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manner to which she is accustomed
Wednesday, April 11 2001
This morning I was listening to the webcast of KCRW (as I often do) and George W. "the Chimp" Bush was in "East Carolina," sounding delighted (in the nervous way spoiled rich kids do upon discovering the bimbo didn't get pregnant) that the American spy mission crew would soon be coming home from their eleven day stay in the custody of the evil Chinese. The "East Carolinians" in the audience (evidently they like that term) were ecstatic in the nervous way that Americans often are when confronting the inedible mysteries of the pagan East. They started chanting in unison, "U-S-A, U-S-A, U-S-A!" As you might expect, a chill of embarrassment immediately ran down my spine. Can these brutish East Carolinians really be so unaware how such chanting sounds in the ear of anyone who might want to deal with this nation in the future? The world is a smaller place now and we have to live with each other down here. If we're such a hot shot superpower, why the clearly evident expression of Fascist-tinged collective nervousness? Is this because the only person our political system can find to speak on our behalf is incapable of uttering a parseable sentence in his mother tongue?
This evening we three of the US-based UK team did a fairly major release of the website and it came off so unexpectedly well that we celebrated in the office with the consummate UK cocktail, gin & tonic. Even our Indonesian contractor, who is a practicing Muslim, had one. Then the UK CTO caught her flight back to London.
Meanwhile Bathtubgirl has read my entry from yesterday and enviously taken note of my tax refund. Suddenly her journal is full of whiny complaints implying that I have somehow been unfair with her. She casually dismisses all the work I did on her site as "not professional," claiming I was using it "to learn Flash skills" and "fuck [as though she didn't want me to!]." The many weekends I went to her apartment and suffered ten hour days to build her site evidently were not, in her mind, worth the few thousand dollars I took off my debt to her. Now, hearing that I finally have the money to pay down my substantial credit card debt, she imagines she somehow deserves a slice. Mind you, this tax refund is the single glimmer of good financial news I've received in a very long time. Due to the dotcom recession, there have been no raises this year at my workplace and no one has received any of their promised bonuses. Without the influx of refund cash, it's doubtful I'd ever be able to pay down my credit cards.
I'm going to be blunt about Bathtubgirl. Her site is doing well and I wish her the best, but she hasn't been especially good at managing her money since we parted ways. I won't go into the details, but it will suffice to say that she has been plagued by a mix of bad business decisions and unnecessarily-extravagant lifestyle choices. I realize in retrospect that even if I had been in love with her and could somehow suffer through her tyrannical restrictions on my bathroom privacy, I would have had to break up with her for financial reasons alone. If I was with her now, all my disposable income and credit cards would be slaves to her project. The fact that Bathtubgirl is still hitting me up for money that we agreed long ago I didn't owe her indicates to me that her current boyfriend Snow is unable to keep her in the manner to which she is accustomed. Which is perfectly okay. But perhaps, then, her manner ought to change.
I should take the opportunity to add, by the way, that I have actually paid Bathtubgirl $300 more than the amount we agreed that I owed her. I was never going to bring this up or ask her for it back, but just now I feel no special urge to hold back on my exhibits of the depth of her ungratefulness.
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