February 20-21, 2001 — Assumed to be negligible

This is to be part one in an ongoing, anecdotal outline of all the stupid shit you can expect out of me due to my bizarre and often hypocritical ways of behaving. It's complicated being me -- having to pretend that fame doesn't impress me but turning into a stuttering moron when talking to someone I think it important, for example. And I guess we'll start with that. I figure three Stupid Greg-isms should be enough for this entry, so let's begin:

When I was in high school, I never liked talking to the cool kids since I had a bit of an inferiority complex that made me feel like I shouldn't be wasting their time and that they spent every second that they were listening to me wishing that I'd leave them alone.

Now that I'm a bit more grown-up, people my age don't make me think like this anymore. But whenever I have to talk to someone that I perceive as being famous, it kicks back in. I get all awkward when they ask me questions like "How's school?" and I want to keep my answer as short as is possible without seeming rude. It's a fine line.

I'm actually not sure if it's famous people or adults in general, really. Maybe I'll grow out of this, too, and I won't have to spend hours wondering how much of an idiot I've made of myself after talking to someone I perceive as being far more important than me on the phone. But as far as today goes, my feeling like a moron after that phone call was definitely the turning point in what had been up to that moment a rather pleasant day.

An hour or two after said phone call, I was at Pizza Pizza for dinner; I was extremely hungry, so I ordered a large pizza, plain cheese. This only costs $6.99, so I don't feel too horrid about getting an entire pizza for myself.

Before I go on, I should point out that I can't complain to people in a store or restaurant. Complaining or asking that something be taken back makes me want to hyperventilate. We'll call this foreshadowing.

I should have seen signs of trouble when they put an X in the pepperoni box on the order form, and then crossed it out and checked the box for cheese. I should've asked him to just write out a new form. I should've paid more attention when they were making the pizza to make sure that they didn't put pepperoni on it. When they were picking pepperoni off of a pizza, I should've realized it was my pizza they were picking pepperoni off of. And when they gave it to me, over-cooked in general but under-cooked where they'd added cheese to disguise the fact that they'd picked off the pepperoni, I should've just asked them to make me a new one.

But I didn't.

I tried to convince myself that I'd be able to eat it, but by the time I got home, I was already feeling sick. Even before I was vegetarian, pepperoni repulsed me to the point that I refused pizza days at school and hated even eating pizza that had been cooked half plain, half pepperoni.

At the end of it all, I was $8.04 poorer (after tax), and still hungry. I cut the crusts off and ate them, but it wasn't really enough. I ended up nibbling on tasteless crackers for the rest of the night. And I'm still hungry. I rule.

And finally, this last (and quite recent) problem is a bit more difficult to explain, but I'll give it a go anyway. Basically, I find that I can't read Gillian's journal anymore. Neither her main one nor her BME one. Maybe I'm saving myself the future stress of reading about her being with someone new in the future, or maybe I don't want to think about her as much today now that I can't think of her the way I used to be able to. Amy explained to me a theory held by some of her friends with a fair amount of experience in Internet relationships: it held that after you broke up with someone, it is never, ever a good idea to continue reading their online journals. I get a kick out of the fact that this is starting to be an issue in relationships -- that so many people have public journals now that it's worth establishing rules for avoiding them after a break-up -- but I erased the history in Internet Explorer so that I wouldn't have her address come up whenever I typed an address that started with V, just in case. Maybe it's for the best.

Speaking of Web browsers (and gracefully segueing out of today's issue of Stupid Greg-isms), the beta version of the Mozilla browser should be out in the first week or two of March. You've no idea how much it excites me to finally have a viable alternative to Internet Explorer. I thought Netscape 6 might do it, but as much as I liked its rendering engine, it was so bloated with bad interface design and links to Netscape-branded services that I just couldn't deal with it anymore. Since Mozilla uses the same rendering engine and (theoretically) a much less bloated interface, it just might be the Web browser that dreams are made of.

Now I just have to figure how to segue out of this embarrassingly nerdy moment...

Actually, forget segues. I'm just going to leave it at that. The only important things to happen to me over the past two days were finding out my exam schedule (I'm done on May 3) and working on antigreg (but nothing's been uploaded), so you're not missing much. Maybe I'll sleep less restlessly tonight than I did last night and be in super duper spirits for the day ahead. But don't cross your fingers. Especially as far as "duper" is concerned.