Pad See Yew, Too!

So much to write about today. I’m going away for the weekend. I’m going to West Virginia, of all places. I have this very close group of friends from college –we all moved into the same dorm at the beginning of my third year of school, and we all lived there for two years. We just clicked from the get-go. There are about ten of us, mostly male, some female, and they’re some of the funniest, most talented people I’ve ever known. A couple of the guys have arranged for us to rent a suite in Berkeley Springs, WV, and their e-mails to the rest of us have been sort of strange and filled with odd portents. I think they’ve concocted some sort of business venture in which they want us to take part. I’m just looking forward to renting a car and going on a road trip with my friend CanadaGirl, who’s part of this group. I haven’t done a road trip in ages. I’m looking forward to getting out of the New York area, I’m looking forward to being away from a computer and not being able to blog for a couple of days.

I think at some point I’m going to have to read this. Fascinating! (Thanks, Dean!)

I talked to my boss today and I’ve persuaded her to give this horrendously dreadful assignment to one of the other clerks. I’ve been working on this thing for about three weeks, or attempting to work on it, and I’ve made no headway. There are either four or five companies involved, and there are either four or five cases consolidated here, I’m not even sure. It involves solid waste and host community benefits and sole source facilities and transfer stations. I don’t really know what any of that means. I have this mental block against the whole thing. I can deal with people. I can deal with a human story. I can deal with someone suing for certain rights, or suing to recover certain costs, or an agency taking action against someone to get his or her (argh) professional license revoked, or even someone suing for Medicaid benefits, despite the confusing technical world of Medicaid. But this case has no human story. A city is suing four solid waste companies to get money from them because they take up space in the city. Or maybe just because the city was strapped for cash and thought this would be a good way to get some. Not even is there no human story; there’s no damn story here at all. I can’t wrap my brain around this thing. I try to read the briefs and my mind drifts off. It repels me. The papers and I are both northern ends of magnets.

I didn’t want to admit defeat, but this morning I decided it was finally time. I can’t take it anymore. And so my boss said she’d give the assignment to one of the other clerks and give me whatever that clerk is doing. It’s embarrassing. As lazy as I am, I’m not a person who likes to quit. Or rather, I don’t like the perception of quitting. Sure, I’ve never had trouble passive-aggessively surfing the Net and getting no work done, but actually giving up? But I guess sometimes you have to know when to quit. You are the Clinton health care plan. Goodbye!

Last night I had dinner with my friend Nick. For the second time in five days we went to Lemongrass and got Thai food. On Sunday we went to the Lemongrass on University Place, and last night we went to the one on Barrow Street. As I turned off Hudson onto Barrow, I realized that a movie was being filmed. Along Hudson there were these fluorescent green flyers that said “To the Set,” with arrows. So I walked along Barrow and there was a Citroen on the street and a Volvo behind it. A man was hosing down the street to make it wet. A handsome, well-dressed couple were sitting at an outdoor table at a restaurant with spotlights around them. I asked a woman with headphones and a tanktop what they were filming, and in a European accent she said, “A commercial from France.” Oh. That’s all.

I met up with Nick and we had the same things we always get — he got Pad Thai and I got Pad See Yew. As I placed each broad noodle and piece of Chinese broccoli into my mouth with a pair of chopsticks, we talked about me and my stuckness. But see, I never feel uplifted when I talk with him. He says things that are meant to be positive and uplifting but for some reason he winds up making me feel worse. I think it just makes me think he’s much more capable a human being than I am. Nothing he said was making sense. Maybe I shouldn’t have tried to let it make sense — maybe I should have let it just wash over me.

I think I’m going to send my resume to Lambda. Also, I think I’m going to look into finding a roommate in Manhattan. Nick suggested that to me. I said okay, even though I’m wary of roommates (I had a bad experience last year). But then he told me there were no right answers. I said okay, I guess you’re trying to signal that it’s better to find my own place? No, he said. Huh? I said. And it went on like that. He was talking about the fact that certain things require work and effort and I was saying that I don’t want to make yet another bad decision. I’m not even summarizing the conversation very well because I don’t really know what the point of it was. It was like going down the rabbit hole. Eat me! Drink me! Make me into a Mobius strip! The point seemed to be that I need to put more effort into making decisions but that I also need simultaneously to worry less about the consequences and yet also pay attention to the consequences. Make a choice that works for me, but don’t obsess about falling into a bad situation. Worry and not worry. Or something. I didn’t get it. He might as well have been talking about solid waste facilities. I couldn’t process what he was saying and I just felt worse.

Some of this has to do with Nick himself. There are certain people whom I meet and then find myself feeling really competitive with. When I met Nick back in September, I fell for him almost immediately. I thought maybe he was the one, or at least a one. We became good friends, and we spent almost every Saturday walking around Manhattan. I was enthralled by him. But I was never sure how he felt about me, and when I finally told him about my feelings, he politely told me he wasn’t looking to date anyone at that time, that he was recovering from a bad breakup. That was the truth, but a couple of months later he entered the dating scene again, just not with me. This upset me, and we were out of contact for a month or so. When we got back in touch, things were like new. My crush was gone — I’d realized he wasn’t the person I’d thought he was anyway. With my romantic yearnings out of the way, our friendship is much improved. We’re less guarded around each other now.

But I find myself envious of him and his success. For one thing, he seems to get all these dates through PlanetOut, while I can’t remember the last time I had one. But more than that, he’s such a go-getter. He works for a cable TV network and he’s the youngest management-level person in the company’s history. He just turned 25, and in two weeks he’s starting a job at a different cable network, where he’ll be making $80,000 a year. Just a college degree. He had a screwed-up childhood — an alcoholic, emotionally needy mother who’s on either her third or fourth marriage. Whenever I tell him that his life seems great, he tells me about how internally anxious and screwy he actually is. Yet at the same time he knows that this screwy childhood has given him strength and independence and worldliness. Instead of killing him it made him stronger. He has this manic energy that chaotically bursts out of him. He’s a great schmoozer, he’s a real people person, he knows how to work all the office politics, and on top of that he’s creative and energetic. He’s either going to be the next Jeff Zucker or he’s going to wind up jumping off a cliff to his death. My god, he can be exhausting to be around.

Sometimes I still see the world as an elementary school, where they give out just one award. Only one person can get it. If someone else gets the acclaim, then you lose. I’m just thinking of fifth grade, where my smart friend got the language arts award and the math award and the science award and he kept walking down the aisle to receive one certificate after another while I kept looking back at my mom with this upset look on my face and wound up getting nothing.

But really, the world doesn’t work that way. There are no awards, or if there are, they’re all just hype-fests propelled by big corporations. There are no Egyptian gods or pyramids to greatness here. We’re all just human beings scraping ourselves off the pavement. It’s just that some people happen to look really good while doing it.

Have a nice weekend.