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nothing in common
Monday, February 15 1999
I worked long and hard through the day with Sherms, the graphic designer dude. By the time we were done with our critical assignment, we realized we'd totally missed out on lunch. It was 5:00pm and we were starving like the residents of a John Cougar Concentration Camp. So we decided to do a late lunch in style (relatively speaking). We hit the Mission Valley TGI Friday's in time for happy hour, and both of us drank big 20 ounce beers.
As one might imagine, my benign disregard for Valentine's Day was not well received by Kim. To tell you the truth, up until today I didn't really know that couples made a big deal out of Valentine's Day. I've been so completely out of that world, the dating world, the mushy couple world, that the institution of Valentine's Day seemed like some sort of made for teevee fiction, like people turning off the radio the moment the plot-altering sound bite is heard in a broadcast.
But after Kim had been on the phone chatting with her girlfriends, learning of their Valentine's haul: the expensive presents, the fancy dinners and the multiple dozens of roses, she felt especially slighted. No matter that she'd been working hard all Valentine's Day rubbing bodies and had come home exhausted, at least I could have made her a fucking Valentine's card.
By now, though, Kim realizes that this is how I'm programmed: I'm unceremonious because my parents were unceremonious. While in Kim's family love was often demonstrated with lavish gift giving, obligations were small and events were much less rigid and ritualized in mine.
In one of her monologues, Kim actually arrived at a point where she expressed bitter resentment about my childhood, as if she'd been cursed to fall in love with a defective product. She blamed what she said was my "Calvinist" personality on a cold, unloving father figure. When it comes to ceremony and circumstance, she wants me to meet her more often halfway from our different world views. For my part, though, I mostly found myself in silent despair at the fact that we really do seem to have absolutely nothing in common.
On a somewhat related note, Kim wanted to treat me to a massage at the Victoria Rose tomorrow for my 31st birthday. I've been sort of going along with this idea out of respect for both Kim and her profession, but the idea of having some strange person (even a strange sexy woman) rubbing oil all over my body leaves me very uncomfortable. Kim's plan to have a birthday massage finally disintegrated tonight when, in a moment of sincerity, I admitted that I'd be looking forward to this massage with much the same feelings I have waiting for a doctor's appointment. Kim wailed that I was out of touch with my body and alienated from the world, but since it's my birthday we're talking about here, she couldn't really argue the point much further.
It's difficult to be decisive when dealing with Kim. She doesn't take "no" for an answer without argument and repeated revisitations of the issue. The many times I've had to be insistent has firmly convinced her that I'm a particularly stubborn individual. This is probably true.
The other day I was thinking about my stubbornness and how it might have come to be. I realized that it could have origins in my deep aversion to eggs. On a deeply biological level, you see, I absolutely cannot stand the presence of eggs around me. So I've always had to be absolutely insistent whenever someone has tried to feed me eggs or has eaten eggs in close proximity to me. This has given me repeated experience with being firm, even to strangers and people I'm trying to impress. With this experience, the "stubbornness capacity" of my brain has been well exercised, and I can apply it even to things about which I'm not adamant.
J. Mascis is, it seems, always singing about his stomach pains. This little turn of phrase won't leave me unhaunted:
I'm waiting
Please come back
I got the guts now
To meet your eye
Those gut's are killin'
But I can't stop now
I got to connect to you girl
Or forget how.
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