| I had a nice Cracker Jack surprise of an evening the other night, when my pa went out of town and I ended up eating dinner with my mother at a nearby steakhouse. I've been working at her for months and months now, and after using one of her very own patented guilt trips against her, I finally managed to open the vaults. There's been a sticking point between my folks and I for a little while now over the subject of the photos. In our living room for many years now, there has been a long box filled to the brim with miscellaneous photographs of various sizes, ages and composition taken by miscellaneous dead relatives of various sizes, ages and composition. (They weren't dead when they took the pictures. That should be obvious, but someone would almost certainly have e-mailed me asking if I didn't say so.) Every time we lose an elderly relative, we gain some photos. Family vacations from the 1940s. Weddings. Pictures of my mom being beaten up by my uncle. A neverending slide show of delights. The problem is that the pictures look like they've been sorted by a toddler with a bottle full of Stoli. As you look through the box, it says to you, "Hey, it's 1965! It's 1937! It's 1971! Mom's a kid! Mom's a teen! Mom's a kid again! Hey, who are these people over here? No idea, but it's 1982! Maybe! Or possibly '83!" and on and on. Now, just about everyone in my family older than my parents has passed away. My paternal grandmother, while alive, is not a reliable source of family history. (While making small talk last Christmas, she asked me when I was getting out of the army.) Painful as her condition is, it is also a stark reminder that my family history is passed along about as well as the collection plate at Our Lady of Kleptomania. I have no idea what any member of my family was like before I was around. For example, none of the men in my family, not one, has ever served in the armed forces or been drafted. Not Vietnam, not WWII. Why? Are we a family of club-footed goons? Was grandpa just the most well-connected street cleaner in north city? What's going on there?* Now, no box of pictures is going to change how tight-lipped and poor at storytelling my relatives are. But at the risk of playing my much-self-despised orphan pity card... I am adopted. For all intents and purposes, my roots start with me. I am my roots. While this makes the family tree remarkably easy to draw, it's also boring as hell. I've been left in the care of these generous well-meaning nutballs, and I'd like to know more about how we all became the way we are. I want a sense of history I can call my own, dammit, and I feel like that box would be an invaluable window. My parents, however, greet my suggestion that they organize and label these photographs (since they're, you know, the last living people who know what they're pictures of) the same way they might greet a suggestion to get my picture tattooed on their @$$es. "Oh God, not again," my mom will groan when the subject comes up. "There are like a thousand pictures in there. Half of them weren't even ours originally." "Exactly! Exactly right. Whose were they? What are they of? When were they taken? I have no idea. No best guess, even." Whine whine. "If you want them so badly, why don't you arrange them?" "..!... Because I don't know anything about them! That's why I want them in the first place! Listen I will buy the albums. I will make the labels. I will come over and help you any way I can. Name the day." "Ohh...! Can't we just burn them?" Maybe I have nothing to be annoyed about, but it still gives me a headache. Probably because they so often lament that we never do anything together. This would be a perfect and sentimental bonding activity, but bring it up and they scatter like roaches when lights come on. Nevertheless, somehow at dinner the other night one of my orations (entitled "Oh Well, I Guess I'll Just Die Without Ever Knowing Who I Really Was") miraculously got my mom talking about growing up in the forties and fifties. Perhaps in an attempt to pacify me about the box of photos, she told me all about how her mom and dad moved in with her grandma and grandpa for a few months, and how "a few months" gradually turned into the rest of their natural lives. I found out that there are entire portions of my family I've never even heard about. Of particular interest was her story about the day she went to pick her uncle Buster up from prison. He was an alcoholic who had apparently robbed a liquor store and gotten sent up the river for a while. He eventually got released, at which point my mom and grandpa picked him up in the family car, still in his black and white stripes and reeking in a way that my mom still remembers very well. Once they got him home, it was decided in a twist of midcentury parenting genius that this drunken criminal would just move into the house with my grandparents and their young children. It did not go well. Prison did not apparently do much to reform Uncle Buster, and his old ways did him in. Oh, and my grandpa was married for a few months before he married my grandma. Pass the salt! These are only abbreviated versions of the little nuggets I pried out of the vault at dinner. At the risk of being hypocritical, I'm not going to trot them all out here, but I did gain a wealth of knowledge about my family that I'd been waiting for for quite some time. And it looks like I saved the data in the nick of time, too; when my mom came to pick me up, she was using an Elvis lunchbox for a purse. I don't know what that signals, but it ain't good. *I eventually got an answer to this one a while back after some prodding. The answer was, "dumb luck." Like I said, riveting storytellers.
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| How I suffer for my gender. All my adult life, I've struggled with the fact that I'm supposed to be some sort of drooling pig. I've never had a half-naked woman's picture hanging on my wall, never taken advantage of the copious pay-per-porn offered me by my generous cable company, never lingered longer on that Pam Anderson show than it took to figure out what I was watching. As a man, though, it's always kind of expected that underneath this mild exterior I'm wearing a "Bikini Inspector" t-shirt bought at a truck stop. Well, not as a man, I guess. As a guy. Maybe that's my problem. I am a man, and yet I don't feel like a guy. There's a commercial for Oprah's new cable channel that has the power to ruin my entire day in a matter of seconds. The premise goes like this: a woman is on the couch reading a book when her guy walks in. He shoots her a come hither look and comes over to start making out with her. She looks at him as if to say, "Yeah, whatever, that's nice," and while he sucks on her neck like some kind of nursing wolverine she goes back to reading her book. Ha ha! Hilarious! Get it? Men need affection from women! Foolish, needy men! I am so tired of being told that women do not need my affection, and the related implication that I'm some sort of irredeemable horndog. Men are supposed to think about sex every five seconds? Let me tell ya somethin': I spent a good 90% of college forcibly prying ex-girlfriends off of my body with a big stick while shouting for help and frantically trying to keep my hand over my zipper. Now when I say that, I by NO MEANS wish to imply
a) that I am a magnificent, decent, or even memorable boyfriend All I'm saying is, Oprah's precious little commercial has not been representative of my experience, and it's part of a pattern of public discourse, a stereotype that makes me see blood red quicker than just about anything in the media. It's on my mind because I'm a big fan of this show called "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." For about three years now, I've been getting together with groups of my friends (usually half or more of them women) and watching this show. It's a good time. At least half of the major critics from TV Guide to Newsweek to Entertainment Weekly have named it one of the best shows of the year several years running. I have nothing to be ashamed of. Ya hear me?! NOTHING!! And yet.... Any time it comes up that I watch this show, any women present (women who haven't watched the show, that is) inevitably cluck their tongues and go, "Uh-hmmm. Iiii see." Because, obviously, I want to have sex with Sarah Michelle Gellar. That's the only reason I would be watching a TV show, right? I want to imagine having sex with Sarah Michelle Gellar. Sure, I work on the internet, where the pornucopia* is so vast that I could literally find two hundred naked women in the time it's taken to type this paragraph. But that doesn't do it for me! No! Every week, I leave the privacy of my home to go sit in a room full of other people and try to block the unending dialogue out of my mind for the ten weekly minutes that the rest of the ensemble cast gets off the screen because NOTHING does it for me like seeing a fully clothed woman do kung fu on a rubber demon. Oh yeah, baby. Please. If anything, the last three years has taught me that that too is completely reversed. Every week, whether it's Nicole or Karen or whoever, it's always the women in the room saying, "Look at her! She is totally not wearing a bra! And jumping up and down!" Meanwhile, all the guys in the room are shouting, "Ack! Snake monster! Look out, Buffy! He's got antlers!" and dodging the onscreen punches in our chairs. We could give a rat's @$$ about the bras. So the other night I ran out of blank CDs, and while at Target buying some more, I happened upon the Rolling Stone with Buffy Gellar on the cover. I liked the idea of a Rolling Stone article, because the geek magazines that usually do Buffy stories are such obsequious slobbering fanboys that you'd think the WB had some kind of mind control ray. So I picked up the magazine and tried to buy it. So as the magazine glided across the counter's conveyor belt, the cashier looked down at it and said, "Heh heh heh. Sarah Michelle Gellar. That's what I'm talkin' about. Heh heh heh." Oh, fer Chrissake. This is wonderful. We've bonded. Let's see how quickly we can get this over with. Bland grin. "Yes. She's not an ugly girl." He was just getting warmed up. "Look at that pose! Heh heh heh. I'd like to get me some a' that. I know what this is for." "I know what this..."?!!! Right. Because we're guys, and that's how guys think. I'm buying this entire 120-page magazine for three pictures I could have easily downloaded 50 times by now, because that's how I think. Literacy, shmiteracy; I wanted a "hard copy" of three friggin' pictures. That's what does it for me. Because frankly, I want to masturbate directly onto the paper. Actually, do you have a bathroom here?... I never even got to finish the magazine. Just having it on my coffee table garnered me so many smart-assed remarks I had to throw it away to keep from gritting my teeth down to nubs. Oink! *if someone hasn't purchased the name www.pornucopia.com yet, they really should.
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For about two days, we've had a snake trying to get into our building by any means necessary. I couldn't tell you what kind of snake it was, exactly, partly because I never paid much attention in cub scouts but mostly because I couldn't care less. It was about three fingers thick, about three feet long, and every time I went out to my car it was trying to penetrate some part of the wall like an invading army. No idea why. It's plenty warm outside for a snake now, but it was acting like it had left its car keys downstairs or something. Like the Snakes' Room was in our basement and he really had to go. Very insistent. We had been leaving him alone, 1) because he was fast and 2) because he was an unidentified friggin' snake. (Hey, there, striped little buddy, what brings you out here? CHOMP!) As much as we'd all love to have field day with the cold-bloodeds, we do actually have jobs to perform at work, hard as it may sometimes be to believe. Eventually, though, the snake actually began to interfere with work, in that encountering him was giving the women heart attacks and I was losing a lot of people that way. And I do mean to say this was only happening to the women. It was fascinating how the gender stereotypes came into play during this whole snakey diversion; to the very last person, the women were uniformly on their desks screaming "eeeee!" while the men were uniformly squatting in the yard saying, "somebody get me a pokin' stick!" Everybody played their roles. The Little Rascals would be proud. So, the snake was hanging out on the porch right by the front door, sunning himself and occasionally trying to work his way under the wall through a crack. This absolutely terrified the person working closest to the door, who just wholly, nakedly abandoned her job and stared at it out the window while writing a tearful goodbye letter to her loved ones. My Sweet, By the time you read this, I will have been gartered to death.With this, a couple of people had officially had enough of our flirtation with live-and-let-live naturelove. After a brief hunt through our inside resources, somebody produced a yardstick that, in a pinch, would make a fine pokin' stick. A couple of us went outside and had the confrontation. The snake was a LOT less concerned than I would have been if three giants came up to me and lifted me off the firmament with a huge pole. He just kinda swung there, as if to say, "So this is what it's like to be so tall! I've always wondered." Having thus captured the vile serpent, my coworker kinda looked around and said, "Uhh... how ya wanna do this? I guess I could throw it into traffic. Car tire'll kill it, don'tcha think?" At this point, the women who were huddled in the doorway watching us dispatch the beast, the women who had announced in terror that the serpent had to be stopped, all cried in unison, "Ohhh, don't kill it!" So the grown men stood in front of their office with a snake on a stick, looking at one another as if each of them were the biggest morons who had ever lived. "So, we are at an impasse, my opponents," the snake seemed to say while I pondered the costly alternative of incarceration and wondered if we had a big jar anywhere. Just then, the man with the stick had an idea. He lifted the stick over his head like a fishing rod and, as if casting for a sea monster, hurled the snake into our neighbor's yard. And that was that. We were pretty pleased with the humane solution to the snake problem, namely making it someone else's problem. We looked out the window at the next door neighbor's snake and patted ourselves on the back for about five seconds. After five seconds, our neighbor came out into the yard with a hoe and hacked the snake into itty, itty, itty bitty bits. Starting with the head. He looked like the snake owed him money. Maybe that's what the snake was trying to get out of the basement. We'll never know. After the massacre, he hoed up some dirt and buried the bits. He had probably watched us the whole time. He's a crazy old man. Although not crazy enough to chase a snake and then not do anything with it. That's about the best explanation I have for how work's been going for me lately. It's a rule of thumb I have learned over the past few years: my life is never in exact balance. Happiness is never evenly divided between the segments. If my girlfriend is leaving me or my car is on fire, work is quiet as a morgue. If nothing's going on in my life, work is insane or my family is at work putting me into a padded room. As it stands right now, I met this girl and it's going better than I ever thought possible, so of course work is like the Dresden firebombing. It's like a bad movie. I have really begun to believe there is a global conspiracy to waste my time. A guy this week didn't want to sign up with us until he saw what we would do for him, so I spent two hours working on the beginning stuff for his campaign before he'd even signed a contract. When he did sign up, I got his client info only to discover that he'd completely thrown out everything I'd done. I went to the kitchen to get some ice water to refresh myself and calm down, and the freezer door promptly came off in my hand. That's the kind of month it's been. And it's as if half the people in the office got a visit from the Men in Black; nobody seems to remember how to do their job all of a sudden. I've become a professional ghost writer; I spend half my day on problems that begin with people asking, "How should I answer this client's question?" and end with me saying, "Here. I'll write the e-mail, and you send it in your name. Keep it on file should the question arise again." I have changed my job title to Operations Cyrano. To say nothing of the fact that I have to leave for work at 6:30, along the way dropping by various coworkers' homes to help them dress themselves. It's madness. Finally today, for the first time ever, I had a coworker go over my head. A salesperson had asked me to check into something for 'em, and I said I would. I said I would because I always, always do whatever research the salespeople ask. It's not in my job description, I'm not required to say yes, and I rarely have time for it, but it typically helps us to spot potential problems long before they're problems, so I do it rather than saying no. This despite the fact that, any time I've ever gone to them and said, "We're having some trouble with this client. They relate to you pretty well; could you give them a call for us?" the salespeople typically respond by making a loud squawking sound and hurling themselves out the window. Well, today, I said "later" instead of "yes," and the salesperson told my boss to make me do it now. The important thing is, everybody learned a valuable lesson from the experience. Especially the salesperson. But I have a date this weekend! And ya know, I'll take the trade-off. The snakes could be living in my desk and I'd take the trade-off.
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A couple of days ago, I went to see the movie Gladiator and celebrate the opening of Summer Movie Season, a season that normally has me giddy as a clown at a kindergarten but this year just seems about a degree above tax time. Maybe it's post-Phantom depression, but this year's summer offerings aren't doing it for me. X-Men, maybe. I used to read the comics as a kid (and by "as a kid" I mean "until I got to college.") But it just looks like everything that always happens when things like that get adapted for the screen; the filmmakers say, "This has a real cinematic quality! It's just screaming to be made into a movie!" and then they set about changing everything but the title. A year later, you're sitting in a mulitplex thinking, "Why is Robin wearing Rubbermaid armor? What was with that shot of Batman's @$$?... wait, did they just kiss?!..." I saw the trailer for X-Men, and I'm still not sure what I was looking at. They were all dressed like Bono. If you're trying to adapt something that's strength is visual, and you start by changing the visuals, well, I won't be in line opening day unless it makes Roger Ebert ejaculate onto his keyboard. Sorry. But anyway, I saw Gladiator, and the experience gave me a new appreciation for how much I love my friends. Because for the most part, everyone in the theater was basically saying, "Ooh, tiger! Ahh, sword! Hit tiger with sword, big beefy man! Bite man, tiger!" Meanwhile, I'm sitting there and on either side of me I'm hearing, "They didn't have metal spoons...! Thumbs up meant 'kill him,' not 'let him live'...! Marcus Aurelius was already dead...! Oh, he would never go all the way out to the Germanic battlefield! Why don't you just have him arriving by helicopter while you're at it?!" I just wanted to push up the armrests and give everybody a big hug for being in my life. I can't explain it articulately. I did kinda like the movie, although I have a hard time getting over the knowledge that, when ya get right down to it, a lot of the characters were real people who didn't do the things they did in the movie. I was especially stuck on the part where the leader of the world got into the steel cage match with Stone Cold Steve Austin. See the movie, and you'll know what I mean. ******* Typical. Today was incredibly, ominously overcast. Not a clear patch of sky anywhere in sight. The street lights turned themselves on at 3:00. It was apocalyptically creepy. But not a drop of rain fell until the very second I left my office and remarked, "I hope the sky holds until I get home!" At that point, it began to rain about as hard as I've seen since that time my apartment flooded last year. I ran out to my car, because for the first time in memory I had chosen that day to leave my car window completely rolled down when I arrived at work. In the fifteen seconds it took me to get in, my front seat was utterly saturated. I swore, rolled up the window and was on my way. About five minutes into my trip, I got the sense that something was slightly off. I couldn't put my finger on it. Trying to keep my eyes on the road in the downpour, I tuned out the screech of the wipers and took a glance around the car when the problem immediately presented itself. There was some weird dirt all over the car. What the hell is that? Is something leaking in from the windshield? It looks dry... and... white. Oh, you've GOT to be kidding me. Apparently, during the one day in recorded history I'd left my car window rolled down, a hapless bird had gotten a look at the color of the car and said, "Holy s***! That's the biggest flower I've ever seen!" He'd gone in for a closer look, only to find himself trapped by that eternal bird's dilemma, glass. Through some misadventure, the little freak wound up inside the car and, unable to get out, he freaked out so much that he relieved himself all over the dashboard. After piecing all of this together, I was angry for about one second. After that, the thought that the bird might still be in the car occurred to me, at which point I began to careen wildly down the slick, crowded highway as if in a car chase, frantically looking over my shoulder to at least anticipate the furious pecking of an injured flying passenger. Turns out I was alone in the car, but by the time I found that out for sure I was in no shape for human contact. Luckily, the only human I was set to come into contact with was a young woman whose company tends to make my bad moods evaporate. Although she was not particularly impressed by my new dashboard decoration. ******* Workplace Conversation, 5/12/00: SALES GUY: Hey there, Jimski ol' pal! ME: Hrmph. SG: Have you had a chance to assign anyone the client I just sold, www.wasteofjimstime.com? ME: Let's see... actually, it looks like that hasn't even come in yet. As soon as it gets to me, I'll let you know. SG: Okay, please do. They're really anxious to get started. ME: Understood. (three minutes pass) SG: Hey, Jameski-meister! Whassup? Listen, what's the word on www.wasteofjimstime.com? Who did you assign them to? Anyone? ME: No. I haven't even seen their information. As far as I know, they haven't even paid. I will, I promise, tell you as soon as anything happens. While we're on the subject, I feel you should know that I am having a rather cranky week, and if you ask me about it again I will be forced to kill you on principle. SG: Ha ha! I understand, sorry about that, Jimskini. ME: Ha ha, no. No, you don't understand. Look at my face. I'll push you out the window with a golf club up your @$$. SG: Gotcha. (one minute passes) SG: Yip yip yip yip yip! ME: I'm sorry. Did you just run to my ankle and start yapping like a little dog? SG: No, I actually came in and asked about www.wasteofjimstime.com again. It only reminded you of a little yapping dog. I vaguely remember you hinting that I shouldn't ask any more, but they really want us to get started working with their site. ME: I see! (to random copy writer) You there! I'm assigning you www.wasteofjimstime.com! Congratulations! Write something about it! Anything! WRITER: But I don't have any of their information! ME: No matter! Go to the site and improvise! WRITER: Their... their site doesn't seem to be loading. I think it's down or something. SG: Oh, they don't have a site yet. The site won't be up for another month or so. (written in loving memory of Sales Guy, who died quite tragically after accidentally falling out a window, being dragged back into the building by his head, and accidentally falling out a window again.)
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My landlord looks at me funny. This is something that's happened a couple of times in the last few months. I'll be going about my day-to-day life, usually going to or from my car, when I'll see the man who runs my building doing something managerial or custodial. And as I approach him I say, audibly and cheerily, "Hi there!" ...and he just kinda looks at me. Says nothing. Has little if any facial expression. Certainly no smile. Might be thinking, "Was he talking to me?" Might be thinking, "God, how I hate you." Might be thinking, "Who is that guy?" Is certainly not thinking, "We live in a civilized society with rules that dictate a response on my part. I will say something back." So my hello basically is just left hangin' out there, like an unshaken hand that has to be awkwardly withdrawn. When it happened the last time, I really found myself bothered by it. It's one thing if some random guy does that stuff to you, but I really want to stay on the good side of the guy who controls my water. Eventually, I am going to break my air conditioner or cram some tar down the garbage disposal or something, and when that day comes I don't need to be on anybody's enemies list. At least not without knowing what exactly I did to end up there. What would irritate him?... Well, when I first checked the place out, they didn't do a background check or credit check on me, but they did ask me if I was quiet 37 times in one visit. Oh, and what high school I went to. (They nodded approvingly at my choice as a 13 year old before handing me my lease.) I have to wonder, who answers that question the wrong way? "Are you quiet?" "HE-ELL NAW! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!" Not very effective screening, if you ask me. I don't throw any parties. To my knowledge, no one's ever had any reason to complain about me as a neighbor. It's probably nothing, but I just find it vaguely unsettling, like finding out somebody died in your apartment. ******* Mother's Day was a nice diversion, with Mom being as Mom as always. I was talking to her earlier in the week, and she started asking me what I wanted for dinner on Mother's Day, because she was trying to decide what to make. As if I'm gonna come over to celebrate Mother's Day and make her cook something for me. From anybody else, it would be unusual. Not that my cooking is an acceptable way of saying, "Thanks for the last quarter century." We had some tasty take-out, and a good time was had by all.
Advanced Family Dynamics: End result: earlier in the week, my mother has to call my sister and remind my sister to call her for Mother's Day to keep from upsetting my father. She did call, praise Jesus, and the Defcon was downgraded and everyone could relax again. Except her, the poor girl. See, Sis recently had this problem where she failed to grasp that the checks we write are supposed to correspond with money that's actually in our bank account. Some fees resulted. Fees do not go over well at my house. So, after the family holiday phone pleasantries and a nice family portrait that involved my parents and I waving the phone at the camera, my dad put her on speakerphone and made her balance her checkbook for him right there on the phone for twenty minutes. He had all the math done already, but he wanted her to do it for him again, out loud, over the speakerphone in our kitchen. Just in case actually bouncing the checks hadn't humiliated her enough. The two things I found morbidly funny about this little scene are 1) Dad thinks that this is a good, helpful thing for him to be doing to her, and 2) he is often heard to remark, "Your sister's always so talkative with you on the phone. Why doesn't she ever have that much to say to me?" There really is no nice way to say, "Dad, you piss her off."
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At lunch today with my coworkers, I borrowed a trick from grade school and officially announced a Do-Over on the week. It was an idea that's time had come. Monday at work was a complete wash, and Tuesday was faring no better thanks to the continued Global Conspiracy to Waste My Time. It was nearly to the point where I was spending hours on huge, detailed reports as special favors to people, and they were writing back saying, "This is close to what we had in mind... but go back through it and capitalize every other letter so it looks like something you'd find in a chat room. And make every third line of text red. Thanks!" (Happens every time. We have a certain way of doing things, but every time Joe Client asks, "Would it be a problem if you changed one leettle thing?" we say yes.... and the next thing ya know, one little thing is fifty things, the contract is forty-seven pages long, my other clients hear from me so rarely they start sending funeral flowers to the office and our company name's been legally changed to Joe Client is the Center of the Universe .Com. I once joked that a client could try to add a line to the contract saying I had to wash his car and my boss'd give me a sponge and bucket, at which point I found out that we did have a sponge and bucket in the front closet if the need arose.) Calling the Do-Over was like magic. I felt better. I vowed it would be a good day even if I had to start it ten more times (or, preferably, end it at like 3:00) and that was all it took. Everything quieted down and I was able to make it home alive. I may restart every day at 1:00 from now on. ******* The circle of life continues rolling on over me. Another transition period is upon us, as a bunch of the old school chums get out of their grad school programs and start the continental drift again. Karen, who by luck and default has become one of my oldest and most enduring friends, is out of school and just took a job several hundred miles away. She'll be back to rejoin her family in a year or three, I suspect. No one who's from here is ever gone long; like spawning salmon, they end up settling here no matter how much they hated it when they left, often returning inexplicably, as if God had been moving them around a great big Monopoly board the whole time. Well, maybe nothing as involved as Monopoly. Candyland, maybe. Nevertheless, it really pains me to see her go, even if her departure is as temporary as I hope it is. So, Karen and my friend Kathleen and a couple of other people are migrating away, just as Nicole and Greg did a few years ago and the rest of the College Gang before that. This time though, as this crew heads out, a bunch of the old people are rotating back in again. Nicole's set to come back to town, as is Ken, one of the few people who knew me when I was 14 and still talks to me anyway. (The Ken arrival is tinged with a definite seasoning of eerieness, and not just because he's gonna be a teacher at our high school. See, we both went to school with a guy who always seemed to be where Ken wanted to be. Ken wanted to learn to play the guitar; this guy was in a rock band. Ken got into his dream school in Boston; this guy got into Harvard. Ken liked a girl; the girl had a ridiculous crush on this other guy. So Ken got a job at this school, but he didn't get the job he really wanted... because they'd just given it to the other guy. I didn't know whether to laugh or shudder, so I did both. At the same time, I was friends with the other guy too-- I was friends with him before Ken befriended me, ya know, just to keep everything consistent-- so I'm glad to hear he's rotating back in as well.) The more these transitions happen, the more I look at my own life and wonder if I didn't settle in too quickly. Maybe I should be bouncing around the country, getting extra degrees and getting into adventures. I always fear not being able to relate to the people who are really important to me. Maybe I'll move to Alaska. Whatever you do for a living, it's a safe bet they need one in Alaska. Strangely, it all seems to revolve around "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Karen introduced me to the show back in '97; Nicole was the one with whom I used to have Buffy Buffet with every week until she moved away. As one of them leaves, another appears to take her place... almost like the Slayers themselves. Weird. And also stupid, but that's me all over. In addition, I've also made an internet pen pal from here in town recently. Found me by this journal and said "hi." It's a preferable way to meet people, if ya think about it; it's like people get a primer on your personality before they decide whether or not to even introduce themselves. And I apparently come off better on paper than I do in person. All I'm saying is, I wouldn't describe myself as lonely. Ya just hate to see people leave after all this time together.
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