Two-and-Twenty: Conspicuous

The original title for this post was to be "I feel falling," and it would have been the rare entry whose title accurately describes its content, but instead, this.

It's been a weird afternoon of a weird day in a weird week of this weird life. I'm a little "off" because things are so quiet in my work-world because I pretty much don't have a Category Manager to direct my energy, so I'm just kind of free-floating (I have yet to hear back about a second interview, but I know this week they were interviewing external candidates.) I did some regular quotidian tasks and my weekly report running flow through info (to crickets, I assume). I didn't really work in the morning because I went with Mel to an appointment she was very anxious about. In the end it turned out fine but some of this stuff really affects her state. She had the whole day off, bless, and knitted a while after we got back. Then we had burritos, and as I went back to work she put on the teen body-swapping comedy It's A Boy-Girl Thing.

After that she found the 2000's Freddie Prinze-Claire Forlani romcom Boys and Girls, which I always found a little dry for the era but has a very unusual structure in what was a relatively formulaic genre/time. It was a college movie that was an offshoot of the teen comedy boom of the late-90s/early-2000s, which was in itself somewhat of a tricky proposition since the college movies tended not to play as well as the high school ones. I'm thinking also of the Jason Biggs vehicle Loser, but then again American Pie 2 was a success and the gang were all in college for that one, and Road Trip. But hey, in the end, maybe it's just that some are better than others.

Anyway, it charts Prinze Jr. and Forlani as two people whose lives are strangely intertwined as they keep bumping into each other, until they realize, yadda yadda, they're meant for each other or whatever. I'm not sure, we didn't watch the whole thing (yet.) I do remember the big soapy dance scene. Anyway, this arc passes for non-formulaic in this context, but it's also a little dry, like most Prinze Jr. vehicles.

Well anyway. The motif of running into someone intermittently over years got me thinking about someone from my past, this girl Leanne (not that one, the other one) who I met through Reach. She went to a school in Burlington and we'd always chat up whenever we ran into each other but I was always too afraid to ask for her MSN or anything that might put me in regular contact. I was a total anxiety case back then and I really had a way of idealizing women that was not productive (I wrote a play about it!)

Anyway, it was not meant to be, but I did run into her randomly one day after high school was over. I was going to the comic store and she was driving by and offered me a lift. I had her drop me off at the Pizza Pizza around the corner, which was my other destination, because I didn't want her to know I was going to the comic store (this was not a bad instinct -- I once went to a comic store while on a date years later, and there was no second date.) After profusely insisting she was not any kind of stalker (too bad) she mentioned she still hung out with her Reach peeps and even remembered me as the person who got a certain question right (I had a rep.) This was all written up at the time here on SWP, search keyword "Colloquialism." At that time she implied that there may have been been at least one girl on her team who was crushing on yours truly, (when I was in my element, as I was during trivia contests, I could be very charming and sexy.) but not only do I not remember any other girls from her team, I very much had eyes for her.

I never found her again and never even knew how to find her on social media.

All of this is not overly healthy considering our last interaction was some 15 years ago and I am now 35 and married, but we all have these loose ends that our mind likes to toy with. I have a few myself, although they are really just dead-ends that never got properly dowsed with the cold icy blast of reality that all my other infatuations suffered over the years. I have a wife right upstairs who loves me, and who knows I love her back, why quibble?

It's human nature to be curious. Searching what I believe to be her last name turns up only a Soundcloud of some twee bedroom pop. Oddly, it seems to have been uploaded only in 2018, but the vintage seems very 2006, very Juno. There's a picture of five people who appear to be related and I think she is one of them, but I never was that good with faces, and the voice seemed to be hers, but it's been a long long time and, you know, whatever.

From time to time I also think about the last girl I seriously wanted to go out with before I met Mel. She wasn't the exact last girl I went out with as there was a very pushy girl whose name I always think was Claire but I don't think that's right, who was very, very into me for a short while but then let me go when she decided we didn't have chemistry after one date. Before that though, it was Grace, the girl who told me that "Dating does to (her) what chocolate does to dogs" but I was so understanding and comforting that I got a second chance, but then she basically ghosted me, possibly because I mentioned I was being dragged out on a date with not-Claire, or possibly because I didn't eat the little smore bite she wanted me to try because I was too nervous and my stomach was flipping out, or because I didn't kiss her, or because I wasn't good company. Anyway I soon after entered a bad period when the store was announced to be closing and I sleepwalked through the rest of the summer before finally coming back to life later that year to find that I was working at Cole's and dating Mel.

Life's funny like that.

Anyway, this is all the past, and like I said, it has a filter on it because it didn't end in some huge dramatic moment. I would love to be able to say that it's impossible for me to ever think of anyone but my wife, and it's completely true that she occupies a unique spot in my world as the only person who carries, or has ever carried, that aura of "we belong together" but that doesn't mean the mind can't wander, the eye can't wander. The heart, however, would be very hard to budge.

So if Grace, or Leanne, or someone else from the past that I idealized but never had a resolution with, called me up tomorrow or got into my DMs -- like that time I ran into Robyn just before the pandemic -- I would probably get a kick out of toying with the idea, but I don't have it in me to misbehave, for the pure reason that I know there is no reality behind it. I know that as good as someone seems on the outside, there's a reason I never found anyone that I truly matched with before Mel. And while Mel and I have had problems, she's as close to me as my own limb, as an extension of myself.

I was going to say I "feel falling" for any number of reasons, got the world on my shoulders lately, unsure of my direction. Work is work, my extracurriculars aren't doing it for me, etc etc. But these are evergreen complaints and not in any way special. 

Tonight's dinner, weirdly enough for a hot summer's day, (actually it's quite cool), is stew. I had accidentally bought some stewing beef to make skewers with a few weeks ago, and Mel said "That's won't work, they'll be too tough" and I capitulated and got some tri tip (and it was still a little tough in places.) But I still had this stewing beef, then last weekend Nonna gave us some lentils so it's lentils and stew.

Well, you know, half the time we don't even know what to do for dinner so having to force yourself to make a weird stew in the middle of July isn't such a bad thing.

Cutting it here so I can go wake Mel up from her day-off nap.

Keep on rockin

-Scotto