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imperfect vacation
Tuesday, April 6 1999
This morning Kim flew back to Detroit for a six-day-long visit with her friends and family. It was to be our first-ever over-night separation since early August. Though it's taboo for me to think so, I was looking forward to the separation, if only for the opportunity to collect my thoughts and do things without the slightest interference by the person to whom I have given up all of my personal privacy.
It was another rainy day, and since I was again stranded at work with my bicycle, I found myself yet again trapped in the rut of having to go out with my male colleagues to the nearby Gordon Biersch Schtevely "micro" brewery/restaurant.
It was mostly us in the web development team: Sherms, Kevin, Al and me, but once we got there, we were joined by one of the sales guys, a dude named Mike. We had a typically male conversation, mostly about what girls we think are hot in our workplace. Again I found myself expressing the opinion that Brandi, the supposedly hot chick who works in business development, appears to be fabricated entirely out of plastic. Kevin didn't care about that at all, saying, "she's mighty fine plastic and I'd like to..." Sherms, on the other hand, agreed with me. He and I actually have fairly similar taste in women, I suspect. We both mentioned Leah, the new "Director of Promotions." She's not conventionally beautiful, but she has a hot little body and a certain flirty naughtyness about her that lingers in the mind even after she leaves the room. "She looks like she might be a 'bad girl'!" I proclaimed, and we all went around giving high-fives. Yessir, that's how guys are. Later it occurred to me that the thing I like about Leah is my conviction that she has a sense of irony. I see it in her eyes. Brandi, on the other hand, has no discernable sense of irony whatsoever. But Al wasn't impressed with this criteria of attractiveness. Said he, "Irony is for ugly girls."
By the way, I had no cash on me at all, but since all my colleagues were stumbling over each other to be the next buying a round of drinks, money was a complete non-issue.
After the drinking, Kevin, Al and I went back to Kevin's place, La Mirage, for further decadence. The evening ended around a Sony Playstation, with a realistic though subtly-stilted baseball game sucking my energy away as I observed it passively from an easy chair.
When Al dropped me off at my place, I luxuriated in the absences of both my girlfriend and her psychologically needy dog. I started the bath water and climbed in. Ah...
I'd only been there a few minutes before the phone rang. I let it ring and go over to the answering machine. It was Kim, wanting, it seemed, to talk about nothing in particular. She called back a few minutes later. Than a few minutes after that. It was disgusting. As far away as she was, she wasn't doing a very good job of giving me the peace I'd anticipated. When my bath came to its premature end, I unplugged the phone and answering machine and went directly to bed.
All night, both asleep and awake, I was haunted by thoughts of Kim. No doubt my obvious non-desire to communicate was being tallied up on my "aspects of loserness" leger while being viewed as evidence of an affair. This separation wasn't proving to be psychologically refreshing after all.
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