one that will probably haunt me forever. I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that I will never overcome it, and now I have to find a way to live, prosper, and participate in society anyway. My problem is this:
I simply do not care what I look like.
On increasingly infrequent occasions, I will get nostalgic for the accumulated twenty minutes during which my old girlfriends were being civil to me, or I'll find myself with too much money all of a sudden, or maybe I'll have just hit my head really hard or something, and for whatever reason I will think, "Golly, it might be nice to be seen in public with a woman again. Or in private, for that matter." And I'll think, "This time around, after being out-an-out dissed for another guy, it might be nice to be the pursued rather than the pursuer. But no one seems to be pursuing…they used to pursue… Becky pursued… Jamie pursued… other than cynicism that could cut glass and Repetitive Furrowed Brow Disorder, I'm basically the same person I was then…so why no pursuit?"
At that moment, I will catch my reflection, and indeed, I am the same man I was five years ago: wearing the same tee shirts and jeans I was wearing five years ago, wearing the same shoes I bought five years ago, with the haircut I got five years ago…
And I'll think, "Oh. Well, that explains that. To pursue me would be to buy the house without shingles. I am a fixer-upper."
The other day as I was getting ready for work, I passed the mirror and actually laughed out loud at how gnarled my hair was. I quoted Jaws to the mirror. "'This was no boating accident!'"
The thing is, though, after thinking about how bad my self-presentation was, I went right ahead and went out like that anyway. Just kinda said, "Aw, geez, that's a shame," and went for the car keys. And my dad said "You went to work like THAT?", and my mom said "If you don't get a haircut you'll need to keep it out of your face with pillars," and women at the grocery store shielded their children from me as the bagger gave me a complimentary paper sack for my head (eyeholes cost extra). But God help me, all that stuff they force-fed us growing up worked.
I like myself.
I'm comfortable with who I am.
Dangerously, damnably comfortable.
I can't dress to impress, or dress for success, or dress under duress or whatever the hell other rhyme applies to me someday moving away from earning grub money (McDonald's) and moving towards earning huge, yacht, mansion, f***-you money (Jack in the Box). I don't have it in me. Everybody always says "be yourself, don't pretend to be something else to make people like you," and that would have been great advice if I had anything in common with anybody. As it is, I never gave into peer pressure, and now I seem to have run out of peers.
As is always the case, the main reason I'm thinking about any of this is there's this woman…. I met this local woman online several months ago, and I have a crush on her that would flatten a Volvo. As we began talking, I soon discovered that she has what may be the sexiest mind I've ever encountered. Eloquent, opinionated, informed. Makes Jane Austen look like Judy Blume. I'm nearly certain she'll have none o' the likes of me.
I've gotten comfortable with our platonic distance and started to overlook the glaring silliness of e-mailing back and forth with someone who most likely lives ten minutes from my present location about how bored we both are sitting at home on a Saturday evening. Recently, though, she put some pictures of herself online that made me rethink leaving well enough alone (something was bound to). She's pretty hard on herself in writing, but once I actually saw her she turned out to be breathtaking. Now I just have to decide exactly how to screw everything up, by doing too much or by doing too little.
It also made me think about posting some online pictures of my own, but I think the world is better off without them.
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Damn the milk!
How does this happen?
Once again, the milk is foul, and during its stay in my fridge I drank approximately 2 ounces of it. Dampened my Cheerios, put the carton down and BAM it's yogurt. I do everything in my power to keep this from happening, but I never outrun the milk to the expiration date. I buy it in one of those tiny little cubes you got in your grade school lunchroom. I feed it to the fish. I do everything but bathe in the excess. And I've thought about it. Still doesn't matter. It always goes bad before I finish it. It always goes bad, and I always try to drink it anyway, and I always regret that decision forcefully through my nose.
Me, of all people. I never believe anything I hear, and yet one time someone somewhere said, "That's not the 'drink by' date; that's the 'sell by' date," and based solely on the unsubstantiated testimony of this forgotten imbecile, I have been boldly going ahead and drinking the milk with a fork ever since.
I obviously can't live on my own. I'll die. I need to be cared for, like a prized rosebush or a very, very inbred dog.
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So, I've gone and gotten myself in trouble again.
Several months ago, a friend of mine was really grating my cheese. All kinds of personality conflicts and philosophical differences and general irritations started popping up. And I got pushed a little too far, and I got a little confrontational, and my confrontation got a little blown off. So I got hacked. I wrote about it. A little while later, things got resolved. Or so I thought.
While I was under the impression that my ol' pal was familiar with my page (considering the fact that the URL has been in my e-mail sig file for the last two years), apparently he was a lot less interested than I gave him credit for. While I thought we were totally up front with one another, turns out he never
quite
made it to my journal.
Until this week. Now, I've got a guy reading all this old stuff we talked about months and months ago as if I just wrote it yesterday. The Poisoned Pen of Jim has done this before, but usually in a "that's not the way it happened, you dork!" kind of way as opposed to an I-keep-waiting-to-answer-my-door-and-get-a-Punch-a-gram kind of way. It is a bad scene. No idea how I'm gonna fix this one. Is this the end of our hero…?
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