Beav Gets A Fat Dose Of Perspective

Ever have those days where no matter what you try to do, it can't hold your attention more than five minutes before you want to get up and do something else? Those days where you think back and dwell on every strange little detail of shit you haven't thought about in years? That's me today...well, except for the "haven't thought about in years" part. Replace that with "have been thinking about all week" and we've arrived at an accurate description of my mental state at present.

For whatever reason, my brain has decided that this week, my sleep will be reserved for dreams about ex-girlfriends. Not just dreams where they happen to be present, but dreams where we're back together. Dreams where we're sleeping together. Dreams that, when I wake, leave me wondering why I have such an abundance of emotion about these two particular girls turning over in my subconscious. The obvious answer is that I have some sort of poorly hidden desire to be back together with either of them, but this time a cigar just isn't a cigar.

Still, though, the mindfuck lingers. Why the dreams? Perhaps it's just life's little way of jabbing at the soft spot in my almost-brilliant system. Ah, my "system." I fancied myself a genius until that one chink in its armor was exposed. I had very nearly convinced myself that I had found the perfect substitute for being in a relationship.

I've been single for about four months now, and happily single at that. There was that stretch of a few weeks where I went a little nuts while I got used to being unattached again, but since that wore off I've been thoroughly enjoying my bachelor lifestyle. A little drunkenness, a little promiscuity, and a total lack of accountability can be awfully refreshing when you're coming off the kind of relationship where your girlfriend gets so pissed that she won't come over because you made a 10 minute trip to get a sandwich. As I got comfortable walking through life in my "single guy shoes", I unwittingly developed a sort of method by which I managed to simulate most of the elements of an actual romantic relationship without having the relationship itself and thus not having to be committed. How, you ask? Well, it goes a little something like this:

Part One:

I live with girls. Not just any girls. These are attractive, smart, funny, down-to-earth girls who I love spending time with, and I get to see them every day. They baby me, I baby them, and we provide each other with the unique and crucial perspective that only members of the opposite sex can provide. Check female companionship off the list.

Part Two:

I work with girls, and if you've ever worked in a restaurant, you know that you basically do two things there: serve food and sexually harass each other. One fellow server in particular is in her early 30s, is a mother of two, is a certifiable MILF, and amazingly has an even dirtier mind than I do and is an even bigger flirt than I am. Nothing I can say shocks this woman. Generally she just one-ups me. When she's not there (and even when she is) there are also young, attractive hostesses and servers all over the place and none of us are really what you would call "prudish." Check harmless flirtation off the list.

Part Three:

I additionally have what you might call a "friend with benefits", although most of our mutual friends and acquaintances are much fonder of the term "fuck buddy." I find the term a little unflattering, but I can't fault its accuracy. She's hot, she's good in bed, she's not territorial, she's fun to go out with, and she's no more interested in being stuck with a commitment than I am. Check sex off the list, and put another mark beside female companionship. If you want to make a category for "flirtation with serious devious intent", go ahead and make one of those and put a check mark next to it, too.

As far as most guys would be concerned, my bases are covered. Still, though, a particular loneliness still seems to be stealing home while I sleep. It was easily dismissed all week long, but last night my very specific reminder of what is still missing strode coolly down the basement steps of my friend's house and threw open the door to that little room in my heart where nothing is ever forgotten.

Right there in the middle of the party, at a time and place I least expected her, Miss Czech Nebraska herself walked in with her new boyfriend and unwittingly revealed to me precisely what I'm missing. If romance is like a campfire, then I have gathered all the raw materials from various different locations, but my refusal to enter into any one relationship is much like a refusal to strike steel to the flint, and I'm left with no spark. Hence, no fire. I must also say, at risk of overusing the metaphor, that one cannot simply build a fire under any conditions. Sometimes no matter how good your intentions, you're just holding a match to a wet log.

She and I...we had spark. Hell, we were practically nuclear while it was good. Now her arrival stings not because of who she is, who she is with or because I think it would work to try again. It wouldn't. It stings because she is a tangible reminder of the contrast between where I am and where I have been before. When she would wrap me in her arms, I would instantly drift away to that place where everything was quiet and safe, and there was only the sound of her voice and the smell of her hair...the feeling of her fingertips on the back of my neck...the way she would smile and sigh when she woke up in my arms...and the fact that I couldn't help but adore her in her gray hoodie, soccer shorts and knee-high socks.

You can't fabricate that.

It's either there, or it isn't.

There's the rub.

I've got a good thing going to be sure, but it isn't the best I ever had, and life has a way of making me dismount from my high horse right about the time I start thinking I'm pretty fucking slick. Consider my ego checked. As for my restless mind, I guess you could say I'm just gathering kindling.

Beav Gets Paid To Witness The Dirty Underbelly Of Human Nature

10/19/05

Tonight was, for the most part, uneventful. I picked up a shift for my friend BrownEyes yet again because she was undoubtedly enduring another smallscale personal crisis. I'm starting to wonder how much money I've indirectly made off of her amazing ability to overdramatize life's minor setbacks. Well, that and her amazing array of psychosomatic ailments...but I digress.

I closed the bar tonight, and I find that I far and away prefer the bar to any other section in the restaurant. This is because the people who come and sit in the bar are far and away more laid back and enjoyable to deal with than some of the stoic, rural assholes and crusty, old fucks who demand booths in the main dining room. I still sometimes get the occasional table of white trash who ask for a Busch Lite, but the good outweighs the bad. Tonight, I got to witness one of the more interesting personalities in the catalogue of human archetypes: The real-life desperate housewife.

The first of this particular pair of ladies arrived at around 5:30 when I got to the restaurant. She was waiting for her friend, so she had a pint of Miller Lite. She got through with that and her friend still hadn't arrived, so she had a margarita. Her friend finally arrived, and they moved to a table, where the friend ordered a bottle of chiraz. If I hadn't already, I started laying on the charm at this point because I knew that for the two of them to get through a bottle of wine, they were going to be spending some considerable time with me. The one on the right (who was the first to arrive and is now certifiably sucking down her margarita) wants to know what I recommend, and proceeds to ask me a lot of questions about fairly self-explanatory menu items. I ask if she's been here before, and her reply is "Oh yeah." At this point I realize that they're going to be my chatty table, and that she, in particular, is going to be my chatty customer. She tells me I should sing because I, "have that really nice, low voice." I stop short of informing her that telling me I should sing is like telling Richard Simmons he should be flamboyant, and instead just let her know her that I do sing in a lot of different settings. The charm is coming on extra thick now, and they're eating it up. I always flirt shamelessly with tables of women...because it works. I don't tend to go so far as to touch them or sit down with them like a lot of the girls do with their tables of guys, but I have my methods.

By the time they've gotten through their meals and their bottle of wine, my new friend on the right is noticably tipsy. A beer, a margarita and half a bottle of wine will do that to you, I guess. I tell them about the 800 number they can call if they want to take the survey for a free dessert, and I joke that they can report how badly I abused them. Here's where it starts to get weird.

They give me the standard "Oh, you didn't abuse us..." business that usually follows that joke, but then the lady on the right says, "You can abuse us if you want to." While I am busy trying to keep from clenching my jaw and trying to figure out if she meant that the way I think she meant it, the words, "Our husbands are away for a year" are spoken. I turn to the lady on the left with an expression that silently says, "WHAT?!? Lady, little help here!"

She then speaks the words that not only confirm the fact that I am being hit on by two middle-aged, married women, but that it's pretty much as bad as I can imagine: "Yeah, our husbands are over in Iraq right now and they won't be back for a few more months, so we're treating ourselves tonight..."

Treating yourselves by getting drunk in a franchise restaurant and making vaguely lewd comments to your waiter, who was born about the time you graduated high school.
U-S-A!!! U-S-A!!!

I look back at the woman on the right. Judging by the way she's looking at me, she's getting drunker by the minute and would probably let me screw her in the back of her minivan right now.

I look back at the woman on the left. She's only just buzzed...but she'd do it too, if her friend would.

A smarter man would find a way to parlay this unbridled sexual frustration into a way bigger chunk of tip money, but I'm too mortified by the fact that I'm being savagely eye-fucked by a pair of thirtysomething soldiers' wives to be quick on my feet. Did I mention that neither of these women is especially attractive? That's not adding any to my comfort level.

I manage to escape after being told twice more by the drunken lady on the right that I’m allowed to abuse them and once more by each of them that their husbands are away. All I’m thinking is that I have no desire to be brutally murdered five months from now when two battle-hardened soldiers return home and find that some punk college kid fucked their average looking wives while they were away risking life and limb for…whatever it is we’re trying to accomplish over there. Point is they’d want to kill me, and they’d know how. The negatives in this scenario far outweigh the positives.

For the rest of the night, I ponder the frequency of such events as this, and I come to the conclusion that people are fascinating, if not fucked up creatures. I also come to the conclusion that between the things I’ve seen and the things I’ve done, it would be best if my future wife and I never spend more than about a week apart. Maybe less than that. Maybe I’ll hire some lesbians to escort her at all times, and then if she sleeps with them I won’t mind…but I digress…

My Ongoing Attempt To Be An Academic Martyr, My Ongoing Success At Being A Procrastinating Douchebag

It's 2:50 AM on a Saturday, and I'm wide awake.

Hook line for an action-packed story? Nope, sorry. Not tonight. It's just another interesting start that leads to the absolute anticlimax that is my life at present. Here's a rundown of my enthralling Friday night:

5:00 - Arrive at work. My idiot server manager (who I suspect smokes a lot of pot in his off-time) has scheduled two people for the same section...again. He's done this probably at least 10-15 times over the last 3 weeks. I don't have a section, so now I have to either talk somebody into leaving or just go home. Only people with crappy sections or people who have to close are willing to trade with me. I'm not in the mood to work a crappy section or be there until 12:15, so I go home. There's at least $70 not going into my pocket tonight.

5:20 - Arrive at home. My keyless entry won't lock my car...again. I try pressing the button a bunch of times, and then I try fidgeting with the casing of the control to see if that somehow brings it to life. No luck. I take a few steps toward the house, and then violently spike my keys on the ground, splaying open the casing to said keyless entry and sending the electronics card skipping across the driveway. I stomp it into the concrete Office Space style.

Evidently I'm cranky about work.

I calmly lock the car the old-fashioned way and go inside. This must be what people mean when they say that even when I'm clearly pissed off, there is still a calm exterior about it that makes the whole situation comical. I guess I have what you would call a calculated sort of rage.

6:00 - I'm finishing the last bites of an entire frozen pizza by myself. Usually I can give half away to the girls, but they're at their performance. I tell myself that I'm going to the rec at 8:00 and that my lifting will justify having just eaten way more food than it takes to run my 163 pound body. Deep down, I know this is bullshit.

7:00 - I fall asleep on the couch.

1:30 - I wake up when my roommates arrive home from the cast party I was going to attend before I fell asleep. I clean up the remnants of my dinner.

2:00 - My roommate's quasi-boyfriend/friend with benefits has arrived. I haven't met him, but I've heard a lot about him...and she neglected to mention that he's a Goddamn man-beast. This guy must be about 6'3" and at least 215 pounds of pure muscle. He's wearing light colored Timberlands and a Phat Farm shirt. Clearly he's a little bit gangsta (hails originally from Washington, D.C.), and in addition, he plays rugby. From these two facts I know that he:

1) Has probably been in real fights as opposed to the near-fights-that-never-quite-were that I've been in.
2) Has no proper understanding of pain or fatigue.

I take one look at him and think, "Well, I'm not the man of the house any more while he's around..." We talk for a minute, and he seems like a pretty nice guy. Still, though, I can't shake the image of him grabbing me by the neck with one massive hand and knocking my head off with the other. He goes upstairs to hook up with my roommate, and I retreat to my room to ponder my new beta male status.

2:30 - I put some clothes in the wash and sit down at the computer. I marvel at the juggernaut of procrastination that is thefacebook.com. I facebook my PSYC 350 lab TA.

Let me restate what time it was and what I did just so how big a loser I am can sink in for you:

At 2:30 on a Friday night/Saturday morning, I did laundry and then facebooked my lab TA.

This brings me to why I didn't go out in the first place; I'm failing lab and I need to do about 5 or 6 old assignments in addition to the rest of the upcoming work so that I can pass. At the time I suddenly had the night off work I thought, "Oh good, I'll get my assignments done and then I won't have to worry about them Sunday after I've worked a double." I've been saying shit like this for the last 2 weeks, and I haven't gone out in 2 weekends because I've told people that I was going to stay in and do homework. Meanwhile, I've intended to do homework and actually ended up doing things like finally getting around to hanging stuff on the walls of my room, moving furniture that I don't really need down from my parents' house in Omaha, getting back in shape, and arranging music for Bathtub Dogs. All of these are worthwhile endeavors, but not when you're failing a class.

Meanwhile, we have my TA. Being the sweet, merciful girl that she is, she didn't fail me outright and kick me out of class (though she easily could have) when I fell behind and skipped a lab. Instead she is allowing me to turn in all my assignments clear the hell beyond their due date so that I can graduate and not have to repeat 350. This creates more work for her, and she's already busy as hell. Every time I see her she offers me a little more unsolicited lenience with the deadline. I finally told her today never to ever do that, ever. Telling a kid with ADD, "If you need a couple more days, that’s ok." is roughly the same as saying "If you want to just push that deadline back and not do shit while you get through one more season of NCAA Football 2006 on your Playstation, that's ok." As of last weekend I wasn't any closer to having any of the assignments done, but I did get a really bitchin' recruiting class.

Once I told her not to be so flexible with me, she straightened up and tried to give me a "tough" speech. There are few things more adorable than a girl who wants nothing more than to be nice to everyone trying to have one of those "or I'll kick your ass" moments. Usually those moments end with me laughing really hard and the girl saying something like, "What?!? I can be tough...sometimes...." but this time I kept a straight face, nodded and said, "Yes ma'am." In a related story, I'm a shameless suck up...and it works.

So now here I sit at 4:00 AM, writing a blog while my homework still goes untouched and unfinished...and it's moments like this that make me realize that I'll always have a much greater passion for creating and entertaining than I'll ever have for the working world or for hard science. Sometimes I wonder if I wasn't intended to be a hippie and I just didn't turn out liberal enough.

Well, no time like the present. Lots of people do homework at 4:10 in the morning on a weekend, right? Christ...that sounds like something a serial killer would do.

The good news, I guess, is that my TA has a great sense of humor and even invited us in class to be funny with the stuff we turn in. Careful what you wish for...you just might have a jackass/aspiring comedian in your class...