Relax, It's Hopeless @relaxitshopeless - Tumblr Blog

July of 2006

I always eventually come around to appreciating how absurd my actions are, but only after a significant delay. It's as if the executive and judicial branches of my mind are transatlantic and they can only communicate with each other using 18th century technology. The judicial branch will eventually find out what the executive has been up to, but only after a lengthy sea voyage to and fro, by which time the judiciary's opinion will have been rendered moot and the executive is off to the next misadventure. I remember right after I was accepted into grad school, I considered going to the bank and applying for a loan, my sole collateral consisting of the mere prospect that in five years I would be an English professor. I thought I could easily obtain "about $20,000 to play around with." But ultimately I decided to live within my means, although this ended up meaning that I charged my indiscretions to my credit card. When I dropped out of grad school three years later, I presumed that I would work "in an office" and earn a steady paycheck that would keep me afloat until my writing career took off. I even thought there was a decent chance I could crank out a novel in a month or two and I could thus avoid the necessity of traditional employment. When this turned out not to be the case, I went to a local temp agency in search of "an office job". Since I had a graduate degree in English (which is to say, I was an unskilled worker), I was assigned a data entry position at a mega-church. There were about a half a dozen of us sitting around a folding table. As I sat there, typing away, I was struck by the acute feeling that I had squandered the last six years of my life. The job was close enough to my grandmother's house (where my mother and I were also living at the time), so I went home for lunch, intending never to go back. My mother convinced me to go back to finish the rest of the day, but she couldn't convince me to finish out the week. The next day I sent the temp agency an e-mail claiming that I couldn't come to work due to a family emergency. A few weeks later they responded by mailing me a check for twenty-something dollars, which represented my after-tax earnings. Every now and then when I forget my limitations, I think about going to law school. But more often I think about what I would have majored in if I had the chance to do it all over again. For years I've been telling myself that majoring in English was a horrible mistake, but now I'm beginning to think that at least it was a forced error, and more importantly, one that I'd repeat. My life was going to unfold in an impromptu fashion anyway. I did end up working in an office. But that novel has taken more than a month or two.

#guidance counseling

Summer of 2012

I am a bachelor and as such I lead a rich masturbatory life. While I feel that there is nothing inherently wrong with my avocation of choice, I am also a slob and that is admittedly an unfortunate combination. If only I were a tidy masturbator! But after the act I find it nearly impossible to summon the energy to do any housekeeping. As as a result there is often, shall we say, paraphernalia, in plain view in my apartment. For this reason, whenever I return from work to find a note on the door from my landlord giving me 48 hours notice that he will be entering my apartment to inspect my smoke detector, etc., I groan because I know that I will have to clean my apartment. And I know that I will procrastinate and end up doing a superficial job of cleaning, and that my landlord will see the squalor that I live in. Once I walked into work and was stricken by the thought that I didn't unplug my iron, and I was torn between calling my landlord to have him enter my apartment and unplug the iron, or doing nothing and risk having the apartment burn down. (In the end I did nothing and eased my guilt by promising to buy a new iron with an auto shut-off timer.) In fact at this very moment, I am putting off telling my landlord about a needed repair because I can't be bothered to clean my apartment. Which doesn't make any sense, because he's already seen some horrible things. Last year, my dilapidated air conditioner wasn't working. As I was leaving for work one morning, I caught sight of my landlord and we awkwardly said "Good Morning" to each other. Mad at myself because I didn't have any follow up to that, I told him that my air conditioner needed to be repaired. "Let's take a look at it right now," he offered, and I immediately regretted having mentioned it given the abundance of paraphernalia on display in my apartment on that day. I remember trying to kick some of the more damning pieces of evidence under the sofa with my foot, which I think only served to draw more attention to them. Although my landlord handled the situation with grace, I was mortified. My mother has dementia, and when she still had her own apartment, the constant mess was an indication that someone lived there who was struggling to take care of herself. I remember shortly after I first became aware of the problem, I returned home after visiting her and I was saddened to realize that my apartment was just as messy as hers. I gave my apartment a proper cleaning, but it only lasted for a couple of weeks before the natural state of disorder set in again. If I were elderly and my landlord came in and saw my apartment in its current state, I wouldn't be surprised if he called social services out of concern that I wasn't taking care of myself. It's more than just laziness or a tolerance for a little mess. I live in the apartment of a depressed person.

#slovenly

June of 1994

When I was twelve, my father bought me a catcher's mitt at my request. A catcher's mitt is much thicker than a conventional baseball glove and it took me much longer to break it in than I thought it would. In fact, twenty years later, the mitt is still not broken in. Whenever I wasn't using it, I would put a baseball inside it and place the mitt under a heavy weight. Sometimes I would sit on the couch and repeatedly open and close the mitt while I was watching TV. But despite my aspirations of playing professional baseball, I never took it seriously enough and I never overcame the unwieldy, phone book thickness of the mitt. I remember I used it once for a few innings during an actual game, but after allowing a passed ball because I couldn't properly close the mitt, I immediately switched back to using the team's cheaper (but actually broken in) catcher's mitt. During my final year of little league eligibility, our team placed first and went on to city-wide competition. We traveled downtown to a field with actual grass in the infield (as opposed to the all-dirt infields of our home field) and dugouts that were actually below the level of the playing field (as opposed to our benches which relied on chain link fences to establish the concept of a dugout). During my first at bat, the opposing pitcher threw the first curveball I had ever seen. But instead of throwing it frequently, which would have been a surefire way to strike me out, he threw mostly fastballs and I hit one sharply into the gap for a double. The batter following me hit a single to left field and I foolishly tried to score from second base. I think I may have disregarded my third base coach's instruction, but I can't be sure. The left fielder's throw reached home plate before I was halfway down the third base line and the opposing catcher stood and waited with the ball for my belated arrival. But instead of going gently into that good tag, I swiped at the catcher's mitt and tried to knock the ball away. The umpire called me out, then he specifically pointed to me and said that I was out. It took me a moment to realize that he had ejected me from the game. I'm not sure why I did it. It was only the first inning and there was plenty of baseball to play. It wasn't as if I had aimed for the catcher's body and tried to hurt him - I just panicked and desperately tried to swipe the ball away. It was just a fundamentally poor decision, one in a series of many. I went back to the dugout and packed up all of my gear (including my unusable catcher's mitt) and talked to my parents about what had just happened. I said that I wanted to go home, claiming that I wasn't certain if I was allowed to remain in the dugout with my team because I had been ejected. While this may have been true, I have no doubt that I would have been allowed to watch the rest of the game in the stands to show my support for my teammates, but I was too embarrassed and so I claimed that the umpire had ejected me from the entire park facility. The next day I went to school and found out that we had lost the game. The next year I started playing senior league baseball and I developed a mental block where I could not return the ball back to the pitcher (an entirely routine act that is not truly considered part of the competitive aspect of the game). I never overcame what had developed into a full blown phobia and I soon gave up my dream of playing professional baseball. I have since developed many other similar inabilities to perform the most routine mental tasks of daily life (or, to be precise, I have transformed automatic tasks into mental tasks), but for the most part I am able to hide these shortcomings. I switched my focus to academic pursuits soon after that, a year of mock trial, a year of the quiz bowl team, but, like baseball, I never really took any of it seriously. I tied for the highest SAT score in my graduating class, but due to my slacker study habits and relatively low GPA, I ended up having to go to a local school (in the...gulp...909). And there are many catcher's mitts in my life that I have not broken in. My bookcase holds three volumes of LSAT practice tests - I think I may have browsed through one briefly before never touching them again. There are many foreign languages I have quit after encountering their irregular verbs, there is a guitar in my closet that I never properly learned how to play, and there is even spoiled food in my freezer that I have never gotten around to cooking. Who knew that baseball could be a metaphor for life?

#baseball

January of 2003

I've only hosted one party in my life, and I don't see this number ever changing. There were several birthday parties at my house when I was a child, but these were really hosted by my mother and therefore don't count. As an adult I've had people over for dinner, and while there was certainly a festive mood on these occasions (two to be exact, therefore the use of the plural is warranted), I also don't count them as proper parties. No - I've only hosted one party in my life, and I owe it all to a baroque piece of furniture.

My parents had a lacquered tea cart when I was growing up. I can't imagine where they got it from - I can't imagine them walking into a store and buying it, I can't imagine someone giving it to them, so to me the most logical explanation is that it came with the house. It gathered dust in the corner of our dining room throughout my childhood - sometimes a visitor would point it out and I would observe it with them as if it was also the first time I had ever seen it. Then my parents got divorced and my mom took the tea cart with her, then a few years later I went to graduate school and I asked my mom if I could have it. She said I would have to ask my father for it, but once I explained that she was in fact in possession of it, she agreed to let me take custody of it.

The reason I wanted this cart was that I wanted to throw a party at my apartment, but I was incapable of doing so without a prop. I told everyone that I would be hosting a proper tea party with a tea cart (wink wink). I even went through the trouble of purchasing several different kinds of tea, but the only person who accepted a cup was a devout Catholic who was anxious about alcohol. Not that there was that much alcohol to be anxious about - I think I bought a 30 pack of Miller Lite and a few bottles of Charles Shaw. I didn't even have wine glasses, but what was worse, I didn't see any problem with serving the wine in coffee mugs. I wasn't being ironic - these were plain white mugs, they didn't have hipster slogans such as "Virginia is for Lovers". I simply didn't see any problem with them until my neighbors offered to share their wine glasses (which were actually made of glass and weren't microwave safe).

It was a lame party - I think it barely survived past midnight. I didn't help matters by pulling my Collected Works of Milton from my bookcase and reciting, in what I thought at the time was a comically grandiose manner, a good twenty lines of Paradise Lost to a captive audience on my balcony. A girl I liked showed me the courtesy of listening to about ten lines before she said "That's enough for me" and returned to the main party inside.

For me, 2003 is remembered as the year I had a go at being normal. As I said at the beginning of this recollection, I can't imagine ever hosting a party again. And I can't see myself doing a lot of other things that I did in 2003 in an effort to be social. And while they didn't go well, I'm glad they happened. But I would be terrified of ever trying them again.

I have no idea where that tea cart is now.

#party planning

June of 2007

In the Summer of 2007, I turned in my emergency credential, stopped referring to myself by my last name, and quit my job as a teacher. I remained unemployed throughout the entire swimsuit season (which I vicariously enjoyed through viewing Facebook albums). As is standard practice for a teacher, I was still being paid for my previous labors until the start of the next academic year. I chose to spend more of my subsidized leisure time writing a terrible novel than seeking employment, which is not to say that I didn't strive to achieve a healthy balance between the two pursuits. In fact, right after I tendered my resignation, I answered a classified ad for a marketing position. Naturally, I presumed that, based on my complete lack of marketing experience, I would be developing advertising campaigns and my work would appear on billboards. I bought a suit from Target (which still serves as my Sunday Best to this day) and I made it through the first round of interviews. To be honest, I doubt anyone didn't. We were all called back to go through a day-long interview, which consisted of shadowing a campaign representative in the field. There were about 50 of us, applicants and campaign reps together, all of us mere kids just out of college, gathered at 7:00 A.M. in a West Los Angeles boiler room that was filled with whiteboards displaying target numbers and sales leaders. I still didn't get what was happening, so I left my car in the parking lot and I got in my campaign rep's car as we headed "east" to a "meeting". Leaving my car behind would prove to be a critical mistake, as "east" turned out to be El Monte, which was a MetroLink and two connecting busses away. The "meeting" turned out to consist of walking down the main street and cold-calling on business owners to persuade them to switch their long-distance carrier. So "marketing" as in tele-marketing, but in person instead of over the phone. As soon as I realized the true nature of the position, I considered myself marooned for the day, both because I wasn't entirely sure how to get back to West LA using public transportation, but mostly because I was so afraid of telling my campaign rep that I didn't want to do with my life what he was doing with his life. Also, a part of me wondered if this was in fact my life now. Fortunately that didn't turn out to be the case, mostly because I was so horrible at sales. Even though I was supposed to spend the first day silently shadowing my campaign rep, I'm certain I cost him a couple of sales. I had recently cut my hand on a shard from a broken toilet tank cover (don't ask), so after the charming campaign rep shook hands with a would-be AT&T customer, I would follow up by extending my noticeably bandaged hand in way of greeting. Plus, I hate people, and it shows. I mean, it really shows. My campaign rep was tall, had obviously played varsity sports in high school, and had probably slept with some of the female campaign reps who had gathered in the boiler room that morning. I had the sense that if I went back to the whiteboard I would find his name among the sales leaders, but on that day he didn't fare so well with me in tow. At the end of the day we hadn't convinced a single business owner to switch to AT&T. My campaign rep informed me that this was called "rolling a donut" and that he had never done that before. He said it as more an observation than an accusation. Thankfully, around 4 o'clock, we got in his car and headed back to West LA. During the ride back he asked me questions about the philosophy of sales, and I eagerly responded with thoughtful answers because I thought it would be awkward if I betrayed any disinterest in his career. I was supposed to have one final 30-minute interview with his supervisor when we returned to West LA, after which I would presumably be offered a position. I said that another interview sounded like a fine idea. When we got to the parking lot, I thought about leaving right then and there, but I chickened out and I let my campaign rep walk me back to the boiler room. Then I was escorted to a chair just outside of the supervisor's office and I was told that my interview would take place in about fifteen minutes. I planned on leaving as soon as my campaign rep was out of sight. Due to the commotion of everyone gathering in the boiler room to compare notes for the day, I lost track of my campaign rep after a few minutes. Figuring the coast was clear, I bolted out of the boiler room and down the hallway to the parking lot. And of course, just as I was about to exit the building, my campaign rep came through the door and accosted me. "Hey Richard, where are you going?" "To the bathroom?" I asked, since I was really posing the question of whether he believed I was going to the bathroom. "It's over here," he said, pointing back towards the boiler room. "Come on, I'll show you." "Actually, I'm going home. I'm sorry, but this job is not for me." Looking back now as I write this, it seems so ludicrous that I preferred to waste an entire day just to avoid a few uncomfortable seconds of saying these words, which I ended up saying anyway. My campaign rep tried to convince me to go through with the interview (I presume because he would have received a cut of any sales I made), but I declined his offer and finally made it back to my car which I had been so foolish to leave. I muted the radio and drove back to my apartment listening to dead air, as if I was giving myself to silent treatment. When I got home, I heated a DiGiorno's pizza in the oven and I ate the whole thing.

#unemployment

c. 1985 (and 1992)

I remember, sometime when I was between the ages of four and six, waking up in the middle of the night and vomiting. And because I was unfamiliar with the sensation of retching and had no idea what would be the result of yielding to it, I made no effort to find a bathroom and I vomited all over my bed. I was very disturbed by what had happened; in the dark I didn't know whether my vomit was my "insides" and whether something was horribly wrong. I woke up my mother, who reassured me, cleaned up the mess, and put me back to bed. Years later, at the age of eleven, I was lying in bed one night experimenting with my newly discovered erection. Through some peculiarity of my pubescent development, masturbation was at first entirely a mental exercise - for some reason it never occurred to me to take cock in hand. On the night in question that was still the case, but after making the serendipitous discovery that I could grind against my mattress, I came after several minutes of doing so (which reflects more on the awkward angle of my untutored approach than on my stamina). I was completely unprepared for the chlorinated fluid that came out of me, so much so that any pleasure I may have felt was stamped out by alarm. I had never experienced such rapid detumescence before and I wondered if I had broken my penis. Governed wholly by shock, I briefly considered waking up my mother and asking her, as she had when I vomited years before, to explain what foreign substance had come out of my body. But I soon realized that I would have to explain how the bedsheets became soiled in the first place and, calming down, I pulled off my bedsheets and resolved to wash them first thing in the morning. After lying on my bare mattress for several minutes, I realized two things. First, that my penis wasn't broken. And second, that I had masturbated. The reason it took me so long to realize that was because my Sex Ed teacher had described masturbation as "whipping your willy around till it explodes" and, not wanting to ask in front of the entire class what the fuck he was talking about, I feigned comprehension. Moreover, our Sex Ed textbooks, while replete with cross-sections of cocks (I always winced when I saw the urethra, which always looked so WI DE and vulnerable to entry), failed to include a picture of cum. I suppose I couldn't blame the publishers - what image would you present to a pubescent scholar? Our Roman Catholic textbooks only dared to include drawings, and even if had they been so bold as to include a drawing of semen, it would have conveyed nothing of its consistency. There were, I will admit, depictions of sperm, but even I knew that I wouldn't be ejaculating tadpole-like creatures from my penis. I just didn't know what semen looked like - perhaps urine, but much less of it? After I put two and two together, although I knew that I hadn't done any permanent damage to my body, I vowed never to masturbate again. As I said, I was too shocked by the surprise ending to really enjoy it and, more importantly, although I still didn't fully understand what I had done, I was pretty sure it was wrong. Plus I made a bargain with God that if he let me wash my soiled bedsheets without my mom finding out, it would never happen again. I didn't last a day.

#puberty

c. 1993 (and c. 1990 and Spring of 2003)

I believe it was in the sixth grade, a time when the youths of America are particularly vulnerable to peer pressure, that a representative from the D.A.R.E. program began educating us about the perils of drug use. My classmates and I looked forward to her visits, not so much because we were passionate about saying no to drugs, but because we were passionate about saying no to social studies. Plus, a substantial portion of D.A.R.E.'s budget was apparently earmarked for pencils which bore its logo, so we welcomed the complimentary writing utensils. During one visit, the D.A.R.E. representative asked if anyone in the class had been offered drugs. A few students mumbled their assent, and then the representative invited those students to share their stories. Since doing so would involve ratting out their friends or older siblings, no one volunteered. So of course, I shared my "experience" with drugs. I told the class that I went to a party and "pot" was placed on a table "in a bowl". Now, at some point in your life you may have told your friends that you were just going to stay in for the night and "smoke a bowl", but that would not be the same unit of measurement. Not at all. What I had in mind (as this story was entirely a product of it) was that someone had taken his grandmother's punch bowl and filled it to the brim with pot, then placed it on a table in plain view, presumably next to a similar bowl that was filled with potato chips. You know, typical party refreshments. Thankfully none of my classmates contradicted me, as the only parties I attended were heavily-chaperoned birthday parties. The representative graciously changed the subject instead of inquiring about these new pot parties that were sweeping the suburbs. I'm not sure how many years passed before I began to regard this story as a liability instead of an asset on my social balance sheet. But it certainly took years before I made this accounting adjustment. Anyone keeping track of my childhood narratives would not have been surprised by this tale of drug use. The foundation for it was set by a story I told my entire third-grade glass about playing catch with a friend. You see, little did I know that my friend had buttered the inside of my baseball glove, so that when he threw me the ball, it slipped out and hilarity ensued. The thing was, little did I know this friend at all, as he never existed. I wish I could say I've grown out of this habit, but at the age of 21 I was still padding my resume, this time the "Romantic Skills" section of it. I told my girlfriend at the time (who was my first) about my previous girlfriend (who was supposedly my first). By this time I had learned to base my stories on my actual life so that they had some plausibility, so the girl who played the role of my first girlfriend actually existed. I simply left out the part how I was friend-zoned by Day 1. I think I may have gone a day or two before I came clean to my actual girlfriend about Her status as my first, erm, actual girlfriend. I got off very easy, as She simply instructed my never to lie to Her again. I think She may have also called me a weirdo, but that was sort of Her pet name for me so I can't be certain. I'm still telling stories about fictional girlfriends, most recently to Canadian Customs officials. But, as I'm still building up the courage to tell those stories, they will have to wait.

#D.A.R.E.

2001 (and June of 2006)

In college I had the sweetest job. I worked for the university's A/V department, and while it may sound like a film appreciation club, it actually involved lugging and setting up equipment all across campus so that those professors who wanted to add a bit of pizzazz (in the form of a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation) to their lectures could do just that. Once I was foolish enough to admit to my boss that I didn't have any plans for the weekend (I honestly thought he wanted to hang) and I ended up working a vague event to promote school spirit (or some similar abstract concept). What was clearly understood was that I ended up wearing a lifting belt and setting up a rather complicated (and, more importantly, heavy) PA system from scratch so that a local "band" could play a free concert in 100 degree heat to promote ... again, I'm a bit fuzzy on the details. But for the most part this job was a breeze. Since I had shrewdly arranged my class schedule so that I was free on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I was given the plush "satellite campus" assignment. Due to a combination of exponential population growth and poor planning, there weren't enough lecture halls on campus to host all of the survey courses which drew 300-400 students each. Therefore, the university contracted with a local cinema located a half-mile off campus to use some of their larger theaters to host lectures in the mornings and afternoons. It made for an odd arrangement, as students in search of their ECON 001 class would be directed to pass through doors which bore a "Blair Witch Project" sign above them. My role in this production was that of a stagehand. I would arrive in the morning, turn on the equipment in three theaters (which took me all of ten minutes), then retreat to a converted janitor's closet which served as my office. I would then study for eight hours, turn off the equipment at the end of the day, and go home. The equipment itself was basic and self-explanatory, a microphone and what amounted to a glorified overhead projector. Every now and then there would be a hiccup - a microphone needed its battery to be replaced, or there was feedback because a professor discovered the secret panel which housed the controls and cranked up the volume too high. While theoretically I was supposed to be making my rounds, in practice I was usually in my janitor's closet poring over the Norton Anthology of English Literature. Whenever a professor poked his head in my study to report a technical difficulty, I would scowl at him as he if had raised his voice in a library. For my labors I received minimum wage. The A/V department had a base of operations on campus, which housed all of the equipment and where the technicians (even the off-campus operatives such as myself) would punch their timecards. During one of these domestic visits, I started talking to one of my co-workers about growing up in the Inland Empire. Somehow he assumed that I grew up in Riverside (when I in fact grew up in San Bernardino) and he asked me if I went to (Riverside) Poly. Now for some bizarre reason - perhaps it was the way he phrased the question with the assumptive "You went to Poly, right?" - but I claimed to be an alumnus, when in fact I had never set foot on the campus. Thankfully he didn't ask me any follow up questions, but every time I saw that co-worker afterward, I had to remember to pretend I went to Riverside Poly. I have no idea why I told him I went to Poly - it wasn't as if it was a prestigious school or there was any other benefit (social or otherwise) to claiming to have gone there. He simply asked me a question, perhaps even nodding while asking it so that I was primed to respond in the affirmative, and I said yes. This brings to mind another lie which I will have no trouble explaining. Years later (in 2006), after the failed migration to Washington, I returned to the 909 to live with my friend T. My friend was gracious enough to let me stay in his house for a few months rent free, and possibly he would have let me stay even longer as the only reason I left was because I feared for my safety and spent my last night in the house sleeping with a loaded gun on the nightstand (but that is another story). Finances not being much an issue, I made the vaguest efforts to find employment, the same type of passive, wishful hoping that constitutes my current search for a girlfriend. One preferred leisure activity at the time was to walk down to a local Mexican fast-food restaurant and have a large order of chips and guacamole (con queso) for dinner. I went there so frequently that the proprietor began to recognize me, and one day he asked what I did for a living. Naturally, I replied that I was a teacher. "Where?" he asked. "Del Vallejo" I claimed. "Oh yeah? My kid goes to Del Vallejo." "To Del Vallejo?" I wondered if would make sense to pretend that I misheard him. Then I realized that I said Del Vallejo first and that wouldn't make any sense. "Yeah? What's your name?" "Garcia," I lied. "Yeah? My kid's (X). Do you know him?" "No, doesn't sound familiar," I said truthfully. "Hmm. I'll ask him if he knows you. Garcia, right?" "Garcia. Del Vallejo," I said, returning to my disingenuous ways. "Alright, see you next time." "Hey, what's the deal with all that construction?" "Construction?" "Yeah, all that construction in front of the school." "Oh, construction," I said, pretending that I had misheard the word. Was it still too late to pretend I misheard Del Vallejo? Yes, it was. Plus, it was important to remember, that didn't even make sense. "Well, you know how it is with construction." "What are they even doing there?" "Who knows? But you and I pay for it, huh?" When in doubt, talk about the Lakers and complain about taxes. It's not a bad strategy. And I never ate there again.

#pathological liar

9/30/2013 (and a little of Winter of 2006)

Whenever someone asks me what I do for a living, I tell them I'm a paralegal. Since most people are only asking me this to be polite, they don't ask any follow up questions and the line of inquiry dies there. But occasionally an even more polite conversational partner will ask me what type of paralegal I am, and I will reply "Collections Law", which means at heart that I am a debt collector. Knowing this, you may now have the image of me calling people at their homes and haranguing them into paying their debts, but oddly enough the debtors usually call me first. Most of my job involves preparing and filing legal documents that, if well-received by the Court, are designed to motivate the debtor to call our office to negotiate a resolution. (By the way, you just experienced the opening lines of my first date monologue.) So, on the particular morning in question, the lark was on the wing, the snail was on the thorn, a debtor wanted to settle, and all was right with the world. The debtor comes to our office to sign the settlement agreement, but just as he's about to execute it, I stupidly suggest that he take a moment to read the agreement. He does just that and soon takes issue with a particular term of the agreement. What the term said isn't important; this is: he takes his hand, fashions it into a gun, and places his fingertip (i.e., the muzzle) directly against my temple. "I don't have control over these people," he says, referring to a term in the agreement which holds him responsible for the actions of third parties. "I'm not going to put a gun to their head to get them to do what you want." I tell myself that the gun to my head does not represent any malice towards me, per se, it's more of a visual aid, part of his presentation style, if you will. The debtor leaves his fingertip on my temple for a long time, all throughout the course of his remonstration and until I begin my response. Because I am frozen in shock, this takes awhile. Eventually, my response comes forward, which is I mumble that the attorney will need to address his concerns. In the end, the agreement was signed (after a mutually agreeable modification) and everything worked out. But for the rest of the day I felt that man's fingertip on my temple. I didn't do anything to stop it; I simply froze. And I tell myself that I was suppressing my ego so that the deal could be reached - I'm sure I would have felt worse if the deal fell through because I took offense to something personal, whether I was justified in doing so or not. But the truth is I acquiesce to strangers all the time, even when nothing is at stake. For example, in the winter of 2006, I was living in Everett, WA, a small suburb of Seattle. I was spending one of my days of subsidized unemployment walking down the sidewalk, completely oblivious to anything but the theater of my mind. Then a couple of cops stopped me and informed me that I had jaywalked right in from of them (which had the unfortunate quality of being true). They interrogated me for about ten minutes while they ran my ID through the system, offering advice such as "Maybe you should leave the iPod at home if you can't manage to walk and listen to music at the same time" and patronizingly asking me, "What are you doing to better yourself?" when I told them I was currently unemployed. Throughout the entire ordeal, I stared at my ankles (which I might as well have been grabbing) and answered their questions in the most respectful tone I could muster. In the end, my only punishment was the emasculation, as I was eventually dismissed without being issued a jaywalking ticket. At the time I told a friend about the jaywalking incident, and he thought it was absolutely deplorable that I didn't stand up for myself. "But if I stood up for myself, that would have meant that the cops' opinion of me was worth $150 (or however much a jaywalking ticket was)." I've always been torn by those two opposing forces: the desire to overcome my cowardice and the knowledge that in doing so I would only be succumbing to a different form of cowardice. And I suppose if I have to choose between two forms of cowardice, I will choose the one with familiar results.

Fall of 2002

Once a friend, who is Mormon, was kind enough to invite me into his home for dinner. And since I wanted to make a good impression, I brought a bottle of wine with me as a gift. I'm not sure what I was thinking. At my first place of employment a number of management were Mormon, so I was aware that they abstain from caffeine and alcohol. It's possible that I thought it would be something that the non-Mormon dinner guests could enjoy - it really is possible that I fell victim to that particular strain of stupidity. But I think it's more likely that I just couldn't synthesize the following two concepts: 1) my friend is Mormon and doesn't drink alcohol and 2) a bottle of wine is generally a welcome dinner gift. I honestly can't remember what my friend did with the wine. I realized from the surprised look on my friend's face that I had made a faux pas, but by then it was of course too late. The more I think of it, I'm pretty sure they didn't serve it. But what I do remember is that they were very gracious about it. I also think they were more horrified by the honey mustard salad I had also brought with me. At the time, I had just discovered honey mustard dressing and I thought it was a good idea to drench everything in it. I must have been using an entire bottle of honey mustard dressing per a standard bowl of salad. Oh yeah, it was a cheap bottle of wine, too.

#faux pas

October of 2003

After I realized that She was winning the breakup (which had been apparent to everyone else for quite some time) I tried to rally by asking out K on a date. K acquiesced, and we went to see a movie in Santa Monica. Afterward, we went for a walk on the pier, and I pointed out that there was so much light pollution that you could see more airplanes than stars. K was Greek, so I shared my theory that perhaps Achilles was a historical person, as in, he actually existed in real life. But instead of being a young warrior, the historical Achilles was a pudgy, aging general, never coming any closer to actual battle than the maps in his tent. And through the process of myth-making, this strategist was reimagined as a demigod, as if Eisenhower was remembered thousands of years from now as looking like Brad Pitt. Just to clarify, this is what I told a girl on a first date. K wasn't very pleased with my theory and she was quick to point out that the Greeks are a modern culture and that no one in Greece believes in mythology or Zeus. I spent the remainder of the date apologizing and trying to clarify what I meant. Needless to say, I went home alone. A week or two after that, I went to a Halloween party with Her and some of our friends. I can't remember why exactly, probably for no other reason than we were at a party and She was enjoying herself and I was (as I always am at parties) miserable, but I felt particularly crushed by our breakup that night. And guess who was also at the party - that's right, K! So I proceed to get drunk (but not even that drunk) and it occurs to me that it would really show Her if K and I started making out. So I start a search party of one for K and I find her, waiting in line by herself for the bathroom. Perfect timing! So then, without any preamble, I try to kiss K. She puts her head down and says "No", and then I put my head down, mutter, "That sounds about right", then I rejoin the party. And by "rejoin the party", I mean I plop down on a couch next to strangers and sit there for a half an hour with my eyes closed. Thankfully, the evening eventually comes to an end, but not before She and I catch a ride home with our friends. She tries to make small talk with me about the party, and I responded by nodding and grunting. She asks, "Are you nodding at me?" I respond with another nod. Then we dropped Her off at Her apartment, and that was the last I ever saw of Her.

#seduction community

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

Relax, It's Hopeless