…and the rest of that !@#$
I'm starting this around 12:40am. It's been a day. Yesterday (Sunday) I was sick and didn't know why. At some point toward 1pm I was lightheaded and just sorta swinging in and out of wanting to stay awake. My friend Ronald dropped off a lens I left at his place after taking photos of his Transformers collection and I kept him outside of my apartment because if I was sick I didn't know if it was me, food I ingested, or something in the air.
Let me back up a little: Saturday was all-intensive. I got up around 10 which was later than I had wanted to. I grabbed some breakfast bars and stopped at a gas station for a small fruit drink before hitting the road to go to my old stomping ground, Buechel. Once there I got a haircut before driving over to the school I graduated from and taking pics of the basketball courts and some green chalkboards thanks to an old instructor Phil.
From there I booked it over to the Clifton Center off of Frankfort Ave. to sit in on the meeting for the Derby City Film Festival. I offered to help out with the fest and take pictures for Kris, the guy running it all. I also met up with Aimee (sp?) who I was interested in last year and still interested in BUT she jerked me around a bit and I'm not sure I want to deal with her anymore. I found a blackboard and started taking pictures before heading to my car to go back to my apartment.
I called Ronald from the road and told him that I would be running behind. I made it back to the apartment where my uncle was awake and sitting in his computer chair by his laptop. “Hi.” “Bye.” I grabbed my desklamp and went over to Ronald's place.
The guy has a massive Transformers collection. Massive. I had never taken “product” pics before so it was new for me. Fun? Yes. Exhausting? Yes. Did the pics come out well? Not as much as I had hoped but for not having done it before better than expected.
Following that we went to the Brick House Tap and Tavern. Three girls, one named Jenny, were having their birthdays and were planning on meeting down at Sully's on 4th Street Live. Ronald and I were down for that and so we decided we would leave for it around 11pm.
Went back to my apartment. Grabbed my USB cable to transfer original pics from camera to Ronald's computer. He did that while I did a crash-recharge on his living room couch for at least 30 minutes. Got up, got moving, had some more Canada Dry, and we went out on the road.
4th Street Live. Paid the $5 to get into Sully's. Jenny and her “crew” of 30 were nowhere to be seen. Ronald was letdown by this. He doesn't drink and he's not too much into club dancing and if you're not into either of these then 4th Street Live is not your forte. We walked around trying to see if they could be anywhere else but, no dice. We finally agreed to go to Ri Ra's Irish Pub where we sat and hung out; he had a soda and I took a Stella Artois, listening to some chick go on about how she would leave a guy who wanted to drink that. Whatever. We found a spot to sit toward the other end of the bar and I perused an imported Irish newspaper. I read about how the Irish seemingly had no rights in their own country and about them finding work in Boston and New York. And I come to the conclusion that maybe, just maybe, I'm a bit more Scottish.
Went back to Ronald's place, grabbed my stuff, put it in the car and went home. Got to sleep by 3am. How it goes, how it goes...
I mentioned something about friends and making them in the title and so let me pontificate and elaborate on such matters. I'm bad at making new friends. Some part of me wants to blame Crazy and Psycho but that can't take all of it -a lot of it is me. I work in a job where most of my co-workers are women; I'm the only white guy that works until the other shows at 3pm. Most of the others have the job as a means of supporting income, getting through a relationship/divorce, or they just wanted an “easier” job to deal with. I've absorbed every pound of bad crap the place has doled out and I'm damn near done with it all. I think I've become paranoid of everyone just a little bit more.
I work with these ladies but keep an arm's distance because who and what I am and do isn't of interest to them. And that's fine. I'm used to being by myself.
But this seeps into other areas. Whether I'm speaking with an engineer, accountant, etc. my world of having a nowhere/dead-end day job to support my writing/blogging and photography doesn't equate to most of them. I went to a Meetup group where people who are new to the area come to meet others and most of them are of the yuppie variety or defined as conservative twenty-somethings from other places with cash to blow and not a lot else going on. Am I in the wrong? Should I curtail what all I'm doing in order to be on a common ground?
Ronald and I talked about friendship. In this locale it's difficult to get to know someone because the ones who live here have lived here for a long time and have to SERIOUSLY consider adding you to their circle of friends that they've known since childhood. All my former friends have wives and kids and the suburban life that the Joneses require you to have. I relate to Ronald that it's difficult because outside of these people there are the Meetup people, mostly transplants and transients, who I get along with for the most part (because I've been places) but not entirely because I lack that “corporate America” feeling. That and my hours of operation go into 2am (it's 1:18am as I write this sentence).
The other thing about friendship is that we're all looking for companions moreso than friends. We want someone to be our support system and there when we get home rather than go out, meet up, then go home alone. And that's understandable. Problem is that losing the aesthetic of friendship robs us of our relationships platonic and otherwise. And besides that with social networking, TV, our jobs, freelancing, etc., do we have time to be “just friends” with someone? Go, hang out, have fun, then go home alone? We've been drilled into “everything or nothing” so badly that guys you hang out with, girls you get into relationships with. If a girl isn't about having a relationship there's not a lot of time to be friends. There can be exceptions to this rule but they usually involve distance, relationship status/marriage, and/or the Internet.
Now to mortality. Last Wednesday my dad had chest pains that night and into Thursday morning. By 7am he was taken to the local hospital where they administered several tests (a few involving bloodwork). The results? Good news: it wasn't a heart attack. Bad news: they have no clue what it was.
Which brings me to that “whumph” I felt when my mom told me that my dad had to go to the hospital. My dad goes damn near yearly to the hospital for whatever reason and my mom doesn't make a fuss about it she just goes and sits by his side. This time she sounded UPSET. Hurt. Frightened. As if this were one card away from the Big CPU in the sky.
I felt it too. If/when my dad dies the dynamics of everything involving my family will change. I'm not looking forward to it. I'm not waiting for the phone call that's going to make me feel 10 years older than
I need to be. But I imagine it's just over the horizon.
“Love? Lord above, now you're trying to trick me in love!”
It may have been “alright now” for Free but not so much for me. Back to being tired and burnt out. I have no clue as to what women want but I get back to the square that says “Not me.” I had up a decent profile on OK Cupid and the only person to talk with me had no picture and felt like I was pulling teeth instead of having a conversation. Being tired and sick the other night I changed my profile and had a friend of mine read it who told me, in a general sense, that my new profile was a bad idea.
And so I'm going to put it all on hiatus. It doesn't matter if I'm nice, it doesn't matter if I'm not – I just don't “click.” And that's fine. I'm going to change my profile tonight and not bother with it unless someone messages me. I'll leave it at that.
How it goes, how it goes
-C
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