3:53 pm - Thursday, Jan. 30, 2003
just a fat middle-aged fool

THU 1/30/03 11:39 am

Just paid my rent and a couple of credit cards bills. Thanks to Cary's $50 loan, afterwards I had $49 and change in my checking account (I get paid a week from Friday).

I'll probably use it to buy food.

Right now, I'm making macaroni & cheese, from a box that was left out in the "giveaway area" of the apartment building lobby (When I looked on the box just now, I saw the "use by" date was last month, and the cheese-flavored powder was not as "powdery" as I might have liked, but we'll see what happens...).

(Had a mini heart-attack just now when my pager went off. I called JS, but he said he hadn't paged me. That happened a few times initially--for some reason, my pager would just page itself--but I thought I'd figured out what the problem was. Anyway...)

Got an email from JS earlier; There was supposed to be an agency meeting on Sunday afternoon, but it's been cancelled, because he couldn't find a large enough space for the price he wanted to pay (Now he's talking about something outdoors, making it a meeting/picnic, which might be fun. Certainly more fun than the "meeting" I was envisioning, where Jon would spend two hours yelling at us for all the stuff we're doing wrong. A meeting like that would be redundant; He already does a pretty good job of chastizing us in his frequent emails).

I actually took a "personal day" on Sunday, just to make sure there'd be no problems with me making the meeting (At one point, he'd said it was "mandatory", though later he amended that to say he'd like everyone who could make it to show up). But I don't really care; As I said just a moment ago, I wasn't nuts about going anyway. Then I developed a would-be conflict with the next Missing Breath rehearsal, which is Sunday morning at 10:00, so it's just as well. After Missing Breath rehearsal, which will take about an hour-and-a-half, I found out last night, the rest of the day will be all mine.

And speaking of free time, I found out something pretty fun when I went back to work on Monday; I have accrued a zillion hours of vacation time!

Apparently, I was unclear on how vacation time happens at Borders (I assumed after some period of time, you got X amount of vacation days), but basically, you accrue vacation time at the rate of six or eight hours a month (There seems to be some confusion on that front). And John C., the bookkeeper at the store, suggested that I take some soon, because he said there was a ceiling of how much accrued time you could have (Juniper, another coworker, said later that she'd called Corporate on this issue, and they'd told her that was not the case in California. It's legal to do in some states, but apparently not here).

Earlier, I seperated my giant bag of Jolly Ranchers into their respective flavors (I thought maybe this was a little wierd, but not too wierd; It's not as if I counted them or weighed each piece or anything). I just thought it would make things a little easier, and save me the annoyance of having to dig around in the bag for whatever flavor I wanted at a given time. I was also idly curious; The green, sour-apple flavor is my favorite, but it seemed like there were fewer of those in the bag than any other flavor (The other flavors are grape, lemon, cherry, and watermelon. They used to have peach, which I liked, but I guess they're not making it anymore).

And it turned out I was right; There were about half as many sour apples as any other flavor.

And I'm talking about all this other stupid stuff because I don't know how to talk about the thing I really want to talk about. I'm afraid I'm going to seem stupid and small, but any regular reader already knows that "stupid & small" is definitely within my normal range of responses to life.

I found out recently that Nick and Kyle have been "seeing each other". For about a month now.

I first had an inkling that something was going on the last day Nick worked at the bookstore; At the end of the evening, we were all out in the parking lot, and I noticed nobody was going anywhere.

When I finally rode away, I got about a block down the street, and then the light came on--"They were waiting for me to leave...".

Days later, I was talking to Kyle, about a movie I'd just seen or wanted to see, and she reeled off a number of movies she'd seen recently. And this is a person who, by her own description, "doesn't see a lot of movies" (Attractive people, even if they like movies, don't go by themselves, because they don't have to).

(Still nothing definitive here, but the suspicion was mounting...)

Then when I had the audition at Ed Begley's house, we were talking about Nick; I said that I was sorry to see him go, but that Borders didn't give him much choice, since they'd recently cut him down to two shifts a week.

Ed said something to the effect of "Yeah, and I can't imagine it was easy, with him and that assistant manager--Kyle? Kylie?--seeing each other".

He acted like he wasn't telling me anything I didn't already know--"They probably weren't being as 'discreet' as they thought they were being", he said at one point--so I acted like I did indeed "already know".

It was an odd moment for me. There I was, someplace I really wanted to be, at an audition that might be a nice opportunity, hearing something confirmed that I really didn't want to know, and I didnt' really want to be true

(I haven't mentioned this before now, because Ed asked me not to tell Nick that he'd told me, even if it "probably wasn't much of a secret". And Nick reads Diaryland. But since Kyle has since told me anyway, and I'm not going to be in the big show, it no longer seems to matter.)

Some time after the audition, I was at work, and talking to Kyle about the audition. I was describing the house, talking about meeting "Nick's dad", telling her how things had went, and so forth, and my intent was two-fold; I wanted to tell her about the audition, but I was also waiting to see if she would fess up to already having seen the house, or already having met Nick's dad, or anything like that (Why I didn't just ask her outright, I couldn't say. For some masochistic reason, I wanted her to tell me).

Now, I'm a lot of things, but "slick" is not one of them. I think it was pretty apparent what the subtext of my conversation was. So eventually, Kyle said, faux-casually, "Was the little sister there...?"

And I made the mistake of acting like I was some mildly-interested, emotionally uninvolved third party--Again, why? (On the other hand, what was the alternative? To say "Hey, I don't give a shit about your fucking love-life, okay?")--so later that day I had to hear how it all began, how happy she is, how she plans to go to Berkely with him, or some nearby college, when he transfers at some point, the whole nine yards.

She went on about how the whole thing was a surprise. But on my end, giving it a second's thought, it was about as fucking "surprising" as the most popular guy and girl being voted "King & Queen" of the fucking prom.

You know one of the things that bothers me most? I feel downright humiliated over all the times Nick and I talked about her, as if we were two hard-luck cases who were never gonna get the pretty girl. Obviously, I was seriously kidding myself; There was only one "hard luck case" involved in those conversations.

Only one guy who's never gonna get the pretty girl...

How fucking stupid can one flabby, balding, 41 year old be?

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