thediastema's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Parenthetical phrases and the return of That Blond Guy. You remember when Angela Chase bounced around on her bed like an idiot to "Blister in the Sun" and declared that it was as though Jordan Catalano had been "like, surgically removed from [her] heart"? O, screw you. I liked that show. Anyway, I tried to make today like that. For me. Involving my own Jordan Catalano. Of course, my strategy wasn't like open-heart surgery so much as, I don't know, a high colonic or something. In the end the purpose is the same: my system needed purging of the less-than-symbiotic parasite it had hosted for over two years. Come to think of it, apart from certain reading difficulties, my particular condition resembles Jordan Catalano very little. (Jordan Catalano was called a lot of things, for instance, but probably never a "spoiled, effeminate, pencilneck dweeb.") Nonetheless I made happy-bouncing my mantra for the morning, spending too much time on my leg-shaving and hair-styling and makeup-doing, allowing myself a Coke for breakfast. (Not that I've ever really outright DENIED myself Coke for breakfast.) I focused my energy on the ride to work. I declared today, 23 October, 2002, an Alternayuppie free zone. Okay, obviously something happened to the mission if I'm composing this entry. What happened is this: I got to work (on time, wonder of wonders) and arranged myself in the usual sea of phone and internet orders at my computer terminal. He was standing silently at my window within forty-five minutes. I was on the line with a patron at the time, and the turning of my brain to store-brand cold cream was probably all too obvious to both men. I acknowledged him with my usual nod -- polite apathy despite months of complete estrangement -- and wobbled over to the charge card machine. I heard him chatting with Olly at the next window. I got back on the line with my customer and delivered the usual schpiel: "Okay, thank you for your patience, that's been authorised, so what I'll do at this point is put these tickets into Will-Call in your name, and since that's the case, I have a few recommendations, gee, I wonder what that blond guy's spit tastes like?" et cetera. I got off the phone and my boss (his erstwhile boss, you'll remember) had launched out the door in a fit of glee, squealing his name and enveloping him in a big hug to remind me how much more special he was to her and how much more willing he is to touch people who aren't me. But she couldn't process him while I dealt with real customers. O, no. Could I do it? And he was back at my window, then, smiling his classic smile, the smile he wears with his glasses instead of his contacts, the smile that says "Erin's Still-Beating Heart, Albeit Grated Into Itty Bitty Pieces, is part of a complete breakfast!" "Okay," I said, deliberately pronouncing his surname, which is the sort of surname you can't mispronounce because it's just a few shades less common than "Jones" and commonly known to rhyme with "curtain." I didn't care. I rhymed it with "crouton." "Yep. I should be the first one in there. I used to know my account number ... " "Heh! Me too." Uh, WHOOPS. Hi, I'm Erin. I used to know you. I hear restraining orders don't always work! "I mean, uh, I knew my account number." (I remember now. 129143.) "Heh! Yeah, I gotcha." "I mean, you know," and here's the joke of the century: "'cos I'm, like, stalking you!" You know. In that disgusting tone of voice Conan O'Brien uses to joke about having the hots for his guest. To stall for time so he doesn't have to stand up and show the crowd his huge, glistening erection. You know this is true. Compounding the unfunniness of the true statement badly disguised as a joke was the history of real-life stalking among ticket agents at PTC. So we both kind of pretended my remark was absurd, and I tagged into the account and prayed we wouldn't go off on another dumbass tangent like that. "Richkid Drive?" I inquired, a confirmation-of-identity step we take with patrons who have common names. Yes, as though this address weren't engraved in my brain from a stolen glance at the campus directory two years ago. He smiled that complete-breakfast smile again. "Mmhmm." He wanted tickets for tonight. Students can have free tickets in the upper balcony or five-dollar tickets anywhere else in the house, but to activate their ID cards each season they must also pay an annual five-dollar processing fee. (Still a killer deal; regular tickets go up to almost fifty bucks a pop.) He gave me his UCard. "I haven't done the fee, though." The Queen beamed over at her former protegee. "Erin, he doesn't need to pay the fee." I took the card and scanned it in the reader anyway. Several times. Grinning like a jackass with each "bippity beep!" that alerted me he'd not paid the activation fee, then cupping my ear as if in disbelief, and making the machine read it again. I came back laughing my "I'm infatuated with both of us" laugh, and gave him back the ID card. He was laughing his "I put up with this shit because I'm physically incapable of manslaughter" laugh. "Okay, so, tonight?" "Uh-huh." "Free in the balcony or five bucks on the floor?" "Well, free is good, but good seats are better, aren't they?" This one was followed by his unmistakeable "it's charming because it's an unfunny, job-related inside joke and therefore irresistibly harmless and bland just like me!" eyes. (And no, I still don't know what colour they are.) I flashed my "O, yeah, rich boy, now you're brown-nosing the right materialistic, Capricornian, too-proud-to-buy-second-rate place!" grin and pulled up the map. "I want good seats." "Okay!" I beamed. "You'll actually want to join the line for 'Fantasyland,' which is -- " More of the manslaughter laugh. This time I chimed in with what I suppose would be the suicide laugh. More in-jokes, then, as we role played "incredibly naive patron who thinks he can get third-row centre seats for two even though he's purchasing on the day of the show" and "ticket agent explaining the laws of supply and demand to a wall." The Queen was getting just a little exasperated with these antics, and she noted: "There should still be seats on Row Q." I laughed. (Note to innocent bystanders: rows are named alphabetically from front to back; the last row on the Main Floor is Row R.) I pulled up Row Q. "Two, I presume?" Here I employed the "look, a saucy implication that you have a hot date, to prove how little I care!" face. He gave an affirmative, and I maintained the sauce face while adding, "Want centre seats? 'Cos you're gonna be all by yourselves!" Another affirmative. "Okay," said I, striking certain keys with more fluorish than others, "ten dollars, please." He handed me his American Express and we exchanged "aha, but there's a two dollar service charge on all credit card orders!" grins. "Twelve dollars, please!" I bounced off to the card machine again. He played with one of the little plastic dinosaurs that have infested the Box Office. He tried to get it to stay on the little glass "All Sales Final" sign. He was upset that it would not. I got authorization (as if there had been any doubt) on his card and handed him the receipt. He scrawled out a signature incorporating the nickname he wishes everybody would use for him (but nobody ever has). I scrawled out "Mousetrap" at the top of the sales slip and we compared handwriting, briefly. He politely said mine was better. I politely thanked him. I retrieved his tickets from the printer and we both admired the expensive little hologram/watermark type deals all over them to help prevent the counterfeiting that's never really been a problem to begin with. Then it happened. A moment of erotic drama, torn straight from the headlines of The Onion: we almost touched each other. It happened that as I was checking the tickets with him, I began cramming them into the envelope, but as I began cramming them in, he began taking the envelope. Our fingers almost brushed. Thankfully, we managed to avert the potential crisis that would have been physical contact by taking immediate precautionary measures when we first felt the pressure of one another's hands from opposing inside/outside parts of the envelope. Okay, that's to say I jerked my hand away so as not to spoil The Perfect Record. If I didn't know better, I'd say it was a very close call. Especially for the circumspect likes of us. I told him I'd see him this evening. "O, are you seeing the show?" Rich people don't understand anything. "No, I'm ... working. Over there. I'm furniture, Yuppie." When I addressed him, I called him by his full name just like everyone else does. I'd intended to try the nickname on for size just to see if it would cause the apocalypse, but as with other things I lost my nerve. And then he was gone. I told him not to be a stranger, but tonight at the show, that's exactly what we were. ~ETK My mom�s advice�#1�Be sweet.� Lovely but illogical because in all six of my classes, I�m absolutely silent and don�t speak unless spoken to. #2 Dress like the girls at Princeton. (?) I have no idea what the Princeton girls wear, so if you go there, enlighten me. I was tempted to say that they only wear lacoste dresses, and we needed to go buy them now. Alas, I did not think of it. --Claire 23:40 - 23 October, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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