2002-07-03 3:08 p.m.
Here To Go, not Here To Work

Now that I'm not suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous out-of-control blood sugar, I can put fingers to keyboard.

I talked to Dad this morning, and I'm not sure how long I can feel guilt about my decision not to work with him. It's nothing he's doing, no speeches or pronouncements or even passive-aggressive verbal jabs. We just talk about what he's going to do with his business (in this case, liquidating some or all of it, and potentially looking for a job � which he said would make the first time in his life he worked for someone else), and the hooks of regret grab onto my heart for another round.

I don't regret my choice, which is the good part. I had to pick this direction, or I would've been saddled to a dying business for two or three years, and very likely end up hating him in the process.

But when I listen to him, when the part of me that never got to be the son you see on TV, playing catch with the archetypal Dad, I'm not so sure I did the right thing.

It doesn't help when he asks me how my life/job search is going, and I have to bumble through an answer I know will make no sense to him. If he knew I was writing about homeless people, he probably would have said, "what, by slowly becoming one yourself by working on something that may never sell?"

Then again, he knows better by now.

Until hitting this job, I never knew what it was like to work in a hyper-corporate atmosphere...the excessive caffeine and sugar boosts to keep you awake and alert, the hours of nothing punctuated by moments of frantic activity...I have to get out of this. I feel too wasted at the end of the day. The artificial highs and lows...now I understand why people eventually dip into coke and speed.

Can I get off this merry-go-round now please?

Flashbacks from hell...in one week, I've bumped into two, count 'em, two people from my high school. One I saw on Broadway while power-walking uptown (who I would've numbered among my best friends until he moved back to Texas), and the other answered my ad on Nerve, who I recognized when she sent me a picture.

The former makes me smile, especially as Andrew's voice has barely changed since then (though my gay-dar is going off; might be faulty), and we used to have stupidly good times...for high school. More to report after we hang out this weekend, but I imagine it's going to be a good time. (Hell, even after creating, nurturing, and burying an Internet startup with him, Dave remains one of my best friends.)

The latter bothered me a bit. She was one of those girls that I found interesting, and who obviously found me cute, dorky, and full of joie de vivre (though who knew that phrase in freakin' high school?)...but she got never past her group of friends to investigate me, and that feeling of untouched curiosity was, consequently, mutual.

We had tea and dinner, and it was really like planting ass on Memory Lane. Instead of her friends, she was held back by studying for the Bar, by the idea that we went to high school together, and of course, the online personal ad thing. We talked about high school briefly, but realized that we didn't know the same people, didn't run in the same circles, and weren't interested in the same things, then or now. All the while, there was this very odd pressure to be intimate, as though we were two acquaintances already in on one secret, so we felt compelled to spill whatever else we knew about, well, anything. (It wasn't that interesting.)

I've been curious (in that "Grosse Pointe Blank" way) about my impending high school reunion in 2004...now, not so much. It can wait.

what I'm reading:

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera