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just returned home from a day spent watching my college football team lose to one of our nation’s service academys. While I always feel slightly unpatriotic rooting against our service academies, I find some way to overcome those feelings and cheer for my boys. Today, however, involved rooting for my boys in a torrential downpour. I was amply prepared for the bad weather, with polka dot galoshes and protective rain gear. I had a little bourbon before heading into the game, which was meant to dull the effects of the pouring rain. Unfortunately, my boys played terribly and the skies just opened up in the second half. My friends took that as a sign to head on home, but I had driven another friend’s dad to the game and as a former player, he refused to leave until the bitter end. I wandered around the stadium trying to stay dry and headed back in for the fourth quarter. My boys made one last defensive stop and gave the ball back to the offense to bring a victory home. Despite the pouring rain, we were given a great opportunity and the few remaining fans rallied together behind our team. Even though a few hours has passed, I still remember feeling so much pride as I stood with this soaking wet group of fans, hoping for our boys to pull out one last touchdown.
Then we went 3 and out, my friend’s dad called to say he was ready, I took one look around at my fellow fans, and ran for the warmth of my car. Maybe “True Fan” is a bit of an overstatement.
tonight, I came home and made one last sweep of my living space for my parking sticker. AND I FOUND IT! I am relieved and can only hope this is a sign of better things to come. Also, this morning, I logged onto the ole FB account and discovered a very flirty email from a guy friend from college. Seeing as the vast majority of my male interactions come from either my co-worker who drives me crazy and my former co-worker discussed in the last post who is also currently driving me crazy, this email was just the slight boost I needed.
As to my former co-worker (I am struggling with an alias for the blog and let’s face it, there is still more to come on this situation), the texting cooled off for a few days following the confirmation on Sunday night that yes, in fact, something was going on and no, he did not want to talk about it. He leaves on Saturday for a cross-country drive and I am hoping that distance will not make the heart go fonder, but in fact make the texts less frequent.
Since I am typing on my computer into between typing texts on my blackberry, I am not very optimistic. I am trying to formulate a strategy on how to proceed, but I am at a loss. I don’t want to ignore his texts, and I am quite confident that I simply lack the willpower to do that. One of my friends, who is engaged, told me today that if she ever picked up her fiance’s phone and saw countless texts from a girl she didn’t know, she would be very unhappy. I agree! I completely agree! And that’s the knot that has been lodged in my stomach for three months. The knot is the physical manifestation of the Irish Catholic Guilt Complex. There’s nothing wrong with married men having female friends; but when the married men keep the friendship secret, that’s when things take a turn for the worse. And maybe you will disagree, but I think the single girl just trying to have a male friend always winds up as the villain in these stories. And I am not a villain; I am a nice, albeit rather confused, single girl looking for love. Contrary to how it may appear, I am not looking for my love in another couple’s marriage.
I remember when I first met S’s wife (I just picked a letter at complete random). S and I had been working together for over a year, grabbed coffee in the mornings, and had lunch almost every day. I was excited to meet S’s wife because I figured we too could be friends. We met at a party hosted by another co-worker. S walked in with his wife after I was already there – they made the rounds and eventually arrived at my corner.
S said, “Wife, this is LG. She also works at the courthouse.” He said in a rather flat tone, like he had just introduced his wife to the mailman. “Wife, this is the Mailman. We do not know one another, but wave hello when we see each other on the street.”
I smiled brightly and searched her face for a glint of recognition. Surely I had been mentioned at some point. She was polite and friendly but clearly had never heard of me before. I recovered quickly and talked to her for a while. I wanted to be friends with her, because she was G’s wife and it made sense to me.
Now, over two years later, I find myself flashing back to that meeting and wondering what she thought of me. Did I want her to like me because I knew back then that maybe the work relationship was not entirely proper? I don’t know, but I suspect I’ve always had an inkling that we talked more than we should. And these are the things that I think about on Thursday nights when I really should put the blackberry down, go out, and meet an available guy.
tonight, I came home and went on a frantic hunt for this very important sticker for my car. I tore apart the various stacks of papers scattered around my living room. And came up empty. I headed back to my bedroom only to discover that both of the lightbulbs in my fancy (read: impossible to change) light fixture were out.
I changed into the first things I could grab in the dark and shuffled back into the living room. I sat down on the couch and cried. I cried and not because I could not find the sticker or could not believe that the lightbulbs needed changing. I cried because sometime in the last few months one of the constants in my life changed. And the change is having this ripple effect that is frankly confusing the beejeezus out of me.
A little over three years ago, I started a clerkship for a wonderful, if at times cantankerous, judge. And during my clerkship, I became friends with a wonderful, and also cantankerous, guy. We had gone to law school together but not known each other very well. But sometime during our sixteen months working together, we discovered that we were kindred spirits. Not in a romantic way, he is married, and the relationship was completely above board. I remember one Saturday towards the end of our clerkship, him coming up to my office and when he opened the door, I was startled because it was the first time during our time together that I realized he was a pretty attractive guy. I just did not think of him in a romantic or sexual way. He was just my partner in crime at work. I dismissed the flash of attraction as yet another odd byproduct of the hangover I was nursing at the time and did not think anything of it.
In the months following our clerkship, we managed to continue being close, exchanging multiple emails a day, sometimes about work, sometimes about nonsense. In our time working together, we had developed our very own language that consisted of abbreviations and acronyms that only we understood. We even had a mythical third party participating in our conversations, whom we affectionately dubbed the Snark. We rarely discussed our personal lives – I dated people and when they were important enough to mention, I would tell him but personal stories were just not what our friendship was about. We had witty banter down to a fine art and that was all I wanted. We made each other laugh out loud the times we most needed to.
Eventually the near constant emailing waned and we would only exchange emails once or twice a week. We had our clerkship in common, and the stories and language we developed there, but as the clerkship faded so did the ties that bound us together.
Until about three months ago. About three months ago, the once a week emails had morphed into every other day text messages. Usually just a few, not about anything serious – work complaints, movie quotes. In August, the frequency increased and started coming at odd times. Our email exchanges had always been limited to working hours, but soon I noticed that I was getting text messages at 7pm on a Saturday night. Or 10pm on a Friday night. Or 3pm on a Sunday afternoon. One night, we exchanged quotes from A Few Good Men until midnight. I did not know where his wife was while we were texting and something just kept me from asking. He had always been a very private person, but with my raging Irish Catholic Guilt Complex, I was convinced that our texting was inappropriate. And I still think it is – as it has continued for almost three months. Finally, two nights ago, he acknowledged that all was not right in his marriage, but not only did he not want to talk about it, he had nothing to say about it.
Two days later and I am still reeling from the disclosure. I have zero details on the troubles themselves and have no idea how long they’ve been going on – but if I had to chart Troubles with Wife v. Texts to LG, my money is on there being a strong correlation between the two. And I just don’t know that I have the emotional strength to be an outlet for him during this time. If a boy texts me from 8:00 am in the morning until 8:00 pm in the evening, I can’t help but wonder what it all means. And I am struggling so hard to not let myself wonder and analyze and overanalyze what all the texts mean. That struggle is what finally lead me to tears tonight. Are they just texts from a guy reaching out to a friend after suddenly finding his evenings open for the first time in nearly 10 years? or are they more? The “more” part is the problem for me – I cannot allow myself to think they may be more, because if they aren’t…well, then my heart will suffer a severe setback and one of my dearest friends will be lost from me forever.
around my office I have a bit of a reputation as a workhorse, a go-to girl when you need something done and don’t want to get a lot of backtalk. whenever a partner asks me what I have going on work-wise, no matter what, I always seem to say, “Oh, not a whole lot. Do you need something?” Even when I am up to my eyeballs in work, I respond like I’ve been reading the paper all afternoon. It is a fault, I recognize it, I am working on it.
the magic of my work persona, is that whenever I am in my office, looking busy, everyone is easily convinced I truly am busy. I walk around with purpose, getting things done, checking things off my list, racking up the hours. Sometimes (and well, lately a lot of times), the walking around and getting things done is a total farce.
And sometimes when I am walking around with feigned purpose, I find myself walking by the Big Boss’ office. He is in his mid-sixties, still working away and making it rain. He and I do not interact very often, but I walk by his office at least ten times a day. And many times during the walks, I have a glass of water in my hand. And on many of those walks, I wonder what will happen, if me and my purposeful self, walk into Big Boss’ office, and dump my glass of water all over his head. Would I get fired? Would he yell? Would I just go back and sit at my computer? Or would I just keep walking right out the door? I have no idea why, but I imagine this scenario a few times a week. And I am not exactly sure what it means. I hope it does not mean that I am crazy. I think it just may mean that I am bored? Bored, I can accept. Crazy? Well, I think I am going to need some new drugs for Crazy.
tomorrow morning, after french class (in which I am clearly the worst estudiante!), I am packing up my car, throwing Woody and Red in the back, and heading up the parkway to the Vegas of the East Coast. Yep, that little slice of Jersey heaven known as Atlantic City. So far, I have packed an inappropriately short dress and gold heels. That’s pretty much all I need.
Tomorrow I stop off at the ATM for a modest amount of gambling money to be spent parked in front of a video poker machine. I hope to have something exciting report when I return. Fingers crossed! For good stories and big wins.
