balding angrily

Jerry may not get a chance to respond; he’s a busy man. He acted puppy-dog hurt when he read the post, but it was just an act.

This morning I went to a meeting to go over preliminary pricing for a multi-million dollar project to which I’m tangentially attached. It was three hours long. I put in the “multi-million dollar” to give a sense of the scale of the project, not to brag. If anything huge numbers turn me off. This meeting was like any other meeting. Everyone shook everyone else’s hand; we traded cards; we smiled; we waited for the client to show up; there wasn’t a single female in the room. As always when he showed up, the client was the best-dressed person at the table. He oozed authority. He had money. The inferiority complex that usually sits comfortably in my perineum began its climb to my stomach. I feel like I’m faking it at my job most of the time, so when I have to represent myself professionally, I always expect the other people in the meeting are going to tear off their human faces, point at me and screech like Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Architects don’t make a lot of money compared to other professionals. Most people think we do because we have a fancy title, but we don’t. That was the first thing faculty told students and parents at student orientation. They separated the parents from the students anxious to get to the drinking and sex. They said to us, the students, “You will not make money. If your goal is to make money, get out now.” To the parents they said, “Your children will not make money; if your goal is to have them make money, get them out now.” Luckily I have a cool dad that always told me, “Do what you want to do, and the money will follow.” I decided then that not making money is okay, and I stand by that decision. I accept that I will make less than my friends and partner. I am at peace with that. I am blessed to have people in my life that were brought up to be humble, down-to-earth, and sensitive even when they have money, but I am acutely aware of class and hierarchy, especially in meetings where I feel like I’m surrounded by fraud-sniffing, people-suit-wearing aliens.

Then they started with the numbers and the numbers and the numbers and the tens of thousands of dollars for the millwork and the tens of thousands of dollars for the toilets and the hundreds of thousands of dollars for the concrete, and my mind went to another place. I thought, “It’s cold in here. I wonder what that power cord goes to. The top of my mouth feels funny. Is he wearing a burgundy shirt? I like burgundy. I wonder what ever happened to that burgundy shirt I wore that one time. Jeez, that was a long time ago. Why would I think about that? I hope they have cookies after this meeting. Is it okay to ask if they have cookies right now? A snicker doodle. I would kill for a snicker doodle. Or a muffin. A cinnamon-sugar muffin. With apple juice. In the four-ounce plastic tub with the aluminum foil top. And maybe a small pack of raisins. I really miss those small packs of raisins. And peanut butter and jelly sandwiches cut on the diagonal. No. Cut straight across. That would be better, cut straight across. And the jelly needs to be in the center of two layers of peanut butter. Peanut butter on one slice with jelly on the other slice is just wrong. People who make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that way are evil. Ooh, and a small carton of milk to wash down the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I wish I were in the cafeteria in the first grade.”

When I hear numbers over 50, my mind turns to bleh.

I don’t mind not making money for doing architecture, but I do mind sitting in meetings where my mind turns to mush. I say this semi-seriously. It’s an aspect of the job that I need to find out how to not do.

J had a comment about that last post.  “Stop writing about pubes and your ass.  Stop writing TMI things…just write something normal,” he said.  I admit I love to write TMI things, and writing about farts and pubes is easier.  It’s easier to get a laugh.  And I’m all about doing what comes easier.  People who know me don’t accuse me of being that guy that does extra-credit homework.

So, I’m writing about him…or us.  We met on-line at PlanetOut.com.  People ask us sometimes how we met, and he pops-up with the truth.  I look down at my food and try to think of a lie or a half-truth.  “We met at Cuba Libre,” I think, my mouth already forming the words, but his words are out and my head sinks.   Even though we met on-line, I’m wary of recommending other people finding love there.  I read and hear too many stories of guys going on-line for sex only, so even though I found love it still seems unlikely.  To be technical, I didn’t find love on-line, I found Jerry on-line, and we fell in love later.

We met for the first time face-to face at Cuba Libre.  This is the half-truth that I’d like to share, the one that will not create thoughts of Craig’s List anonymous sex late night meet-ups in the asker’s mind.  The first thing I noticed about him – and I’m not saying anything too out-of-line; his friends give him hell about it all the time – were his eyes.  Jerry has really big eyes.  Someone less caring then me might even call them bug-eyes.  Also, he was wearing an outfit that didn’t accent his tall and thin frame.  He looked sloppy.  I parked my car a distance from the restaurant and walking toward the entrance saw him excitedly waving to me with those saucer eyes and that slovenly outfit.  My first thought was, “Alright, so it’s going to be one of those dates that I have to bear through thinking about how much time I have to spend with him until it’s no longer considered rude to go home and watch Spiderman for the twentieth time.”  And he cussed non-stop throughout the night.  I cuss a lot too, but not on a first meeting.  I thought that we might have a couple of uncomfortable dates and then stop calling each other.  The one good thing about that first meeting, the thing that impressed me about him, was the conversation.  If I listened past the cussing, I noticed that he was attentive to it.  He understood that the conversation, if it were to be a good one, had to have balance, that I shouldn’t dominate it and neither should he.  He asked questions about me, and I asked questions about him.  We shared equally.  This is really rare on dates, especially first dates.  So I gave him another shot.

Now, if I can I’ll get him to write about his first impression of me.  Or at least give him the chance to fire back some insults.

And yes the title of this post is true.  I take full credit.

I go through this problem every time I stop going to the gym and watching what I eat. My belly feels like its sitting on my thighs like an old man sits on his rocking chair rocking and complaining about the speeding whipper-snappers kicking up dust down his private dirt road. In this case complaining about drag racers equals gurgling and producing pockets of gas that don’t keep themselves contained.

Jerry and I are sometimes more like frat brothers than cuddly lovebirds. Many times a week one of us will purposefully fart on the other person. All sweet-like I whisper in his ear, “I love you very much…good night, sweetie,” turn around so my butt is right up against his hip, and let one fly. Jerry is less obnoxious but more noxious. He let’s one fly and then demurely says, “Whoops!” Fifteen seconds later the smell hits me, and I have to run for the Neutra-Air. As soon as I bolt from the bed, he cackles and kicks his feet in glee. I spray the Neutra-Air directly at his face while he screams at me to stop. We’ve been together for four years. It doesn’t get old. So naturally - or maybe unnaturally - I fart without really thinking about it.

We’re pretty much moved in, so there’s no more excuse for not working out. Today I gave it another go at the gym, but the gas problem hasn’t quite gone away. I farted and too loudly. Blessedly my elliptical neighbors had their headphones on, so they didn’t hear it - I think. And I hope they didn’t smell it. I hope.

Moving’s a bitch.  That’s not newsorthy, but it bears repeating.

We helped move J’s sister a couple of years ago; they have two kids and tons of shtuff.  They hired two trucks and about 15 movers because of the amount of their shtuff. When you get that many movers on the same job someone is going to end up standing around picking their nose.  When a person pays a load of money per hour for another person to pick their nose, the first person tends to want to cause harm to the second person’s genitals.  To make up for too many people picking their noses, J & I worked extra fast and got extra angry.  About 12 hours into this 16-hour move, one of the nose pickers caught my attention. He had a bald-head…not the kind of Vin Diesel/Bruce Willis hottie-hot bald head, but more like the Three Stooges’ Curly bald head where it looks like they have a package of hot dogs where the back of their neck should be…and as he smiled at me in a way that showed me that his mind works on 2 of its 4 cylinders, he said to me, “Dude, why are you rushing around?”  I wanted to tell him, “I’m making up for you, you encephalitic fucktard.”  (Oh AngryWhiteGirl…we hardly knew ye.)

The off-duty firemen that moved us were nothing like my sister-in-law’s movers.  They were so efficient and fast-paced that most of the time I felt like I was getting in the way.  J also had a lot to do with the efficiency of the move.  I have to be reminded that there are reasons why we’re a match, and one of them is that I tend to be a scatterbrained slacker and he’s an in-control organizer.

Unpacking was/is the opposite of the move.  This beautiful downtown view we now have from the seventh story of a nine story historic building comes at the price of inconvenient trash service.  In order to take down the piles and piles and piles of crushed boxes, packing paper, pizza boxes, doilies given to us by grandmothers that we intended on throwing out before packing, stinky cat litter, holey, greasy towels, and fake flowers we have to go down to the first floor, borrow a dolly or cart from the concierge and bring the trash to the compactor.  It sounds less complicated than it is.  After almost getting into a fight with J because both our nerves were shot, I tried to stack this pile on a flat dolly.  This flat dolly had no sides.  The boxes didn’t stack nicely, and they were slippery.  When I pushed on these boxes they tended not to move as a mass.  As I was getting off the elevator, the pile of boxes spit itself out from on top of the dolly like an overstuffed hamburger spits out its innards when you take a bite of it, getting French dressing on your white straight-from-the-cleaners pressed shirt with which you hoped to impress prospective clients in an after-lunch interview.  This metaphor came to me courtesy of the hand-on-his-walkie-talkie security guard that watched it happen while waiting to get on the elevator and did not help me gather up the boxes laid out on the lobby floor like a deck of cards after a game of 52 Pick-Up.

This scene was punctuated by many loud expletives and fist-shakings at the Creator by yours truly.  And thus the title of this post.