August 25–September 7, 2003 — Choosing poorly

It is colder outside.

I should be working, but I’m not. I don’t have the energy for it most of the time; I only have the patience to work for an hour or two at a time before I need to go for a walk. I tried to trick myself this week: I had so much to do that I allowed myself to splurge and rent the first season of Six Feet Under on DVD. The plan was to watch two hours per day for seven days to reward myself when I managed to get something done on one of the many projects I should be working on.

Except that I ended up watching them as a reward for cleaning my room or eating the proper number of meals on a given day. And then I ran out of time after watching only ten of thirteen episodes.

I found out this week that I probably contributed in no small part to my manager being fired at the store I used to work at. He wasn’t really the person I was most frustrated with, either. But I guess it never hurts to have something new to feel guilty about...

And what better way to combat guilt, I thought, than to force myself to spend more time than ever with people. I went to a party knowing in advance I wouldn’t be friends with anyone there aside from the person who invited me and that she would be drunk and talking to other people the entire time; I went to shows and made an effort to talk to people I wouldn’t normally talk to; on a single day, I hugged two people, more than my quota for normal month.

So I ended up feeling awkward as well as guilty. But maybe I was punishing myself; maybe this is the way it’s supposed to work.

I went to a Neil Gaiman signing and stood in line for over five hours to spend somewhere between 90 and 120 seconds talking to him and watching as he drew pictures in the three books I brought with me. Few things have made me as consistently happy as his books have, so it was worth the time in line. I worry, though — I think the reason I still love his books so much, Stardust and Neverwhere especially, has a lot to do with when I read them: towards the end of high school, when I had a lot to hope for and less to feel guilty about. His books are part of who I was when I was happier with where I was going; I worry that if I keep reading them, I’ll start to lose that. Stardust will start to remind me of the afternoon my arms hurt too much for me to finish my contribution to an e-commerce site selling US flags, and Neverwhere will remind me of the day I spent going back and forth on the subway because it felt better to be in transit than it would feel to be anywhere I could think of going.

But there is a very happy-looking moon drawn under my name on the title page of Stardust now, and I spent the afternoon carefully taking the book out of my backpack to look at it. I think I’ve got awhile yet.

Now it’s a few days later. On Friday night, a girl held my hand while I walked her to a subway station because she’d had too much to drink and couldn’t find it on her own; the next night, she didn’t remember much of our walk. It felt nice, though: to take care of someone and to have her smile and say she was glad she met me before kissing me on the cheek and saying goodnight. It was sad to see her the next night and to feel she barely remembered me, but another part of me thought it might be for the best: It had been nine months since I last held a girl’s hand, and to be able to do so again without committing to a relationship that would end like all the others might help keep me sane a few weeks longer.

Besides, who needs girls when I can stick to getting people fired? I seem much better at the latter.