Tag Archives: friends

Quantum States

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As you know, since it’s become an oft-misunderstood meme, Schrodinger’s cat existed in a quantum state of dead and alive, so long as you didn’t open the box where it was kept. (Insert joke about cats and boxes.) Since Monday, when Newcastle was tentatively given a thumbs up until we heard back on the blood tests, he was in that box. Finally, the box has been opened.

I was told I had to wait twenty-four to forty-eight hours to receive the verdict on Newcastle’s blood tests, and it took seventy-four. The vet told me that Newcastle is on the verge of kidney failure. She said that we can treat it (for now) by hospitalizing him at the boutique vet where I get his heart checked twice a year. It would buy him a number of months.

I learned then where I draw the line. I think some people believe I spend too much on my cat. I give him three pills twice a day, at a negligible cost (the last bottle I bought will last me two months, and it cost $4.00). For hyperthyroidism, I buy a transdermal cream for $60 a month. He has arthritis, so I get him a painkiller injection every four weeks at $80 per shot. For the hyperthyroidism and for the cardiologist, I get his blood tested for $300 a pop. If the doctors find anything wrong (which is rare), he gets another blood test and X-rays, for as much as $500. I take him to a cardiologist every six months, to the tune of $1,100 per visit. So if you read that paragraph and think I’m too obsessed with saving a broken cat, I don’t blame you.

I love Newcastle, and I would do anything for love. But I won’t do that. I’m not spending what may be thousands of dollars to put my cat in a stressful situation for days on end to buy half of a year. That’s not even up for debate. That doesn’t mean I’m not wracked with guilt. I feel like this is me saying, “I only love him so much.”

Untreated, Newcastle has a month, maybe two. I’ve contacted a hospice veterinarian, and we discussed the process and the price. When it’s time, I will call them, set up an appointment, and they will come to my home, perform the procedure, take his paw print, and cremate him. It’s expensive, but that will be the last money I spend on him, so I don’t care.

I also spoke to Nicole. When she lived with Kate and me twelve years ago, she and Newcastle had formed a bond, and when we lived together the past five years until January, she spoiled him and loved him as his auntie. She will be there for him.

Upon getting the news, I’ve been stoic. I called the hospice, then my parents to let them know, and I sent texts and DMs to my closest friends with the news and the fact that I didn’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to be a complete wreck. When I sat down and decided to write this, I’ve been crying, but it’s a low-key kind of crying, more of a babbling brook than the tidal wave I was Sunday and Monday.

Honestly, I’m relieved. Since I noticed that something was up with him on Sunday, I’ve been worried that it would be his time, and I wouldn’t know, and he would suffer needlessly. Now I know, and I’ve been given enough time to enjoy his company. As you can see below.

Today, he figured out how to get to my owl collection, so he’s still pretty spry.

Considering how bad his health is and that he’s lived so long anyway, he’s probably going to live for at least three months.

Newcastle is my world. I’m not ready.

(I promise I’ll write about something else soon.)

AARF: The American Association of Retired Felines

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From what I recall, the second-to-last time I cried was in the spring of 2010. I was walking on the treadmill because I was severely overweight and out of shape, and I had been prescribed 300 minutes of cardio a week. Earlier that year, my psychiatrist and I found the right cocktail that stopped the depression that had been drowning since Kate and I moved to the DMV area. I was finally myself again. I had figured out how to transfer .mov and .avi files to my iPod, so I was watching a lot of pirated TV (on a teeny tiny screen). Today, I was watching an éclair of a sci-fi show called Warehouse 13, and the episode was about how one of the main characters always felt alone at the holidays, and at the end of the episode, the rest of the cast threw him a surprise Christmas party, and I broke out in tears. The show was fun, but it wasn’t good. I talked to my psychiatrist about it, and we determined that I wasn’t that moved by the show, but it was a product of reacting to the exercise endorphins and the new drug regimen.

Since then, I well up a little at shows and movies when emotional scenes like that happen, but I don’t cry like that anymore, not even when I was ambushed with divorce papers. (I went into a zombie-like state of depression for a few days, but no tears.) Sunday and Monday of this week, I ugly-cried.

My old apartment was 850 square feet (between 250 and 300 square meters) with two bedrooms, a living room, and a bathroom. It had a backyard full of grass. There was a cat named Henry who was pretty active but cuddly (not to me, but he did show me some affection between clearing off the top of my dresser). My roommate was Dr. Doolittle, who lived to spoil animals.

A month ago, Newcastle was moved from there to a 435-square-foot studio with one room and a bathroom, and no roommate or cousin. He had Dad, but that was it. He hid under the bed for the first week, coming out to eat and occasionally socialize. Chalk that down to cats not liking change, especially after three years in the old apartment and five years with roommate and cousin. The second week, he suddenly came out and was very social. He explored (not that there was much to explore), and he ate a lot. He has stairs to my bed, but usually he made a lot of noise when he was finished eating or going to the bathroom, and I’d bring him up to cuddle.

But last week he went back under the bed and he only came out occasionally to eat a couple of bites. He didn’t socialize. He didn’t stay out at all. I was worried about it, and I need him to adjust to living alone, but I gave him his space. And then on Sunday, he yelled at me, and I brought him to the mattress with me and pet him for a couple of seconds before he slunk back onto the floor and under the bed.

I’d seen this before, when Andrew, aka Gray Cat, who was eighteen, turning nineteen in a month, went into what I called the Rage Cave, i.e. the little holes some cat trees have. He didn’t even come out to eat. Kate and I brought him to the vet to put him to sleep, but the vet wanted to try a different painkiller. It was a miracle. Andrew was a kitten again. (For the fourteen years I knew him, Andrew always acted like a kitten.) When I moved out, I made Kate promise to tell me when the cats had to go. She did not keep her promise. Andrew and Magik would be twenty-four this year, so I’m assuming that they’ve moved on a while ago. Thanks to Kate, I never had a good chance to mourn them.

Anyway, recognizing this behavior, I called my vet. They’re closed Sunday. I called Newcastle’s old vet and cardiologist and asked to speak to someone who could help. The vet tech who answered the phone said she could. After I gave the long story about Newcastle’s behavior and his health concerns, she said, “You should bring him to your primary vet.” And hung up. Luckily, I have a secondary vet, and they answered the phone, and they treated me with attention and empathy. We scheduled an appointment for a “Quality-of-Life Wellness Check” on Monday, and I called in sick to work.

After hanging up, I broke out in tears. I knew I would have to put him to sleep. I thought about how much he meant to me, and how I didn’t know how I was supposed to go on without him. Thousands of memories ran through my head. And to make matters worse, I wouldn’t have a chance for a last cuddle because he was in his own Rage Cave.

Two hours later, Newcastle emerged from the bed, ate a bunch of food, and meowed at me. I brought him to the bed, where he spent a while walking back and forth while I pet him, then fell asleep on me. The sadness drifted away until Monday, when I remembered what I was going to be doing. I brought him to the vet, crying every few minutes in the Uber and in the waiting room. When the vet and her assistant asked me what was going on, I couldn’t tell them because I was bawling my eyes out.

She did an exam, and she concluded that he was alert, he was in minimal pain, and since he was eating and going to the bathroom, and I was staying on top of his medications, he was (probably) okay. They drew blood and urine to test, and I find the results out today. I’ve gone from ugly sobs to holding my breath until later this morning when I’m anticipating a call from the vet.

Newcastle is twenty years old. He has cardiac failure, kidney disease, a herniated liver, hyperthyroidism, arthritis, and I think he can’t hear anymore. He has more problems than a nerd in an eighties movie. Let’s be realistic: he’s going to leave sooner rather than later. I know this.

But I’m not ready.

All Hail the Pirate Queen

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Most of my heroes and villains in MortalMan are based on someone I know. This is M, Scourge of I-80. She jumps from automobile rooftop to rooftop on I-80 through the Midwest, stealing the change from people’s ashtrays. In this way, she is no longer relevant because who keeps change in their ashtrays? Cars don’t even have ashtrays anymore. Anyway, She’s based on my dear friend Emilie, who used to sign her notes “M,” which strikes me as something you could do with a sword. And if anybody I know in this world swashbuckles, it’s her.

I’m not good with likenesses, but I do a lot better when I’m not consulting a reference.

Schoolyard Haunts

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Something I’ve always wondered about was where the supplemental lyrics to “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” came from. I never hear them on TV (that doesn’t mean they’ve never been on TV), but I’ve been hearing them since I was too little to remember. Nowadays, you can’t sing “You would even say it glows” without someone appearing out of nowhere and adding, “Like a light bulb!” Where did it come from? How do I hear it from New Mexico to Oklahoma to Northern Virginia with few differences? And even if there are slight differences, the tune and rhythm is the same. I think this would be a better documentary than another one about Ted Bundy, so Netflix, call me.

However, that’s not why I gathered you all here. You are here because a chat conversation today revealed to me just how weird this schoolyard song was, and that it, from what I can tell, did not leave Woodall Elementary in rural Oklahoma. I’m calling upon you because, if you can identify the song, you would put to rest a mystery I’ve been living with for over thirty-five years.

The song, and I am not making any of this up, goes like this:

Yo momma, yo daddy, yo greaaaaaaaasy granny!

You got a hole in your pants, you got a big behind, like Frankenstein

You’re gonna beat beat beat down Sesame Street.

It was sung to me as kind of an acapella funk rap. The part where you’re introducing your relatives goes pretty slowly, like a train warming up. The rest of it chugs along at top speed.

I have no idea what this is. When the class clown who taught it to me was confronted by a teacher who said, “Where did you get that song, mister?” his answer was “Sesame Street.” Which is funny, but it is probably not accurate.

I don’t even know why I remember it, but I do. Is it from a song? That’s a possibility because I was not up on music in the eighties, unless it was by “Weird Al” Yankovic. And yet, I’ve never heard this song. Is it just a weird schoolyard thing? I have not heard it in any schoolyard I’ve been to, and anyone I’ve asked about it has usually given me a concerned look.

If I had the finances, I’d do a documentary about this, as well, but it would probably be lots of shots of people being puzzled by me singing to them. I’d be asking questions that would baffle them, such as, “How do you respond to the allegations that your granny is greaaaaaaasy?” Or, “Do you believe that this alleged hole in your pants might be related to your behind matching Frankenstein’s in size?”

Anyway, that’s why you’re here: does this ring any bells? Is this a song I’m not familiar with? I recently found out that accusing someone of having a “big ol’ butt” came from a song. I hope you have some answers.

There’s one possibility I hadn’t considered, and that’s that the class clown made it up whole cloth. Somehow, that would be the best origin for this strange little rhyme.

Live in on the Edge

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The guy renting out the room in his apartment in Jersey City had double-booked a roommate interview. Unemployed, I sat on a couch next to a professional (a doctor, if I can remember back twenty-five years) who was well groomed, while I looked like I had just rolled out of bed. Things were grim, until I saw his bookshelf.

See, televangelist Pat Robertson had written a “novel.” I am by no means a fundamentalist Christian, or even a Christian at all, but I had actually read this book. (I’d accuse it of being ghost-written, but ghost-writers are professionals, and this book was not.) The late nineties were the End Times, and I was getting a kick out of people being freaked out about it. Ironically, I read every book I could find about the coming apocalypse. All the fiction books had a henpecked president and his lesbian, Satanist wife, who may or may not be the Beast. They got old after a while.  

I pointed at the book and said, “I’ve read that!”

The guy looking for the roommate said, “What did you think about the ending?”

I said, “It was a great twist!”

The room was mine.

I lived there six years, then another four years in the home Kate had purchased before I moved in, and the next five years in a series of private and corporate apartments that Kate took care of, until the government took care of everything and set us up in a compound in Doha, Qatar. From there, we bought a condo with my father-in-law’s money.

After that, I lived in the apartment Nicole had been renting out for years, until we moved together to a two-bedroom. Even though we are both on the lease, Nicole did most of the work. It’s privately owned by a single landlord. We paid an application fee, a security deposit, a month’s rent, and a small pet fee. It couldn’t have been easier.


My new apartment, owned by a corporation and subsidized by HUD, requires proof of employment and a month of pay stubs, a signed twenty-five-page lease, Newcastle’s photo and medical records, an account with the electric company, two lease addendums, a loading-dock reservation, one month’s rent (pro-rated), an amenities fee, a pet fee, a security deposit, a pinch of paprika, and renter’s insurance (but not the policy I already have).

I turn forty-eight this year, and I’ve never lived alone. I’ve been insulated from this process, so I had no idea what a hassle it was. I move on Friday, but I can’t pack until Tuesday. It’s okay, everything here belongs to Nicole. I left my marriage with my clothes, my note-, sketch-, comic, and just plain books and some art supplies. I’ve acquired some furniture and some organizational equipment that had one job and failed, and a huge number of toys, mostly Doctor Who related. That’s it. It will take ma a day to pack. And then, it will be Newcastle, me, and a pile of stuff to sort through. Finally, I’ll be able to start MortalMan.

This is a pretty huge adventure I’m embarking on. I feel like, after all this time, I’m finally a grownup.

Creativity Is My Co-Pilot

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In high school, Pilot Precise pens were the Cadillac of writing instruments. They were hard (for us) to find, but they were as close to fountain pens that we’d get at that age. The most exciting thing was to get a new color. Black and blue were great, but there was also red. Red was pedestrian compared to green. Or freaking purple. When I was journaling back then, I collected pens to represent the rainbow, substituting black for yellow, and finding an orange felt-tipped pen. Those were the days.

In 2010, long after I’d learned to draw, I found a four-pack of Pilot Precise pens at the Government Printing Office, where I was temping. I swiped them out of instinct, but I wasn’t sure what I would use them for. I didn’t journal—I didn’t do much writing in general, and when I did, it was with real fountain pens. I put them in the Box of Misfit Writing and Art supplies.

Along the way, Nicole bought me a set of thirty Stabilo Art Pens. They were regular pens, not brushes, so I tried a little cross-hatching. After a few tries, I was able to create works of art like this:

My mind returned to the Pilots. I only had four colors: black, blue, red, and green, but even with a limited palette, I knew I could create art. Best of all, I had a character I’d never get tired of drawing, and red, green, and blue were her colors. I have a dozen of these drawings, and some of them are really awful (most of my drawings are awful—you’re only seeing the good ones), but here are a few of the best.

(I did this one yesterday)

Concerned that the four-pack was going to run out of ink (it’s not even close), I splurged on a ten-pack. In addition to black, green, blue, and red, it has magenta, purple, light blue, light green, yellow, and orange. I took them for a spin.

It’s been good to stretch myself out after working so solidly with watercolors while making Polterguys. These pens are indulgent, but they’re a lot of fun. It brings me back to the school days when Severian and I would hang out in the back of class, writing all over our notebooks, and being unbridled in our creativity.

Big Wheel Keep on Turnin’

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Sometimes a bad day doesn’t have to be a bad day forever. New Year’s Eve started really poorly, the kind of poorly that could have carried over into the new year. I won’t get into any specifics because they’re none of your business, but my life is going to change drastically, possibly as soon as this month.

I spent the afternoon kind of shock, but one of my oldest friends got my stunned text and helped talk me through it over the phone. I’ve worried that I don’t have many friends anymore because everybody has a life, and many of them were pushed out of my life while I was married. However, everybody I reached out to got back to me as soon as they read their texts, and I was able to process the events of the day.

The reason I didn’t have a bad day was because I got to hang out with the Nerdy Couple, a husband-and-wife duo I can trace back to Bloomington, Indiana. They had with them their Delightfully Weird Friend and another friend I could only describe as unhinged.

I told them all about my morning while trying not to editorialize (while editorializing), and after that twenty-minute conversation, we talked about Star Trek, the Star-Trek-adjacent fic I’ve been posting on AO3, but haven’t updated since October. We talked a lot about Star Trek. Nerdy Husband told me that there is a novel with some information on how Sarek and Amanda Grayson got together (a question that’s been plaguing me for a while), and we all agreed that the Kirk of the original series is actually a thoughtful, diplomatic man and not the horny cowboy everybody remembers him as (thanks, in no small part, to the JJ Abrams movies).

From there we gorged ourselves on sushi, cupcakes, and (for me anyway) Adderall and coffee before playing Cards against Humanity and observing ourselves becoming horrible people. I shared my favorite pick-up line (“You remind me of my pinkie toe: you’re small, cute, and I’m probably going to bang you on my coffee table later.”) which matched the tone perfectly. My bedtime is 8:00, though closer to 7:30 lately, so by ten o’clock I was feeling loopy, which only helped me win a few rounds. Taking breaks to show each other TikTok videos and to share horrifying medical stories, we wrapped it up in time for the ball drop. Delightfully Weird Friend dominated, followed by Nerdy Husband. The rest of us weren’t even close.

That’s how I’m going to remember New Year’s Eve 2023. It was the year I became an artist again and illustrated two-and-a-half comics. I saw Romania, which was awesome, and I kicked my marijuana habit. Newcastle came down with hyperthyroidism and arthritis, but once we put him on treatment, he’s incredibly healthy (for a cat who has those ailments plus kidney disease and cardiac failure). I finally made a new friend, at work, and we text each other all the time when we’re not being productive or going out to coffee. I lost the hearing in one of my ears, but yesterday it came back. I did put on a lot of weight, which I’m not happy about.

This year I’m going to illustrate the MortalMan story I’ve been dreaming about since 2000. I even picked up a new art board to do it with. At some point, I’m going to move to a new apartment, and I’ll be living solo for the first time in my entire life. I have a plan to take my weight off. Other than that, my year will be wide open.

This has been a very matter-of-fact post, but that’s because I’m probably going to hop back into bed shortly. Once upon a time I spent New Year’s Day nursing a hangover, treating myself to a greasy breakfast, and watching bad TV, sometimes with a girlfriend, sometimes with my sister, and sometimes alone. This year I’ve spend most of my morning in my pajamas, drifting in and out of sleep and reviewing my first round of proofs while Newcastle cuddled me. I cannot be happier at this moment. Twenty-four hours ago should have ruined me, but it failed. I’m filled with as much chill and hope as I’ve ever had.

May your year fill you with chill and hope.

And IIIIIIIIIIIIIII Will Always Love Yule

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I stopped celebrating Christmas a long time ago, around the time my parents stopped paying my airplane ticket home. After I moved to New York-adjacent, I had a lot of family in New Jersey, but I am a terrible long-distance relative, and I didn’t know any of them well enough to spend the holiday with them, except once, and that was awkward.

The second year I was there, my uncle Larry invited me to Linden, New Jersey, in mid-December, along with the extended families of himself and my aunt Christine. Christine is my mother’s sister, but I adored everyone there, even the kids and grandkids of Larry’s brother, Phil. Even though I was out of touch, Uncle Larry welcomed me into his home on Ainsworth Street as if I had always been there, and I visited them frequently on weekends.

I only saw Larry’s family once a year, though, and I watched the children grow up as I kept them occupied while Mommy and Daddy got drunk. Whenever my smoker’s lungs couldn’t keep up with them, we played the heart-attack game, which was me falling to the ground and all of them tried to revive me using their rudimentary understanding of CPR. My other favorite game was the monster game, where I’d chase them to a hiding place, safe from me, and then I went and had a beer. Eventually, they’d find me, then I’d just roar, and they split.

But that left the actual day, when my extended family celebrated with just themselves, and my found families all went home. You’d think that would be depressing, but it really wasn’t. You see, on December 25, I had plans.

My day would start out late, and I’d head into the city for brunch with Joshua. As this was Christmas, our options were limited. One or two years, he had a girlfriend from China, and she took us to a real Chinese restaurant, which was a lot like that racist dining scene from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Chicken with broccoli was not on the menu, but something horrible being done to a crab was.

From there, we’d see a movie, which was reminiscent of what my family would do when I was a kid, and we ran out of things to unwrap. For the latter, the movie I remember most was Home Alone. As for the former, the one that became my Christmas movie is Spike Lee’s 25th Hour. (All you Die Hard people are so cute.) And from there we’d go to work.

Working at The New York Post on Christmas was absolutely wonderful. Everyone there was Jewish, or without family, or hiding from their family. None of the hardcore news editors were there, so everyone was relaxed. Year-round, the sport we played at The Post was to make each other laugh, and never was it more competitive than it was on Christmas. Even though I saw them every week, there was something especially heartwarming about seeing Mike and Rob and Dom and my auxiliary dad, Barry, as well as everyone else. The magic of Christmas in New York is such a cliché, but when you pass by the tree at the Rockefeller Center and glance into the ice-skating rink on your way to an office with a sodium-heavy buffet and affectionate shouting from some of your favorite people, you believe.

I have no memory of the thirteen Christmases I spent with Kate because we treated them like normal days. Usually we’d spend the weekend before with her (but never my) family, and her family didn’t get me, so they had no idea what to do with me. The actual day was just like any other, except everything was closed. It’s not as special when you’re not waking up and unwrapping presents.

With Nicole, she has a side-hustle sitting pets, and Christmas is a lucrative day, so we’ve spent it apart, except for once, during quarantine, when we watched that smoking turd, Wonder Woman 1984. This year, she woke up at home, and we unwrapped presents together and went our separate ways, her making a dessert and me taking the new sketchbooks and expensive paintbrushes Mom and Dad got me out for a spin. Zooming with them and my sisters and my niece and my nephew-in-law was pure chaos.

Christmas is just a day. Sure everything’s closed, and there’s nothing good on TV, but the sun rises and falls, just as it always does. You need to eat lunch, you need to take the dogs for a walk. It’s okay not to do anything just because someone else is. If you really need to find meaning on December 25, you can find it. I found mine on a loud news floor, trying to think of a clever headline. (The best one I ever came up with had to do with a computer screw-up that cost New York teachers their December 24 paycheck: “The glitch that stole X-mas.”) And it’s okay to feel lonely. Boxing Day is just around the corner.

I used to be a humbug, including during my time at the paper before I realized what a holiday it was. Nowadays, I am by no means a Tiny Tim or post-ghost Scrooge. I still have a problem with how shallow this holiday is (i.e. the Black Fridays that last well into December) and how I lost the goddamned Wham! game on Christmas Freaking Eve! But even at my loneliest, I looked forward to this day, even if it is just a day.

(This essay has no thesis, it’s just a bunch of random and contradictory thoughts pouring out.)

The Sass and the Furious

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I had a brief dream where, in the next Fast and the Furious movie, Vin Diesel’s Dom Toretto gets swept up in the evil shenanigans of his old college roommate, played by some famous slab of beef wearing a fabric baseball cap and a pair of cargo shorts. This is, of course presupposing Dom Toretto, or even Vin Diesel, went to college, much less finished high school. (Considering that it’s in Diesel’s contract that Toretto can never lose a fight onscreen, I’m inclined to think he didn’t.)

Anyway, it got me thinking about my roommates in college, and whether they’d come into my life as bad guys to be forgiven and welcomed back into my family to enjoy a chilled Corona. There’s Will, who’s certainly sharp enough to be a mastermind, but he’s a big softie, and I don’t think he’d take too well to being bad.

Then there’s Jeff. Anyone who knows Jeff knows that he’s got it in him to be a madman. I haven’t seen him in over twenty-five years, but I know he shaved his head, which is a prerequisite to evil. When I knew him, he was perfecting the wicked rubbing together of palms and giggling maniacally while tossing out wicked bon mots like, “When life hands you dilemmas, make dilemonade.”

He could also get inside the hero’s mind. For example, he never swore. He took to words more colorful than “damn” or “hell” like I take to the N-word, i.e. never, ever, not even alone in a dark room with all the listening devices turned off. That’s why it came as enough of a surprise that I fell off my chair when he caught me by myself and leaned in really close, whispering, “Don’t fuck with me.” He denies it to this day, and to this day, nobody believes me but Tim Lentz, who always knew there was something shady about that guy.  

Jeff kept his cool under pressure, a necessary qualification for an overlord, but he also had little patience for malarkey. Even though we were a matched set through much of our freshmen and sophomore years, he didn’t tolerate my bullshit, and understand there was a lot of bullshit back then. Would he kill a minion for making a mistake? Maybe not at twenty, but certainly as he got older, his patience would dwindle.

The reason I know for sure that Jeff’s got amoral plans for the world is that he never left our room without a slip of paper he tucked into his breast pocket. He showed it to no one, but he’d occasionally take it out, read it, and chuckle darkly. One evening, when I was again protecting the purity of Altman Hall from behind the desk, he chatted with me for a few minutes, pulled out this paper, and opened it up, revealing the title: “Taking over the world checklist.” He crossed out a numbered item, “Befriend Jeremiah Murphy,” and folded it back up before I could read what else was on it.

To this day, I have no idea what my role in a global takeover might be. I’m all but hermit who writes novels and illustrates comics no one reads. I have a feeling we’re going to find out soon because we’re both turning fifty, and fifty’s a good age for world-domination. And if he tried to stop him, Vin Diesel find out that this is a fight even Dominic Toretto can’t win.

Oh My Gourd

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I have been unusually social lately, which is to say I’ve been a little bit social.

It started when my desk moved to the other side of the office, closer to my boss (and farther away from the constant gossips who never acknowledged my existence). Sitting nearby was the new girl whose neo-eighties look I admired from a distance. And, completely unlike me, I introduced myself and engaged in a few long conversations with her.

As an introvert who becomes more of a hermit with each passing day, I’m fine not talking to people, and in fact, I prefer it. But there’s a difference between my new neighbors giving me space and my old neighbors not even acknowledging I exist.

For example, I overheard one of my new neighbors say, “… for when you rip your arm off …” I turned around and said, “What the HELL are you talking about?” And they laughed and included me and filled me in. My old neighbors would have laughed and carried on like I wasn’t there. I may be quiet, but I’m not opposed to conversation.

Anyway, eighties girl was not alive in the eighties, but like 80 percent of the girls I knew who were, her name is Jennifer. She moved desks a few days after I met her, out of sight, out of mind.

What typically keeps me from introducing myself to people is that I feel like I need an excuse. I don’t want to be (anymore awkward0. With Jennifer, it was telling her I liked her style. However, with the other new girl who just started last week, my excuse was she was my counterpart at the other journal we publish. I made myself available for questions, and I did the unthinkable: I asked her out to coffee.

(I don’t think I should have to say this, but I’m going to say this anyway to clear up any potential confusion: this was not a date. I’m ace, and she’s getting married in March. This was a friend date at the most.)

But what really alarmed me was when the boss’s boss’s boss put out a call for the Pumpkin Carving Committee. I volunteered, only to find out that all of the other volunteers knew I was an artist. (I photocopy pages from my sketchbook and hang them up in my cubicle, but I didn’t think anyone noticed.) So not only am I a part of a work-related fun activity, but I kind of took charge. I gathered everyone’s email addresses and contact the group with updates. Naturally, I designed it, marked it up for cutting, and also walked to the art store with the corporate credit card and bought paint. (Based on the recommendation of the gurus there, I purchased paint markers, which don’t dry out and are more convenient if I want to graffiti the place on my last day.)

I’m not going to do anymore to the pumpkin. As I told the committee, I’ve been hogging up the fun. My boss volunteered to gut, but no one is stepping up to give it a face. I am reasonably sure the pumpkin will go unfinished. But I don’t care because look what I did!

That begs the question, what has gotten into me?