Hey! I was just rereading old entries and I had forgotten how much of a wreck I was about what I was going to do after I graduated from college. For all my horrible worries last year that I was going to end up in a gutter, I turned out okay.

Let's see:

I graduated! I even passed that wretched Silent Film class. Hoorah!
I won a hundred bucks for my thesis.
I got departmental honors.
I didn't move back with my parents, but rather into a nice apartment.
I landed a temp job at Fairmount Park, doing things that interested me.
And then I finally got a wonderful, fantastic, generally fulfilling job at a totally unique institution where I get to hang out with scholarly people and have a boss who adores me.
I won on the price is right! Well, it's like that happened.

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One of my favorite parts of a Futurama episode is where the big brain shouts "I am the greetest!" because Fry can't spell "greatest." It's kinda like that, although I'm sure that doesn't make any sense to anyone.

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I'm really bad at dressing appropriately for the weather. My friend Sarah was going to make me a list of things I should recite before leaving the house: I will not wear a short skirt with bare legs in 20 degree weather. I will not take shots of tequila on an empty stomach. I will not walk across town wearing insensible shoes. I will not kiss men I don't respect. I will not neglect to bring an umbrella and insist on walking to work when the forecast calls for hurricanes. Since I'm still waiting for the framed version of this affirmation, I feel as though I am obliged to disobey it.

2004-10-14, the greetest

Give me a week or two to
Go absolutely cuckoo
Then when you see your error
Then you can flee in terror

Brian broke up with me in early August, and sometimes I'm alarmed that I'm still occasionally wistful or angry. Pleasant memories will float up to the surface, or I'll see someone who looks like him on the street and will be overcome with a desire to sucker punch them. I really gotta stop punching strangers.

He was the sixth person I'd ever slept with (for those of you playing at home, there were four in Wales of varying degrees of tawdriness and two in the States), but the first relationship I've ever had. I don't really fuss about that, anymore. It's how things happened, and I'm pretty sure I'm not all that worse off for it.

It's funny. He was a big, tall boy from Lancaster (similar to my father!). On the face of it, he wasn't especially complicated, and I was very attracted to that - he seemed really solid and whole. (I was attracted to him because he'd read some Camus, though.) He liked chocolate milkshakes and zombie movies and having his back scratched. He generally was just a very calming presence. I liked that he wasn't a budding alcoholic.

The way he talked about himself, though, was that he was nothing except his work. He talked like he was an all consumed science type who's nothing beside his work. The thing that baffles me is that I find it so incredibly unattractive to be nothing beside your work. I feel embarrassed that I'm constantly talking about my job, because I never want to be someone who's nothing beside her career.

Even when I was dating him, I had these hilarious, nightmarish images of what would happen to me if I stayed with him and married him. He talked about his life goal, which was to move to State College and be a professor. I pictured myself as an unfulfilled housewife whose career fizzled. I'm having affairs with hundreds of his students, raising an army of children who aren't his, and he doesn't notice because he's so engrossed in his work. It's one of those things that I just pictured so clearly, and so absurdly - every detail down to the greasy hands of the kids to my flowered house dress.

It still just cracks me up when I think about it.

He broke up with me by leaving a note for me, and then never talking to me again. It was not a good time. What's worse is that someone on Sex and the City did that, so whenever I told people they'd say "Oh, yeah, that happened on TV."

To me, it's still just crazy to me that I can be a fantastic human being and these schmoes will tell me that they "aren't sure" about me. What's not to be sure about, you losers? So I'm slightly pugnacious - I make up for it with excellent cookery and sexy voicemail messages. I mean, I guess I wasn't especially sure about him if I thought I'd end up an unfulfilled housewife if I stayed by his side. I guess it's that he was astoundingly untogether in the way he broke up with me that convinced me that I'm just much cooler than him. Of course, my enormous ego has made it difficult to fit my swollen head through doorjambs, but that's nothing new.

It's possible that I have a massively inflated sense of self worth, but I'm not so sure of that. I don't really feel like getting involved with another confused bozobrain, though.

2004-10-14, absolutely cuckoo

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