MY LIFE - NOVEMBER

Social Experiment #289 - Tuesday, November 19, 2002

I'd like to say a lot has happened in the last five days since the last entry, but unfortunately, no excitement was located, so therefore, I'll bore you to death using a monotonous voice, much like many of the college professors you may or may not have had. I'm not sure, I seem to have a relatively young visitor base.

I'd be the envy of television executives everywhere if I was averaging hundreds of visitors a day because I have a dominating command over the 15-20 year old population group. Well, all five of you that come by anyway.

I manage to get the attention of young girls. I just received a note on Bolt from a 14 year-old girl who I've talked to all of three times, saying that she told her friends about me and they think that we'd make a cute couple.

Evidently, I come across as wanting to spend the next five years of my life behind bars. I mean, I like the girl, she's really nice, but let's not talk about being a couple when you're 14 and I'm 22. I don't really look at age much, but I have to draw a line somewhere.

Age is such a fine line to toe though. Right now, I'd have to say if the girl is under 18, there's no way it's going to go down. You need to be at least legal. I just don't really know what to think when it comes to age. In one sense, I'd like to date a girl that's my age so that we could actually go out and have a drink or something and not worry about having to sneak her in or what-not.

In the same sense, the girls that are 18 and 19 seem to have a better appreciation for who I am. This continues to be true as the girl gets younger, the attention span just gets shorter as well. The girls that are younger though, they don't look at me and my age and think I'm too old. For them, I'm probably more mature than the guys their age.

It's a weird thing to contemplate, but it's giving me a headache so I'm going to stop.

I'm in one of the best moods I've been in in quite a long time. I've been smiling all day just for the hell of it. If a girl is going to fall in love with my smile, today's the day. It might not be seen for a long time.

That's one of the more enigmatic things about me. I smile and laugh a lot when I'm around people I'm comfortable with, but in school when I'm by myself or when I'm out somewhere, I don't smile much. I don't look at girls and break into a huge grin (something that's supposed to be cute; I think it borders more on complete and utter idiocy if someone looks at me and has a ridiculous smile).

Today, I was. I was even smiling while driving behind a girl in another car who kept glancing back at me in her mirror. I couldn't wipe the grin off my face. Part of it was from listening to Bone Thugs-N-Harmony's song "Bad Weed Blues," (that's a funny song), but a lot of it was from, well, I don't know. It was very weird, almost disturbing.

I may need to find out what's in the Lucky Charms I had for breakfast.

Something else has me baffled. Let me tell you about the e-mail I got first since it will kind of help set up what happened last night at work. First off, my ex, Tab, sent me an e-mail not too long ago telling me that she's pregnant. In regards to that, I'm happy for her and hope that it all goes well. It's not my business to pry, so I didn't ask some questions that other people might have asked.

Here's where it gets interesting. It seems that everyone I talk to expects me to say something mean or bad about her, so they say things for me. It seems everyone has had such bad experiences with break-ups and ex's that it's been assumed that I'm bitter towards her and vice versa. Then there's disbelief when I say that I don't feel that way.

The first mistake I made was mentioning it to someone I was talking to at work. The first thing out of her mouth (and I'm NOT naming names, so don't even ask) was an insult bordering on being ridiculous. I didn't know how to respond initially, so it was assumed that I agreed. This caused much aggravation as I tried to explain that I do not hate her in the least.

That went about as well as playing Russian roulette.

In other words, I was speaking, but it was in one ear, out the other.

I tried to proceed with the rest of what I was going to say as normally as possible, but the little jokes continued to fly and I just ended up saying the hell with it.

The bottom line is people, I don't hate Tab. I don't have bad feelings towards her. I don't. So cut that shit out. It's starting to bug me.

Then I made the huge mistake of mentioning that I'm trying to get a date set up with a girl I've been talking to for a while. Suddenly my personal life was the most important thing going on at work, more important than anything else. Rose wanted to know about it, so did Jim, Keith (ugh!), and Lennie. I was being bombarded with five questions at once at one point, making it hard for me to even think about focusing on what I was trying to answer.

I decided to turn it into a game. I wasn't going to answer many of the questions, and they weren't going to know which answers I would answer and which ones I wouldn't until they were asked. Jim of course recognized what I was doing and started asking stupid questions (such as "Does she have hair?" and "does she have legs" which made me laugh so hard), questions that I'd answer. Keith was clueless and was asking me things I wasn't going to tell him.

Rose was actually asking nice questions, but I wasn't answering everything she wanted to know for my reasons. I wasn't about to spill everything I knew about this girl, especially since I haven't heard from her since last week and don't even know if I will hear from her again. The hope is I will, but I'm no longer holding my breath when it comes to these kind of issues.

Basically, I only answered about a fourth of the questions seriously, most of them Jim's stupid questions, so they really don't know that much more about her than before I accidentally mentioned the possible date.

It'll stay that way too until I know more myself.

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Some other odds and ends to wrap this up...

Nichole from work is not very smart. She's whiny, she gets an attitude easily, and she's just really hard to work with. She doesn't want to ring the register even though she and Lennie are the most inexperienced people (Lennie doesn't have a problem, why does she?), instead she tries to hide at the filling station and gets mad when someone tells her to go ring.

I told her she was ornery one day and she nearly blew her lid, then professed to not know what it meant. I found this equally amusing and disturbing. Amusing because it bothered the hell out of her everytime I said it, disturbing because it's not an overly complicated word to understand (if you must know, it's another way of saying someone's cranky), but that seems to be the way things are now.

I never claim to be overly smart, actually I think I border closely on being a complete dumbass, but I like to think that I have a grasp on basic spelling. I just can't understand what the challenge is.

Spelling and grammar seem to be overly difficult things to do. Maybe I'm just anal, but c'mon, they're not hard.

I also don't care for people, mostly girls, who use shortcuts to write words instead of the full word. For example, "2" instead of "to," 4 instead of "for" or the "fore" part in before, and the other shorthand methods. It's harder for me to read since I have to try and figure out the context meaning of each word instead of just reading straight through.

If you do this, I'm not trying to knock you for doing it, I'm just saying I have a hard time reading it.

Plus I'm fucking anal about it.