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conflict over time
Sunday, August 1 1999
Today was Sunday, and at noon I convinced Kim to drive me to work. The depressing reality of my pathetic alienation from everything I hold important continues. But at least I had a genuine success by the end of the workday. My message board system went live today. I can now boast that I wrote the message board system for the largest online community website in San Diego. And I'm not even a fucking programmer; I'm just a cynical college drop-out schmuck like you. My biggest claim to fame is this online journal, the thing that will no doubt get me fired some day. Today: three years and one day.
I was so focused on my job that I failed to communicate with Kim, who had a bunch of girls over at our place this evening. As time passed and I didn't materialize, they were all wondering where I was (and passing harsh judgment on my failure to call).
By the time I made it home at 9:00pm, I faced a stony wall of coldness from those hanging out. They'd all been raking me over the coals.
While our neighbor Lisa and Kim's new co-worker Renee sat chatting in the living room, Kim and I launched into a major fight in the back room by my 400 MHZ AMD K-6 II computer with 192 Megs of RAM.
Kim wanted to know what I could possibly have been doing so late on a Sunday night. She assumed (and her girlfriends had confirmed) that something must be terribly wrong with out relationship if I wouldn't even call her.
My yesterday-evening lounge-bar experience with Azar was fresh in Kim's mind, and she was wondering if perhaps, well, I had carried things as she suspected them to their "logical" conclusion. I found this preposterous notion unworthy of dignification. I took deep offense to the fact that, after a long Sunday of work, I had to come home and face an irrational, jealous girlfriend.
But somehow Kim and I found our way out of our conflict. I explained that I didn't call her from work because I didn't want to spend the precious time defending what I was doing at work (that is, actually working) when I could work instead and get home that much sooner.
Still, even after I'd explained that putting up my message board system had taken a lot of time and enormous mental focus, Kim couldn't understand how anyone could put so much time into a job, especially on a Sunday night. It seemed to her abnormal, like the behaviour of a cult member. This, indeed, has been my contention from the start. So I offered to quit my job if Kim wanted me to. Though I've volunteered this solution numerous times, Kim has never supported such an idea. But tonight for the first time she said I should. Yet when I told Kim that, okay, tomorrow I'd tell [name of boss] that I was quitting my job because it infringed too much on my personal life, she suddenly had second thoughts and figured I should stick it out at least to the IPO.
After our fight, Kim and I were actually fairly happy with life and each other. But our guests, uncomfortable at being present for our fight, had gone for a walk. When they finally returned, they still had the dark mood they'd had when they'd left, along with some "crack head" (as Kim described it) junk food they'd bought down on Newport Avenue. Kim likes her new co-worker Renee a great deal, but she's perplexed at her strange dietary choices. Renee had turned down sunflower seeds as being "too fattening" but had proceeded to go out and buy Gummy Worms instead.
There was something about Renee that reminded me hauntingly of Jessika[REDACTED]. Her facial bone structure was almost identical, as was her quiet etherealness and her absent-minded way of staring at people without any thought of the social implications. But she also had an incredible touchy-feelyness, in keeping with her massage therapy profession. Her positive reactions to all things were uniformly extreme, and though they might have been voiced in that understated sort of way I expected with the "Jessika template" I used to measure her actions, she kept slipping out of that template in other ways that reminded me, in a strangely unsettling way, of a fashion-conscious middle-aged school teacher.
Steph showed up after awhile to check in on Kim, who'd been in a miserable state when last she'd seen her. Then Lisa, on our request, went back to her place to fetch us a sample test that her boyfriend Andy must take in order to qualify for selection as a border guard. The test features a comprehension test on text written in a completely artificial gibberish language. Supposedly it's designed to eliminate all but candidates endowed with the highest verbal aptitude. I can't imagine why our government would need especially intelligent people to keep wet backs from slipping across the border, but that's the way it is. This gibberish exam was so unexpectedly weird that it left me wondering what other completely odd things our government is up to, particularly things they don't want me to know about. Thinking this way is enough to make me into yet another fly-over country conspiracy believer.
Kim went out and bought a number of interesting books today, including a coffee-table photo-documentary of Burning Man.
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