Many years ago I had a conversation with Evangeline about who usually does the breaking up with in our respective relationships. I had commented that I seemed to be in an A/B rotation. I’d end it with one and then the next would end it with me. This pattern continued a few cycles. I asked if she had any patterns like that. She said that few of hers ended that way.

“Which way?” I asked.

“Either way,” sne answered.

“If you don’t end it and he doesn’t end it, how does it end?”

“I’ve perfected the art of getting them to think that it was their idea,” she explained.

—-

I can’t remember how it started, but my coworker Pat and I were talking about things that are such a bad idea that you have to ask yourself “In the face of so many obvious ways that it could create problems down the line, how did they envision that this would turn out to be a good and positive thing?”

Some examples:
* Some white cops got national attention by letting a couple black youths get out of a littering charge by performing rapping about how littering is a bad thing.
* A recent article in the New York Times about Ivy League young men and women posing nude for college magazines.
* Girls Gone Wild
* A guy in charge of a juvenile correctional facility going to a pornography convention and posing for pictures with various adult film actresses.
* A congressman emailing and IMing lurid content to pages
* Getting a tattoo with the name of a romantic person you’ve just recently become involved with.

That last one spawned a conversation about tattoos. We figured that if you got a tattoo with a woman’s name on it (say “Maria”), if things didn’t work out the next person you dated not named Maria might have an issue with that and the next person that was named Maria would be creeped out if she thought you got a tattoo with her name on it by the first or second date.

That reminded me of How I Met Your Mother, which I’d just written a post on. In the first episode, Ted ruins his burgeoning relationship with Robin by professing his love for her on their first date. Barney, Ted’s misogynistic friend, begins using that as a way to get rid of young women the morning after. If you really wanted to take that to the next level, getting a temporary tattoo with that person’s name on it would be extremely effective at scaring them off. And, as with Evangeline, they would almost certainly believe that it was their idea and would never look back. You wouldn’t even have to worry about them wanting to be your friend cause they would either feel really guilty or really scared of you.

Genius, Pure genius.

One thing you may or may not know about clocks is that they don’t use the same Roman Numeral system that is used virtually everywhere else. It’s almost the same, but the number 4 is more often than not IIII rather than IV. There are a lot of theories as to why this is the case, but it is so. If you want to make a quick buck, find a watch that uses the correct “IV” and bet them that you can see something unsual about the clock that they can’t. It may take a little while to collect because they’ll doubt you at first, but the majority of clocks use IIII. I’ve personally won bets with my mother, two ex-girlfriends, and various acquaintances. If nothing else it’s good for them buying you a beer next time around.

One thing that I don’t think I ever appreciated about leather or fake-leather is now much it absorbs cigarette smoke. Last night while watching TV Clancy requested that I remove my watch because it smelled like cigarette smoke. She’s asked me more than a couple times in the past couple weeks if I’ve been out to “Visit Uncle Phil”, which is code for whether or not I’ve been smoking. She believed me when I told her that I hadn’t, but she had to ask because she could smell it on me. Time and time again, we’ve figured out that it was the watch.

Who knew that such a small band of fake leather could carry such a smell?

When I was in the 8th grade my intermediate school took the rite-of-passage trip to Washington DC. I’ll write more about that later, but the most lasting affect that it had on me was that I have not been consistently without a watch since.

I’d started to take it for granted that a clock would always be near. We had them at home, in every classroom at school, and so on. Clocks, it turns out, are few and far between the in the Hallowed Halls of our government. I’m not sure if that says something insightful about our government or not. Anyway, I went absolutely nuts not knowing the time at all times. So nuts that I asked my friend Oswald the time every two minutes. He eventually put the watch in his pocket and refused to answer any time-related questions.

So contra Daniel Gross, I don’t think that the watch business has anything to worry about with clocks for me. The bad news is that I almost always buy really cheap watches. I’m a fiend of the $9.99 counter at Walmart.

For my recent non-birthday/birthday thing at the end of February, my folks took an old watch that I’d left down there with a dissolving band and got the band replaced. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that the band probably cost as much as the watch did.

Lastly, one peculiarity about my watch-wearing and one of the relatively few ways that I am chicklike when it comes to my personal appearance is that my watch absolutely has to match. I always, always, always match my watch, belt, and boots with either a black/silver combination or brown/gold. Whenever I don’t I feel so awkward that I take my watch off and keep it in my pocket. Taking it out every couple of minutes to find out what time it is.

I was introduced to The Nguyen Count several years ago by a friend. It was named after a young lady with the last name of Nguyen who had the awful luck of repeatedly dating guys who married the next woman that they dated, even though she really wanted to get married. Over time Nguyen Count was augmented as Miss Nguyen started sharing her story and others began topping it. The bad news is that the higher the count, the more cause for embarassment you have. The good news is that a higher account means your my-pathetic-luck stories surpass others, and in the single world where self-pity is king that is no small thing. I’ve never met Miss Nguyen — for all I know she is the stuff of lore — but her count was entrenched in the dating vocabulary of my social circle.

Scoring goes as follows:
+1 if the man/woman you dated exclusively ended up marrying the next person they were with. (no points awarded if you are/were anti-marriage)
+1 if the man/woman you dated succeeded you with a homosexual relationship. (no points if the person who preceded you was also of the same gender as your partner)
+1 if the man/woman ended up exclusively homosexual, but discovered this after the person after you. (no points awarded if they were already openly bisexual when you dated)
+1 if the man/woman you dated had kids with a later partner even if they swore they wouldn’t (if it’s the person after you, the +1 above is applicable, but no points are awarded here if you didn’t want kids yourself)
+2 if the man/woman you dated married someone that they previously considered having a disqualifying characteristic (Different religion, different politics, divorced, has kids, etc. but no points are awarded if their requirement was completely frivolous like never marrying a redhead or something)
+2 if the man/woman you dated succeeded you with their very first homosexual relationship.
+2 if the man/woman you dated ended up marrying the next person they were with and that person was someone that they met through you.
+3 if the man/woman you dated is married to someone of their gender by the laws of Vermont, Massachusetts, Hawaii, or some other state that allows for it.

So… what is your Nguyen Count?

I think mine is zero, though it may be one if they never ended up getting married. I’m not sure it counts even if they did marry as I sorta kinda maybe “stole” her from him in the first place.

{The following post contains spoilers of the TV show How I Met Your Mother, though only up to the first season because that’s all I’ve seen to date. I start watching the second season today and wanted to put these thoughts out there while they still apply to the series in my mind}

In the first episode of the first season, Ted meets the woman of his dreams, Robin. While the show is generally about Ted’s attempts to meet “the one”, most of the first season focuses around Robin. The hook is that in the first episode it is revealed that Robin is not the one. No other woman he meets in the first season is the one, either. The show toys with its audience with the focus on Ted and Robin as well as with a couple other really nice girls that Ted meets along the way.

Where the show succeeds, somewhat astonishingly, is in getting its audience (well, getting me) to root for Ted and Robin to work out. I’m sort of a sourpuss when it comes to sitcom romance and frequently find myself rooting against two characters getting together because I get no payoff when they do and the sexual tension of the show, if there ever was any, dissipates. And when the characters do get together, they typically have each of them do stupid things to keep things from being imperfect (because comedy is about, if nothing else, the imperfectibility of human nature).

But rather than the fact that Robin and Ted (and Victoria and Ted, etc.) don’t end up together being limited, it actually frees up the show somewhat. The characters weren’t meant to be together so you know that they won’t magically end up in each others arms and happy despite their stupidity, as is frequently the case in such shows. In one sense I expect to spend the next season waiting for the shoe to drop. But rather than doing it with anxious anticipation, I view it as the natural extension of their personalities. When things don’t work out there is usually a reason and all that has to happen is let the writers run their course with it. In the meantime, you get to appreciate the relationship for what it is: earnest, sweet, and doomed.

In the most healthy of outlooks that’s how almost all relationships are. After all, despite all the relationships we go through in life only one is going to work out (except in weird religious communities, of course), if any do at all. Sometimes I find myself looking back at old chatlogs and emails with former girlfriends, former almost girlfriends, and former love interests of all sorts. I guess it’s a function of getting older, as well as having found one that things did work out with, that I look back more with a smile than a sneer. Even the ugliest relationship I’ve been in has a sweetness in retrospect. Even Libby and I had our moments, however buried they are in all the acrimony.

The most wise and helpful advice from Evangeline I never took was when she said, “This would all be a lot easier if you would just have some fun.”

If I have any regrets with Eva, it’s not that things didn’t work out (if they had I wouldn’t be married to Clancy, after all). It’s that I failed to enjoy the ride. Being human, I was unable to take a step back and say “I know that things aren’t going to work out, but it will be a beautiful and wonderful thing while it lasts.” I did know that things weren’t going to work out, but it was more with a sense of panic, heartbreak, and loss that I recognized it. I spent many long hours, days, and weeks trying to repair that sinking ship. My main regret was that I spent so much time trying to repair the ship when it would have been so much more fulfilling to be the violin players on the Titanic.

And thus far that’s How I Met Your Mother‘s chief success. It gives us the opportunity to enjoy the ride without regard to whether or not things work out. Quite a gutsy thing for the sitcom to do, but so far it’s working out. And since we know that things did work out with Ted in the end with a woman that he hasn’t met yet, we don’t have to worry about how he’ll come out in the end. I think most of us have a relationship in our past where we were devastated that things didn’t work out, where we know that things might have worked out if things had been slightly different, and where we’re ultimately not sorry that they didn’t.

Viewed in that context, How I Met Your Mother is a romantic sitcom unlike any other I’ve ever seen. I’m looking forward to queueing up the second season and watching it over the next week while I replace all my burned CDs, with more than a few tracks I will always associated with bittersweet, doomed romances of years past.

I’ve been having a devil of a time getting the AC fixed in my car.

I had intended to go to the dealership on Saturday, but apparently they are appointment-only. If I was going to have to set an appointment, I figured I should do so in the town where I work (Almeida) rather than the one I live (Santomas). So I filled out the form for the dealership in Almeida. The page said that they would get back to me within twelve hours. Thirty-six hours later they hadn’t, so I called the number on the page where I had filled out the form.

The guy I talked to was in the sales and not the service department and was kind of agitated that I was wasting his time. I told him that this was the number on the page and he said that he did get the request and passed it on to the service department, gave me there number, and didn’t even bother to say goodbye before hanging up. I called the service desk and told them of my plight… and they forwarded me right back to the angry salesman.

So I decided that I would stop by after work and make an appointment in person. When I got there they had closed shop for the day, two hours before their posted close. They said that they didn’t have anything to do so they closed early. They wouldn’t take an appointment because they’d shut down the computer for the day.

I want to give these people money in exchange for goods and services. You would think that they would generally be supportive of that idea, seeing as how they are the service department and that’s what they are there for.

Addendum: I stopped by the place this morning. Despite the fact that they admitted they had nothing to do, they couldn’t take care of the car except by appointment, which can’t be made less than 24 hours before the repair. So I made an appointment for tomorrow morning. They wouldn’t go against company policy by taking care of it this morning, but when I refused to make the appointment through sales they agreed to go ahead and circumvent that particular part of the procedure.

I bought the TV movie Thrill Seekers (also called Time Shifters) for $1 at Walmart. I don’t know what prompted me to do it. The movie looked at best like one of those flicks that I would catch on HBO at two in the morning when I was thirteen and at worst like one of those movies on at two in the afternoon on Sunday on UPN (before it was UPN). I didn’t even know if I’d ever get around to watching it, but a buck is a buck and I gave it a chance.

It was surprisingly good. Well, surprisingly good the same way that day-old, unrefridgerated pizza sometimes surpasses expectations. It’s nothing you’d want to make a steady diet of, but it tastes better than people might lead you to believe.

The movie stars Casper Van Diem (who apparently makes a living starring in cheap TV movies that now sell for a buck on the Walmart racks) as a journalist that barely survived a report from inside a power station that was blowing up. His life all shot to hell he ends up at a tabloid newspaper room and notices a suspicious man that was present at the sinking of the Titanic, the collapse of the Hindenberg, and something else I can’t remember. The kicker: he hadn’t aged a single bit. In his search for the mysterious, strange-looking guy in the black hat, he invokes the wrath of Men In Brown Tweed (similar to Men in Black, but less coolly dressed), Martin Sheen, and the FBI.

I knew most of this going into the movie so my expectations were that it would probably be worth about a quarter of what I paid for it, making it worth about a quarter. This was sort of like playing the lottery. The movie will probably stink, but there is the offchance that it will be so deliciously bad that you have to show it to all of your friends the same way that you demonstrate some really smelly thing to them or some gross picture you saw on the Internet. It’s a guy thing. So I more-or-less just purchased in that vein.

I was about ten minutes into it when I realized that I didn’t win the lottery. In fact, by twenty minutes into it I was actually getting curious as to what dark plot was afoot, what would happen next, and how it all fit together. Sure, I was sort of curious the same way that you’re curious what a friend is getting at when he is rambling on and on about a story the point of which you don’t quite understand, but giving such a movie the benefit of the doubt that you give a rambling friend is more than expected!

In the end I would rate the movie as a C or C-. There were a number of ways they could have gone with it but decided not to so that they could fit the big climax and romantic subplot (with Catherine Bell, of JAG fame, who combined cuteness and computer geekery in such a pleasant way as to let the reader forget the implausibility of her character) that was apparently more important. Martin Sheen’s part was too small and you only saw him through static. Given that Sheen was catapulted back into stardom via The West Wing after this, he’s probably not too sorry about the marginalized role in this film (and one wonders if he is trying to buy back the rights to the awful Spawn movie, which he starred in as the villain).

So the movie is neither good enough nor bad enough to make a point of watching. But if you happen to run across it at Walmart, it’s probably worth the dollar you pay for it. Don’t let’em rip you off at $1.25, though.

“Yeah, he actually said ‘Christ’s butt’… I didn’t know he had that kind of curseword innovation in him,” Clint said. We were driving to the copy store. We’d only gotten 200 copies of our flier but Hugh though it was obvious that we’d need at least 500. So to avoid Hugh’s wrath and get away for a few minutes, Clint, Quen and I all volunteered to go to the copy store right away.

“And you can’t remember what he was cursing about?” I asked.

“No… wait, yeah, that’s it. He was talking about you,” he told me, “he was upset about the whole hotel room thing. He was all like ‘Christ’s butt, can’t he take responsibility for anything?!”

Almost immediately, a wave of hot rage swept over my body. “He… said… what?!”

My college roommate Hubert always took really good care of his things. It became a sticking point of our friendship because I only cared about stuff insofar as they worked. I’m the kind of guy that goes to a used car lot looking for a car with a dent on it so I can get a discount, even if I can easily afford the car without a dent. Hugh, despite his protestations, was not cut from that cloth. He liked to own the nicest of things and took good care of them.

I used to give him a friendly ribbing on the subject and, once upon a time, he would rib back at my sloppiness. There was one time when I made a joke about the obsessive way that he protected his comic books. I can’t remember what I said, but I do remember that it wasn’t out of bounds. Then, out of nowhere, in a room full of friends, he started screaming at me. Everyone’s eyes just bulged open. After a few minutes he calmed down and was somewhat apologetic about his outburst. I never raised my voice throughout the whole incident and calmly told him that if my ribbing him on the subject was out of bounds, he needed to tell me privately and calmly. He said that it wasn’t and that he was just having a bad day.

He was having a lot of bad days. It was not a good time in his life. He’d just aborted his physics major over the protestations of his mother. He was looking into hiring a voice acting agent over even greater protestations. His mother and his step-father were divorcing and the money they had was being tied up. It was because of this that I took a lot more abuse from him than I would ordinarily take from anybody.

In about the same timeframe I was watching an anime series that he had purchased. I must confess, I was less than entirely careful with his tapes. One of the boxes got sat on by a roommate and he was so upset that he was shaking when he held the collapsed box. I apologized profusely and offered to replace it. He demurred and said it was fine. Not long afterwards a tape got dinged by my chair. We looked at the tape and it looked like its contents were undamaged. He swore, however, that what I’d done would make the tape get worse over time (faster than a VHS usually does, anyway). I told him that I didn’t think that it would, but again offered to replace it anyway. Again, he demurred.

A couple months later a bunch of new friends were invited over and they watched the series. The fourth tape wasn’t looking so good. I chalked it up to the crappy TV and VCR that we had and started working on my computer again. He decided to make an announcement that I had ruined this tape and failed to take responsibility for it. He asked each one of them if the tape looked okay to them and then pointed out that I had said that the tape was fine. I didn’t say anything, surfed to an online retailer, and ordered the new set to arrive the following week. Thirty minutes later I remembered that it was the fifth tape that I’d dinged with my chair and the fourth tape was unscathed. In other words, I’d been vindicated. I don’t know that I even told him about that. I just gave him the new tapes. It was worth the $100 just to shut him up on the subject.

While all of this was going on, he was getting on a lot of people’s nerves. It seemed that nearly every mutual acquaintance we had told me privately that they didn’t know how I could stand to live with him. Clint and Quen, two colleagues on a creative project with Hugh and I, were constantly butting heads with him. Time and time again, I defended Hugh. I told them that he was going through a rough patch and that it would get better.

The following summer we went to a convention to show off our creative project. There was a minor mishap with the hotel. Because I was the one with the money, it was my job to make the hotel reservations. We were a little late moving that Thursday night and Hugh said that I needed to call the hotel and let them know because they might give up the room. I pointed out that I’d had confirmed reservations with my credit card, meaning that they couldn’t give up the room even if we never showed up, but that they’d charge me for it anyway. Figuring that it would take a while to corral the cats, I made sure of that. My assurances, however, meant nothing to Hugh.

When we got to the hotel, they’d apparently booked the rooms for the wrong nights. This was all Hugh needed in order to be vindicated. If I’d called to confirm, none of this would have happened. True enough, though that wasn’t why he wanted me to call them. He wanted me to call them because they’d give up my room, which was not the case. In any case, the person behind the counter at the hotel demonstrated such ineptitude that it was clear that it probably was not my fault that the rooms got reserved on the wrong night. In any case, they found us a room and that was that. Or so I thought.

We were scrambling to get enough fliers for our presentation when I found out about Hugh’s unique curseword. It wasn’t so much that he was angry at me as I’d learned to accept the fact that any time anything wasn’t quite up to his specifications he would be. It wasn’t even that he was angry behind my back, honestly that was preferable. It was that he accused me of being irresponsible. At the time I was working 40 hours a week. I had a full 15-hour courseload. I had a fulltime girlfriend. I had a part-time job with a local partisan newspaper and a column at Southern Tech’s daily newspaper. He, meanwhile, had a 6-hour courseload because of the changed major. He had no job, though his having to look for one was sufficiently woe betiding to make us hear about it. He had no girlfriend, which understandably sucked but was nonetheless one less responsibility.

And there he was calling me irresponsible because, in between my jobs and my coursework and my girlfriend, I hadn’t made the time to confirm a reservation that I’d managed to make on my own time with my own $600.

Livid does not even begin to describe it. Quen said that he’d never seen me so angry. Clint had, but it had been a long time. I don’t know if there’s ever been a point where I’d directed so many expletives at a person in my life. It ordinarily was not my style to do so, but words could not convey the anger I was feeling. I had spent the previous six months defending him. I had been the one that had refrained from making judgments about him, even though I had faced more the brunt of his malcontent than anyone else (simply because I was living with him). I bit my tongue when he took rather hurtful jabs at my girlfriend. When he’d screamed at me. I’d even kept from him the complaints of others, including the fact that he was the reason that our former roommates Saresh and Dennis terminated our 4-person roommate arrangement. It honestly wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d not been such a good friend to him, but I was the best friend he had at great emotional cost to myself.

We lived together for about a year after that and it was all downhill. I no longer bothered really trying to be his friend. I found reasons to stay away from the dorm as much as possible. I started badmouthing him with the rest. When he got angry at my sloppiness, I’d just become more sloppy. The only thing I really did for him was to secure him a good job and that was as much for my benefit as his. The funny and sad thing is that I don’t know that he even really noticed the difference.

A couple months later there was a young lady who spent a lot of time at our dorm. She showered and left the tower on the floow. He screamed at her and embarassed me. I sent an email to Quen starting with the words “Want to hear another Hugh story” and told the story in a light very unflattering to Hugh. Hugh later ran across this email (he says that I asked him to look through my email box to find a phone number, though I have no recollection of that) and seemed genuinely surprised that I might hold him in somewhat low regard. He was apparently that oblivious to my actions towards him.

I don’t know that I’ve ever directed as much venom to anybody personally as I’ve directed at him. There was a time when it seemed every conversation I had with Clint or Quen would at least briefly turn into a conversation about Hugh. Partly it’s because of the sense of betrayal for the person I had been a best friend to, but partly it’s something else.

He and I were and are alike in so many ways that it haunted me. The reason we became friends and roomed together in the first place was because we had so much in common. Not just interests but also temperament. We saw the world in very similar ways. We’re both idealistic and yet cautious, introverted and yet draw strength from others, hard-headed and yet intellectually curious, naturally rigid and yet have a desire to be more laid back. I saw myself in him and it was the stuff of nightmares. I devoted a lot of time and energy in being as unlike him as possible. In some ways I still use the lessons that the Big Bad Hubert taught me when it comes to dealing with other people and they’ve made me a better person.

But trying to be unlike someone that is unlike yourself takes a toll. I found myself believing things I didn’t really believe simply because he believed the opposite. I found myself acting in ways that weren’t me and couldn’t be me because they were ways that he would never act. And ironically it lead me into being the spiteful person that he was back then.

It’s approaching ten years now since all of that went down. Hugh is an entirely different person now. He’s become the kind of guy that I could again become good friends with. But I don’t think I can. That’s a subject for another time.