Bacon & Eggs

I cringe a little when I run into someone I know that I haven't seen in a while, especially if I haven't seen them since before I got fired from my library gig. It's not that I'm a horribly unfriendly person, but I know that the polite, well-meaning question of "how are you doing" will come up.

How am I doing? Do you really want me to answer that?

If they had asked that last summer, before I got the hotel breakfast bar gig in late July, I probably would've broken down crying and wailing at the unfairness of the world. Nowadays, apart from a growing desire to be rid of the small little town I've called home for far, far too long and the nagging fear that I won't ever write anything substantial anymore, I would say I'm doing okay.

Really, I am.

In consideration of all the things that could have happened to me (getting squashed by an out-of-control truck, turning into a zombie, or being forced to sit through one of the "Twilight" movies), I got off pretty easy. And while my situation isn't ideal, it isn't soul-crushing either; I've been around long enough now to know that bad stuff often does, and damn it being a cliche but it's true, happen for a reason.

Sometimes that reason is to rob you of your ill-earned sense that "at last things are going my way," but it was ill-earned. You were a jackass. You kinda had it coming.

But anyway, back to "how are you?"; I've had to field that one quite a lot, and nowadays I can say that I have a job, it's not a career but something to pay the bills, and hopefully I get something going on the job-that-could-be-a-career front soon.

I will say, I'm shocked when I run into someone I knew from high school who is glad to see me, because often this same person would be someone that shunned or picked on me during said high school era (not that I made myself an unappealing target, having the nerve to get acne and glasses right before the most important phase of puberty and thus maximum attractivness to the opposite sex). Maybe I was better-liked in high school than I thought. Or maybe it's reassuring to them that the guy who always said he was gonna leave Walhalla is, alas, still here.

I wonder sometimes if anyone I graduated with ended up doing what they wanted to do with their lives. Odds are no, but maybe they're doing something enjoyable that they didn't know they'd like when they wanted to be God-knows-what back then.

Anyway, I'm not going to any of the reunions until I have one of the Kardashian girls to hang on my arm and draw envy from the crowd with (even if her dead-eye stare betrays her Kardashian tendency to look prettier than her personality ought to be)