2004-06-30 - 4:39 p.m.
Soon to be Free of June?
Right. Often I say something stupid about “start at the beginning.” Well, I’m not sure where the beginning is, so I’ll start with the set-up.
I’m home. It’s Wednesday. I got home at about 2:30 this morning. Yeah, that’s not normal – I’ll sum-up.
The Rig (what I usually call our work car) died on us at about 5pm yesterday. As nearly as Andy and I can tell, it’s the Alternator. So I called into the office, and after a bit of conferring about what we were supposed to do, I called AAA to have the car (and us) towed back to the hotel (A Hospitality Inn in Dover Ohio – about 45 minutes away from our work zone again. Did I mention that on Monday we half-unexpectedly worked 14 hours, and couldn’t find a hotel in Millersburg again?). Nate was going to hook up the car hauler and come down to fetch us. Tina told us to have dinner somewhere near the hotel on the company card. (Bob Evans. I don’t even think we cost them 20 bucks for our dinner.)
Now, what do two bored, tired, overheated, frustrated blue-collar types do with at least two and a half hours of time to kill before being hauled the two and half hours back to base? We asked the lady at the desk at the hotel if there were any bars in walking distance. (At this point, Nate’s ETA was going to be roughly 10pm. It was going on 8.)
So we walked in the general direction she’d pointed us, and ended up at a little place… Rascal’s is the name of it, I think.
Now, as much as killing a mostly-limited amount of time in a bar after an afternoon like that could’ve sucked (or at least been boring)… this is where the story turns, and I begin to half-hope that as it’s the end of June, I will really be escaping from my worst June on record soon.
Bar was fairly quietish. (Well, it was a Tuesday night, after all.) And we ended up chatting some with the bartender, who evidently does not usually work on Tuesdays. Mostly just chit-chat. Andy and I were comparing notes on different drinks and different bars we’d been to, and the bartender was paying us roughly the same attention, I’d guess, as she was some of her apparent regulars who were in.
Then she got off shift.
Roughly at this point, I’d gotten a second beer. I noticed when she started switching out the drawer for the next girl working that she hadn’t taken my cash. “Do I get to pay for this,” I asked. “No.” I thought she was joking. Or rather, I expected that the bartender coming on would take my cash. Neither. Uhm, OK. I don’t complain about free beer, as a general rule. Although I felt mildly guilty, as I hadn’t been alert enough to tip when I got the first beer, so I’d lost my chance.
Anyway, bartender (her name’s Amanda) sits down between me and a friend of hers who was playing the game machine. Buys two chips from the new ‘tender. Promptly flips one at Andy, and one at me. Chats with us some.
Andy was actively a third of the conversation through drinking stories, places lived (or places friends and exes have lived. From the sound of it, she’s lived in as-many-if-not-more places than Anne, and her ex-gf lived more places than she had), drug pop-culture, and stories we don’t want to know about our mothers. He started to completely drop out of the conversation roughly when we were talking theater (she’s a theater major), movie adaptations of Shakespeare, and lit – mostly the sci-fi and fantasy genres.
I got Andy a round after he’d used his chip – I did, after all, owe him one from the night we unwound a bit in that sports bar in Greenville. And got myself a third with my chip. (Three drinks at this point, and I’d only paid for two of them. I don’t usually do that well at the Wharf. Heh.)
Nate showed up at about 10:20, and we talked him into having just one beer with us – payback for having driven all the way to Dover, which no one would really want to do unexpectedly because of a broken work vehicle. I got it for him. Now I don’t owe Andy anymore, but theoretically Nate owes me. And I went ahead and got myself a last beer, since we were staying for a bit.
I ran out of smokes, bummed two from Amanda. Well, I bummed one; the second was offered. And I swear I wasn’t like, eyeing up the pack or anything either. I generally won’t bum more than one from somebody I haven’t known for quite a while.
Around 11ish, Nate and Andy finished their drinks. (I have roughly no idea what time it is, as I’m actually having that rare thing – a genuinely fascinating conversation with someone I don’t know). So Andy nudges me, tells me I’ve got to finish my beer, it’s time for us to get the car loaded up, get checked out of the hotel, and head back to Elmore. Just because, I said “What? Time to go?” Either Andy is somehow a slicker guy than I’d quite have given him credit for (although he is a good fella), or he totally misread the intent of my being a smart alec there. Very good-naturedly, he says “Give her your contact info and let’s go – we’ll be back next week. Next two weeks, maybe three.”
In roughly the time it takes me to process that he’s just told me to give the girl my number, she’s gotten a pad of notepaper from behind the bar, and written down hers. (Although I don’t know - because I didn’t think to ask - if it’s a cell or a landline). So I picked up the notepad, wrote down mine (had to check it – hey I never call my own cellular, y’know?), asked if she was online. She said yeah, and so we exchanged e-mail addresses too.
So, yeah. In spite of having killed the work car, and not getting home until 2:20ish this morning (took a while to load up the car, check out, etc before we could get on the road), it was not the horrible day it could’ve been. Not even close to it.
Granted, being me, I’m kind of in a “*blink* what exactly just happened here” kind of frame of mind.
Of course, then I get up, and check my LJ friends list, and come to the conclusion that my small time as a part of Anne’s life is already nothing more than a footnote to her.
That sort of bothers me, but… I don’t know. Maybe not as much as I expected, or not for the same reasons. Possibly a part of it is that some part of my brain has finally been able to flip the switch, and sort of say “Well, that’s really how it is, how it was. Right then, really wasn’t anything I could do. We can make peace with this.” And as for not the same reasons I would’ve expected that to bother me… it’s like, I would’ve expected it to be more of a sort of whimpering “but this meant so much to me, how could it mean so little to you” kind of thing. But it seems to be more the form of a sort of wounded-ego, if that makes any sense. I’m vaguely surprised by this. Usually my ego doesn’t pipe up enough about anything for me to notice if it’s wounded or not. But there’s this… as usual, I don’t know how to explain it. Like part of me is feeling almost insulted, where I would’ve expected to be feeling more hurt.
Not that it doesn’t remind me of the hurt. That’s not it at all.
I’ve come to the decision – and might actually be able to keep to it – to stop trying to really work out in so much degree of detail how I’m feeling over all of that. All I do is chase my tail like a puppy. Over-thinking was never going to solve it all for me. And evidently thinking isn’t either. So instead, I’m going to stop analyzing it so terribly much. There’s a little that’s changed – not so much in how I feel, but how I react to feeling that way – and there’s a lot that hasn’t really changed, although it appears a little differently. Either way, what was out of my hands is still out of my hands. And while I haven’t been wallowing, exactly, I have been uncharacteristically broody.
Mind you, brooding is often what I do. But it’s unlike me to brood so much over something specific that’s not only out of my hands, but over and done with. It’s much more “me” to “brood” over the current, and to brood over complex things that I do have some ability to alter.
But it’s June 30th. And I really think that I’m going to be able to escape June soon, finally.
And I mean that in a lot of ways. I mean it emotionally, I mean it in terms of work stress, and in rare moment of near-optimism, I’m going to say I might even mean it in terms of some family stress. And, judging by the bits I wrote last week at OMN, and the bits I wrote on Monday & Tuesday during lulls (in my head, mostly, scribbled down swiftly once I had a chance later on), I also mean it in terms of my creative block that’s been stemming from everything else June heaped onto me.
Hmm. And I forgot to mention. Mom’s computer is back and in good health, which means I have the internet on my own machine again. Of course, I can’t figure out how to get mom’s box to start auto-dialing again (particularly when my machine wants the internet and we’re not connected yet), but that’s a small annoyance. For having things back the way I’m used to them belonging, that’s all cool.
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Murrrrrrffff? - 2005-01-04
A Late Review - 2004-09-12
Weekend Update - 2004-08-08
Intermission - 2004-08-07
Rambling or something. - 2004-07-31
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