Wow!

I just came across a weird document on my harddrive, something I must have written a couple of months after I graduated from college. The title of it was Chapter 1. Was I trying to write a book? I don't even remember.

An exerpt:

Chapter 1: xxxxxxxxxxxxx

“On weekends I like to make lists and cross things off.”

Her response triggered “weird” sirens in my head. Certain questions should not be asked for different reasons. Asking a weighty women her weight or asking a guy likely to be a virgin whether he is a virgin embarrasses the addressee. Other questions embarrass the questioner. These questions are usually the type with the undesired answer implied by the questions. The self suspecting loser asking, “Do you think I’m a loser?”

I figured asking my manager about her weekend plans was innocent and unlikely to fall into my category of questionable questions. However, the responsive created a new category, those questions that embarrass the questioner because of the earnestness of the addressees answer. I could not help envisioning my manager dreaming of her free Saturday morning, finding a fresh pad of paper and listing:

1. White Laundry
2. Grocery Shopping
3. Mother’s Day Card
4. Tower Records (Dido single)
5. Clean bathroom

Dreaming of returning home, she triumphantly scratches neat lines through errands 2,3, and 4. In the same motion she adds a number 6 to the list: buy cleaning products, which she lines through, smiling to herself for having made the list of cross-offs longer.

I do not have a problem with lists. In fact, I often make them. However, I would never add making a list to the list of my weekend plans. Nor would I list making a list and crossing off items as something that I liked to do.

The first day I began working at ZIA I met V. I met most of the people that worked at ZIA on my first day. A stocky girl, with pointy boobs, a big smile, and long dirty blonde hair, Vivi seemed nice in the way my 3rd grade teaching assistant seemed nice, ineffectually. At the time, I was stoked. My boss would be a 26 year old ex-sororiety girl that I would be able to make fun of without her realizing it. She would like me because I would make her feel smart so long as I acted interested in the inane excel formatting standards she proudly espoused. It would be like grade school once again, a reversion I didn’t mind for the short-term while I tried to figure out what one does after graduating from a small liberal arts college.

These were just my first impressions of V, not at all based upon anything she had told me, or anything I had heard. In other words, no facts. One fact, however, that I did take away from that first meeting was that she had a boyfriend. And I knew from the way she said it, that it was a boyfriend she intended on marrying. Four months later, she confirmed what I had known after that first meeting, in what she probably thought a clever conversation at Herringtons,

“So, you have this boyfriend and he’s great…like a good steak. One can always rely on a good steak. But what about the other items on the menu? Do you check them out?”

“No, I don’t.”

“But how do you not look at the other items. I mean, it takes effort NOT to look. Don’t you think.”

“Not when you’re in love. I don’t need anything else.”

“So you think you’re going to marry Derek?”

“Yes. I do.”

So there it was. She did have her entire life planned out, her and Derek, making lists of their lives and crossing things off as they went along.

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The next section of the Chapter goes into another guy at my work with an "Asian fetish" and then I go into a bizarre dissection of why Asian fetishes don't really exist, a round up of the last three weeks of college, a very detailed explanation about the mechanics of hooking up with one girl without this other girl finding out (which I read now and think - what an asshole), video stores, and a college Nemesis.

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My favorite passage:

Fierman was roommates with Evan and I sophomore year. We were all friends. Some folks around Pomona knew Fierman only as Newman, for his close physical resemblance to Wayne Knight. The Newman nickname had become more appropriate come senior year, as Fierman abandoned our group of friends to live with the Lawrey group. The Lawrey group was the group that liked to think they were the big partyers on campus. What they lacked in quality personnel, they made up for in quantity. Fierman was easily seduced by that allure and abandoned our group because he become resigned to the position of the fat guy with weed. Since his unofficial free agent signing, Fierman, (his name uttered in a tone reminicient of Jerry Seinfeld’s clutching snipe, “Newman!”), had made more than a few aggressive assaults towards me. By far the most annoying occurred one evening in the dining hall as I was telling a new release about how the kids at the hostel I volunteered at were sick and that little kids in general had lots of diseases I was succeptible to. I was drawing a funny picture of dirty, germ-ridded children running around threatening my health, when Fierman, in a well-timed interruption mused, “It’s well known that most diseases are age specific.”

I was stunned and taken aback by this blatant act of aggression. As a chemistry major, Fierman was capable as coming across as the science-know-it-all, often using terms such as “chemotaxis” or “isotope,” to intimidate a conversant. At the end of the table Antony started laughing as I had mentioned to him a day before some prior Fierman anti-me behavior. Not as quickly as I would have liked to, I said, “I’m talking about catching a cold, which to my knowledge is not age-specific.” The response did the trick and shut Fierman up, but was not nearly as silencing as a quick, “Fierman, I’m not talking about osteoporosis or gout, you fucking retard,” would have been. In any case, I finished my story quickly as it had lost any momentum that had accrued.