The Clock is Ticking

R apologized. It all boiled down to the same argument we've had time and again--words on a page (screen) can never emote. While his intentions were without focus, what appeared on the page very much bothered me. On more than one occasion I've shared some part of myself with him and come away feeling a bit foolish for opening up. This time, it took several days before I did, and it came via his blog. Yuck. This after he stressed that he thinks maybe we should "re-audition" for each other.

Once I voiced my tentative thoughts and feelings, I let myself think a little about it. It certainly didn't hurt that after our conversation, I did stay the night and fall asleep in his arms. Whatever else is going on in my life, that is the safest I've felt before. But just letting me say those things (granted, it wasn't a long conversation or even in depth) and then curling up with me gave me a sense of safety, of no regrets for speaking. His blog post fucked that up for me.

Actually, the real problem is that he forgot his own teachings about seemingly harmless posts. They aren't always harmless just because the writer sees no harm in them. The reader, in the absence of clear intent, must invoke his or her own emotions, which far too often are not the intended ones. One things leads to another and someone's offended or misguided.

So, a word to the wise and the not so wise (in order that ye may become wise): Watch what you write. Those who are emotionally invested in your topic of choice may misunderstand your intent.

R’s been posting about me again. I should be flattered, I suppose, but I’m not terribly.

My boyfriend broke up with me last week. I was devastated, then calm, then pissed (because he showed his ass, and from his behavior you’d have thought it the size of a mack truck). I’m not grieving, there’s no reason to grieve a prick.

R's been posting about my "process" so to speak. He posted about the conversation we had the night he went with me to pick my things up from the asshole's house. I, at his urging, voiced my wonderings about the elusive "us." We dated for nearly a year about 2 years ago. When we broke up, we became the best of friends, and yes, we had benefits. Lovely benefits. But the wonderings I voiced had little to do with the benefits.

He said he got it..but his blog reads differently. Why must men screw around like that?

Pardon the rant, I just read that post of his and had to spill.

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Moving on. Do you recall your school bus driver, or at least have a vague memory of what bus drivers were rumored to be like? I had a run in with a real doozie this weekend (I coach speech and debate and we had a tournament this weekend.). I've had bus drivers that were total jerks to students, but never one that was a bitch to the adults on the bus. I can't recall the last time anyone yelled at me at 6 a.m. on a Saturday morning. Probably the last damn time I was a student on the bus.

Again, some things never change.

Went to Houston last night with R. Actually, some friends of mine from work were going to a performance of a local big band, along the lines of Ricky’s band in those old “I Love Lucy” shows. A friend of mine from high school plays tenor sax in the band, and I now work with his mother. Since R enjoys big band music, and my boyfriend’s out of town for a few more days, I grabbed him up for an escort.

Picked him up at his house, and then went for dinner. Somewhere between exiting the freeway and knocking on his door, I decided to go ahead and do what I’ve talked about for months. I got my belly button pierced. Really tame seeing as how I previously had a nipple piercing.

Dinner was to calm my anxiety before actually letting somebody poke holes in me. Didn’t help just a whole hell of a lot. I realized that when the guy (Thom, excellent guy if I may so myself) asked if I had any questions and I giggled really loud and said no. He looked real quick and asked if I was really sure. Uh, yeah, jus take my credit card and let’s get on with this.

Now, I’m not big into piercings really. The long-ago nipple ring was an ex-boyfriend’s idea and it was gone almost as soon as he was. I don’t like to look at piercings on others and they really don’t do anything for me—the belly button thing’s just something I’ve always talked about and it’s harmless. I have to say though, that I found myself studying a picture of a suspension (one of those things where someone’s got piercings at particular points all of the body—back, legs, whatever—and they are suspended by those piercings. Yuck.). As R and I talked with Thom, we discovered that he is on a team that travels all over and does suspensions. He’d been in Hollywood a few weeks ago and does the big HPEP show every year. Oddly enough, this made me feel less worried about getting my own boring old navel ring.

So, a few deep breaths and one unexpected pain later, I was done. I now know that I’ve got really thick skin, literally. Thom said I had the toughest skin he’d ever seen on a white person. I’m not sure that’s a compliment, but maybe I can put it on my resume’.

I also now know that a 14-gauge bar through my tummy skin actually feels like shoving one of those thick kindergarten pencils through my skin.

I told you that I wasn’t YOUR high school librarian.

Somewhere out there is an idiot who actually knows he/she is an idiot. Not only does this person know, but this person can explain why it is that he or she is just not blessed with whatever it is that makes us not idiots. I want to meet this person, because I want this phenomenon to be explained to me.

I can't handle idiots. I'm by far not the smartest person in the world, nor am I immune from my own idiot moments. I do however rarely show my ass to the world. At least not on a daily basis.

It just seems to me that I'm often placed in working situations that defy reason, largely because of the inordinate idiocy that is just seeping from the walls. My assistant is a prime example. When it's slow in the library, I pass the time (unless I have legitimate work to do) by documenting her idiotic actions and observations until I find myself overwhelmed. It only takes a little while.

Like today. The copier went on power save. Now, she's in charge of the copier--it doesn't like me for some reason, so I don't mess with it. She got up to run some copies for a student and couldn't figure out why the copier wouldn't make the copies. I knew what had happened, I'd heard it power down for the power save, but I decided to see how long it would take her to figure it out. Before it was all over with, she'd crawled around on her hands and knees looking at the power supply and surge protectors, had turned off her computer (to let the copier have more electricity?), called our help desk, and finally run off to the front office to run the copies on the machine up there. The whole time she was whining "I don't know what's wrong with it, it just won't work. It acts like it's been turned off (duh), J come help me." I at first pretended to just not hear her. Then I feigned ignorance--I mean, the machine never works when I mess with it.

But as soon as she walked out, heading for the office, I hopped and turned the machine on. It's nice to know that the stupid can always provide a little entertainment on a boring day.

Superiority isn't something that I typically seek out. I rarely try to exert it over someone else because I wind up feeling guilty and a little childish.

That being said, I've taken a secret pride in being a bit more technologically advanced than my best friend. I've been proud about because of everyone else I'm that close to, I'm the one scratching her head and looking confused when they start talking that techie stuff. (Well, except my grandmother, but one should be superior to one's grandmother in this area.).

So, it's been eating me. I do web design for several educational sites, own a kick-ass computer (even my love, the computer god, envies my computer), can talk anybody through the intricacies of Microsoft (and there are so many, aren't there?), own all kinds of gizmos for the computer...and I'm feeling small because my best friend has a blog he's been working on for a month. It makes absolutely no sense, but as I read his most recent ramblings this morning, I just couldn't take it anymore. I literally felt like I'd been one-upped and had to remedy it immediately.

Here it is...huh. Since he's "ahead of me" on number of posts, I'll have to one-up him by doing some design work.

It only bothers me a little that I'm feeling a bit childish. Then again, I work with high school students, it's probably rubbed off from them.