Sometimes I break down and look at the world askew, thinking myself different, falling into the trap of believing myself unique, even superior at times, even at times... The fool. (sorry, found myself plagiarizing T.S. Elliot there)
You know which fool I mean, though. The wise one. The clever one. The one that sees the underside of people's eyes, and knows what they are really seeing through their haze...
Anyway.
Yesterday, a dear friend asked me for a pick-me up. I told him about my lunch hour:
"Wandering down St-Laurent street in the glaring sun at lunch today, I passed a thousand people, each one more average than the last.This one a hairdresser, that one a programmer, a third choking on his stiff white collar as he wandered by.
I passed a beggar in a doorway, a woman who scowled at my hair, I trod heavily on the foot of a man wearing his dollar value on his sleeve.
You and I are none of those people, each face blanker than the next, and we are a rare breed indeed.
Good days, bad days... We seem to have understood what Nietszche was screaming at the world all along, and somehow in the courses of our short lives, we have learned how to live."
I fully realize how arrogant that is. I also remeber how true it felt, arm in arm with coworkers, marching up to visit princess at her desk on our downtown adventure.
We'd decided to skip the gym, pamper ourselves since we'd all been having a rough week, head to Tia's favourite deli for steaming kaiser rolls brimming with meat. MmmmmmMMeat.
I found the glass jars that I'd been looking for to stow my pastas and lentils and rice. I sound like such a happy little homemaker.
Regardless. Yesterday's lunch was the highlight of my day, the surging confidence that I was living something that nobody else understood.
I then proceeded to hide behind my desk until 7pm, when I e-mailed my boss the final timeline for my proposed project. I have nine working days to design it, write it, debug it, package it, and figure out how to make a pretty demo.
Hopefully I really am improving as swiftly as I think I am, eh...
Then again things should go faster this time.
Daniel quit yesterday, without saying goodbye, wandered out with a box in his hands and we got a call at noon from HR that his contract had been "terminated".
I haven't spoken more than a handful of words to him these past couple of weeks, and when I finished my last demo so glowingly despite him, I think it was a last straw somewhere, something broke inside him and he saw what incompetence was.
Funny how when you get what you wished for, it feels colder somehow...
I feel responsible somehow, the first person I've broken on my way up the career ladder. But I didn't mean to, I swear I hadn't inteded to... It should never have been him against me, me against him. There should have been room. But the position that he'd been hired to fill was demolished before he got here, and we'd had trouble finding things for him to do.
Not my fault, Philippe said, when I couldn't look him in the eye. Not your fault, even Peter said, but somehow I know I made it harder for him to pick up the skills he would have needed to be useful to us. I taught him to use linux, I taught him to install it, taught him what the file system was like, what a kernel was. I showed him the command line and he swiftly set the runlevel to 5 so that he'd never have to use it again.
I showed him how to play with Makefiles when things wouldn't install, I showed him how to use the graphical interfaces for networking, printing, Samba...
I tried to show him how to learn rather than talk about learning.
Maybe I was a poor teacher, maybe my "stop trying to act like you know anything" attitude was a little too strong.
Alright, none of those are real maybes, and while I know I was trying the entire time to calm down and stop spitting in his eye, it would appear that the first time that I was faced with someone who mistook himself for authority since high school, I reacted in precisely the same way.
So much for growing up, I'm still here hurting people.
Maybe David's way is right. Maybe curling up and not fighting so hard would have worked out better. He doesn't think so, seems to envy me the extroverted way I learned to shake my fist at self-consciousness and the jeering names, but I wonder.
He's never hurt anybody. Ever.
But I'm working on it. Always... Working on it.
In the meantime, I spent yesterday evening locked in a vacancy behind a desk, then cleaning my appartment and organizing my pantry, then falling asleep with a book in my lap, and waking up to let the boyfriend in and make half-hearted attempts at passionate joining with him.
So much for my intense and vicious life, eh?
Tonight is hair-dye night with the girls, a new girl from work, the young and beautiful Tanya, and Tia, and princess who so swiftly refused us her presence this time.
We've got white bourgogne (for Tia who likes sweeter wine), red bourgogne (a well aged Pinot Noir, not too heady, not too fruity either), my favourite St-Emillion (a lush red bordeaux, not for wine sissies) from my favourite year (1997 was truly stunning it would appear), a bottle of twelve-year-old port, sake, cheese, chocolate, cold cuts, and baguette.
Oh yeah, and hair-dye. Oodles of it. And a vacuumed floor, tidied furniture, a made bed and clothes in places relatively close to where they're supposed to be.
What a strange way to spend an evening... But enjoyable, and so I am not going to beat myself up about it. This time. But I'm not going to make a habit of wine parties either.
Besides, a $20 bottle of wine that tastes like a $90 bottle of wine takes time to find.
And I wonder if I should worry that I'm getting better at it.
~