September 24th, 2001.  Monday

    I had a pretty long day today.  I tried to get up early today because I needed to finish a cover letter, then go to Kinkos to print it out on nice paper.  After dawdling around for a bit, I finished the letter and left the house shortly before 2.  Then to another aggravating trip to Kinkos.  Then a rather hassle-free trip to the post office.  After that, i had about 4 hours to kill.  My part-time tv-watching night-time job had called before I left the house and wanted to know if i was available to work, which of course I was.  So rather than go home, I decided to wander the city some, as I have been doing for the last week or so, and walked around.  The first stop was Barnes and Noble to buy a new book.  I've given up on Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned for now.  I just couldn't really get into it.  So I just bought another Vonnegut book, Hocus Pocus.  I illogically paid five dollars more for a bigger, more pleasant to hold version of the book.  I couldn't really justify it to myself, but I did it anyway.  So then off eastward, eventually landing in Cafe Pick Me Up, where i've been spending a good amount of time lately drinking coffee or wine and staring out the window.  I got about four pages into the book when I looked out the window down the street, and saw Rodzilla walking this way, then into the coffee shop, then into the back room to look for seats.  Finding none, she came back out front, and I flagged her down.  She'd gotten a pretty drastic haircut since I'd seen her about two weeks ago.  More fashionable and hip.  Layers and whatnot.  It's a different look, but it seems to suit her. Anyway, we'd decided a few weeks ago that we not seeing each other would probably be the best for both of us.  We'd made that decision several times in the past year, but inevitably we'd meet up or call or something after a few days or weeks or months.  We weren't on bad terms or anything, so it's wasn't terribly awkward to see her.  We did the heys and hellos, and had coffee and talked for a while.  And sat in silence for a good bit.  I found myself sort of uncomfortable after a while, and I kind of wished I hadn't run into her.  It just wasn't very pleasant for me.  In my head.  And for the first time I really understood why it actually was a good idead that we not see each other.  I felt the same way, to a lesser degree, I'd felt during the rockier end moments of our relationship.  Though the uncomfortableness only lasted for a few minutes and overall it was fine.  And it was good to see her.  I mean, she's still one of my closest friends.  So since I had to go to work in a few hours and had to eat, I asked if she wanted to go get sushi, so we walked up to 11th St. and 1st Ave.  Once there, the conversation quickly turned unpleasant.  Consisting of things like "Forget it. It's none of my business anymore," Long pause as I fiddle with some seaweed.  "What exactly did you mean?" "Do you really want to talk about this?" "Yes, let's talk about this," and such and such.  Issues were discussed, frustrations were vented, explanations were had, feelings were sort of hurt, and emotions were somewhat stirred, but in the end, I guess it was a helpful and long, long overdue frank discussion.  The closest thing to any sort of real closure I could hope for.  Although this was the first sushi dinner I've ever had that I couldn't really stomach.  And if there's one thing I like, it's raw fish.  Anyway, after dinner, I had no where to be and she had to go up to 20th street to the bank, so we walked and talked a bit more.  The way these things usually go is, we inadvertently get into a bad talk, feelings are hurt, and then after all that's flushed out, it's back to joking around. Maybe it's a self-defense mechanism, but there's still a certain levity about the whole situation.  And if nothing else, I felt better about talking about specific things that lead to the end of our relationship.  At least now I know, in general, what went wrong.  That makes it easier in some ways, and terribly worse in others.  But I'm really not dwelling on that, and just trying to feel better about this period of my life closing.  Though I should have been at this point about a year ago.  But whatever, at least i feel a little better.
    So we rode over to Union Square on the L, and she hopped on the N train uptown, and I caught it going downtown to Canal Street.  Most streets south of Canal were still traffic free around Broadway.  So I showed up for work around 7:30, watched two pretty terrible shows on UPN, and wrote some amusing trivia questions about them.  The first show I had to watch was the Hughleys, which i thought would be awful.  it ended up being moderately entertaing.  The episode centered around DL Hughley's daughter getting her first period.  So my entire set of questions were about tampons and periods.  I put in a ton of juvenile and terribly inappopirate joke answers, just for the amusement of my editors, but to my surprise she left most of them intact, and even offered me some better questions in the realm of female troubles.  She even like the answer the reference to the Rolling Stones "Let it Bleed."
    Anyway, finished that in more time that I'd hoped, and out of there by 10:45.  Standing in the subway tunnel, waiting for the Q, was the first time that evening where I had a moment to think about the encounter with Rodzilla, and to think about just how I felt about it.  And I guess I feel fine.  Which is honestly sort of weird and surprising.  Sitting here now, I almost feel like I'm supposed to be upset or something.  But I won't even let myself think about it.  I just don't want to devote the mental and emotional resources necessary.  So instead, I'm drinking a nice-sized glass of Jameson's.  I've been training myself to drink whiskey for the past few months, and it's to the point where it's almost water to me know.  Poisoned water, but it's not so bad at all, and I don't even need to thin it out with water anymore. I'd always took some comfort in the fact that I could never be an alcoholic because I hated the taste of alcohol and have an extremely low threshold for discomfort.  It's the reason why I could never see myself getting addicted to anything.  It's just too much of a pain in the ass.  But now, the taste barrier has seemingly been breached.  Almost.  My health meter has been oscillating wildly the past month.  Whereas in the past, it was pretty much a level line of almost no excercise and a moderate amount of activities detrimental to my health, these days it's a relatively high level of excercise and a lot more eating and drinking than ever before.  But I've still managed to lose about 5 pounds.  So we'll just continue this for a while I guess.

Well, suddenly I'm not feeling so good. Let's hope this will pass.

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