Thursday, March 02, 2006

an hour of sunshine for a million years of rain

It is possible that I mistakenly hung up on Saheli this morning. You know when you think someone has said goodbye and you think they've hung up, but then you get off the phone and wonder if you maybe hung up on them instead? Or am I the only one this neurotic? Anyway, Saheli, if you're reading this, don't hold it against me!

In truth, Saheli has already been unnecessarily patient with me. I was supposed to call her last night, but got a phone call from SP that turned into me yelling at her for 1.5 hours in the hopes of snapping her out of her funk. I am going to be honest, people- I am not the right person for this job. With my own doledrum issues in tow, it is exceedingly difficult to browbeat someone else into embracing a Sister Mary Sunshine outlook on life.

This brings me to a matter of some unpleasantness. I am a little loathe to confess this, because it may scare away the occasional XY (TM Mimosa) that does wander over here. Still, I am all about letting inappropriate things into the public domain. I do not know if it is because I have more friends who are women than I used to when I was younger, or if it is because this is what women experience as time marches on, or if it is because I have become more of an alien over time and thus spend more time absorbing other people's experiences. I can't trace it back to an exact reason, but I feel like I have become enveloped and surrounded by tales of horror and tragedy when it comes to men.

For a while, I was allowing a lot of this to seep into my being. I began shrugging a lot of things off as animal instinct, and advising SP, "they're all pigs, so go wade into the sh*t and find yourself a hog." Romantic, no? But lately, I have found myself actively meditating, chanting to myself "All men are not pigs, all men are not pigs, all men are not pigs" or "There are nice men out there, there are nice men out there, there are nice men out there" or some similar repetitive sentiment.

What is particularly sad is that I know men who prove this sentiment. I should not need to convince myself of it. The guys I have dated have been neither pigs nor jerks. Things did not work out because sometimes things do not work out, not because the dude was a spectacular a$$hole. Okay, except for maybe that one time. My closest friends are neither pigs nor jerks, but they are men. I am quite close to my brother, and he... okay, well he might be a bit of a pig.

I do not know what I am writing, really. I do not know what my point is. Maybe it is so obvious that it does not need articulation. I feel like I need to filter out all the noise of all the bad experiences of people around me. It isn't that I do not want to hear them or to be there for my friends. But it is so easy to take it all to heart, to collect data and try to draw conclusions. But these are individual data, and the interactions between a man and a woman are far too complex to sum up into the easy generalizations that seem to fit. Count on me to lean on science for the final analysis.

In other, vaguely related news, I realized yesterday that I have had a crush on a coworker for over two years now. All I know about him is his name, that he has wild and unruly hair, that he once gave a presentation severely hung over (and got heckled rather hilariously for it), and that he eats his lunch alone in the cafeteria every day. Kids, that is all it takes for me.

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