Alan Hollis #0741

Alan Hollis was older than everyone else in our English Education classes in college. He was a class clown, and he always sat next to this diminutive mousy girl with glasses named Darla.

It was the understanding of everyone in the class that Darla was going to be an awesome teacher. She always came up with the best lesson plans, and though shorter even than myself at a good 5'2", she seemed to have what it takes to beat the five year turnover rate of the public school system.

Alan, however, could perhaps have taught clown school. He specialized in smarty answers, sarcastic remarks, and the helpless look that meant he didn't mean to be a pain in the ass, it was just all so funny. Class was a joke to him, and to Darla the joke was Alan.

I saw them walk together to multiple classes. They hugged. They flicked each other in good natured flirtation. Everyone thought for sure they were dating.

But apparently they weren't dating.

(*cue dramatic crescendo*)

"Hey! That is so not true! Def Leppard, man! Fuckin Def Leppard was the shit!"

Cue Darla's boyfriend, Roy. Roy was huge, at least six feet tall. He had a shaved head, a goatee, gauged ear lobes and a lip piercing. Frankly, I would not have been surprised if he had a swastika tattooed on his chest somewhere.

Roy liked to be the center of attention, puff up his chest like a game cock, and walk around intimidating everyone with various feats of idiocy and unnecessarily foul language.

I saw them outside of a campus bar at a picnic bench under the covered porch.

"Darla and I here--" he slung his arm roughly around Darla's neck and she smiled and pressed into his shoulder, "--we were going to go to Buzzfest this year, but she had some fuckin school shit to do."

"I'm trying to teach Antony and Cleopatra without talking too much about sex," and she giggled behind her nerdy glasses.

"Oh man, I said. You're teaching that? I have to teach Chiua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. I think I'd rather have Shakespeare." Next to me, Kyle Parson had also been in our classes and known Darla.

"Yeah? I've got to do Faulkner. I found out about that and thought 'what the crap.' I didn't understand Faulkner in college!"

There was a lull and Roy started looking about the room since he obviously had no place in the conversation. He started playing with Darla's hair. His macho affection was actually coming off pretty disgusting. every since Darla had informed us that they lived together, I couldn't stop thinking about how weird they must look having sex.

Kyle broke the silence.

"Have you heard anything from Alan?"

Darla immediately looked at Roy. She opened her mouth a fraction of an inch.

"--Don't even say that name, man. Don't fuckin bring it up." As much as he looked frightening, I had to stifle a smirk because the thought of Alan, who was puffy and goofy looking stepping in and emasculating Roy was just really funny.

Abruptly, Darla got up and excused herself.

Roy leaned in to Kyle and I as we watched Darla round the corner toward the bathroom inside.

"I told that motherfucker if he ever comes near her again I'll fuckin break his neck."

But I kept seeing Darla and Alan together in class. I never saw Roy in the same one hundred foot radius, but the two of them always sat together, always joked, always teased.

When we graduated, Roy watched Darla walk. I saw him standing there clutching a bouquet of Kroger carnations when they caught up in the grass outside the arena. Alan and I ended up with the same student teaching supervisor, so I kept up with him. He got a job at a well-to-do public high school in the suburbs coaching football. He had been dating a woman with special needs who was divorced with two children.

And I couldn't understand how he had time and patience for all that. How he could be laughing and joking and poking fun, and really be coming back to that? But then, I couldn't understand how Darla ever had patience for Roy either.

So I guess it all made sense in a way.

Comment Card

They took away my grilled cheese at lunch!

Every day I get a cup of tomato based soup and a grilled cheese sandwich for dipping and general enjoyment.

Then Tuesday I come to lunch at 12:45 like normal and the dude behind the counter says, "Now, I can't get you grilled cheese no more!"

"What?" I grin at him. I am sure he's joking.

"I can't make grilled cheese any more. I can only make what's on that card up there."

I grin up at the card. I still think he's pulling my leg, and grilled cheese will be up there. ...but no grilled cheese. 

"Are you serious right now?!" 

I walk toward the hot entree side where there are steaming trays of meatloaf, macaroni, and mashed potatoes behind the glass. I stand there. Because someone is required to serve the stuff, usually.

"What's wrong?" Another dining employee who usually greets me has moved around to the hot entree side.

"They took away my grilled cheese!?"

"Yup," he says, picking up a plate from the side table. "And guess what else, this is self-serve."

I suddenly look down and notice that there are spoons sticking out of everything. ...Damn. 

I feel stupid. I throw my soup into the trash before paying for it, and walk toward the parking elevator, and then my car. 

When I get back to work, the heading on the Dining newsletter is as follows: "Dining Facility Gets Back to Basics." Apparently a "Back to Basics" menu has been instated to give customers less choices and streamline the dining process. It is now easier to order the Basic lunch that is much cheaper by comparison to area restaurants.

The newsletter then listed ridiculously over-priced area lunch spots and compared them to a similar lunch in the dining facility.

Still, the price of a candy bar had gone up by 50% and a sandwich had jumped up by a whole dollar. I was a little bit mad.

FEEDBACK FORM:

Comments?

How can you not put two pieces of bread together with cheese in the middle and grill it? I don't even care if the cost increases! Bring back my grilled cheese!

"Back to Basics?" How much more basic can you get than cheese and bread?

Also, with limited contact to service personnel due to the increase in self-service selection, I feel more like a cow among cattle than a person having the unique and homey dining experience I enjoyed before. 

In short, you won't see me in the dining area any more. Have fun serving (or preparing the self-service of) the even fewer number of people who still feel like eating there. 

I kinda felt like I was writing a congress speech. 

Still, though, they're not bringing grilled cheese back. When they serve "old fashioned" tomato soup, I may cry.

The Law of Diminishing Returns

And the word for today is: Dull.

Lately I've been thinking I'm all dull inside. And I think its probably due to the Law of Diminishing Returns. Which ironically was once the the highlight of my day. I had a hopeless crush on my Economics teacher in high school.


"So Brian is eating a cup of chili. It's REALLY good chili. And it's so good that he decides a second cup would be even better. And it is! --Brian, eat another cup of chili."
Brian mimed eating a delicious cup of chili.
"So Brian's second cup was even better! What about a third cup! That would be even better than the second, right?!"
Aaaah... I thought from my second row seat. You are so delicious.
"WRONG! A third cup --Brian, eat a third cup-- A third cup actually makes Brian feel kinda sick. What's wrong? I thought more was better, --Brian eat a fourth cup-- but, it appears that a fourth cup actually makes Brian vomit."
Brian mimed the vomit of the conditionally delicious chili.
"And that's the Law of Diminishing Returns."
Aaaah... I thought. You are even delicious when talking about vomit.


I actually took the Advanced Placement test, paid a whole 50 dollars, and really had no intention of passing the test. While I did have 100's in the class, all I wanted out of the exam were the afternoon study sessions. I wrote page after page of a student-teacher romance novel that, of course, never materialized. I got a 2 out of 5 on the exam. He apologized to me after the fact, and I could have told him that I got exactly what I wanted out of my 50 bucks. But I guess I let him think he'd failed me. He hadn't. I even liked the way he looked apologizing.

Hence, I may be a bit off in my interpretation of the Law of Diminishing Returns. But based on Mr. Formerly Delicious's Law, I have come to the Vomit part of my dating life. Boys, even hot ones, not only disappoint me, but I am bored by them rather than enthralled. I no longer feel the need to gawk at all. Despite my crush on 1oth Floor Indian Guy, or Pink Shirt Wearing Guy four cubes away from me, or even my fantasies about Rafael Nadal, I am haunted by the ordinary-ness of it all.

I no longer anticipate the release and rush of emotion, the flutter of nerves. I no longer go out of my way to encounter them. I don't want to crash crush bury myself in passion. Because passion, I've become aware, is all a big lie.

Now, I've known this for some time. We all do. But its that ohmygod feeling, that cloud-nine, my-life's-like-a-movie thing that keeps us from noticing that this situation isn't different. This is not a lasting relationship. It's infatuation.
Infatuation.
In-fat-u-ation.
It's such an ugly word to be the best feeling in the world.
And maybe it was age, independence, self-sufficience, or the fact that MARRIAGE looms over the horizon like a necessary evil, but I don't even feel like that any more. Ever.

Hot 10th Floor Indian Guy is the most delicious right where he is: Across the room from me, eating tandoori out of an aluminum foil package, at most vaguely aware that the white girl with the scribbly notebook won't stop looking at him. He is the best in my dreams only. In the idea that just maybe he's actually Edward Cullen, and he wants to run away with me and have vampire babies.
This way I never have to find out the mundane truth: that his breath reeks, and that his parents still technically run his life. That he is engaged to a moderately attractive Indian girl named Sonal who is still in medical school. I don't want to know this.
I want to daydream like a little kid.

I want to dream like I did in middle and high school where the most cathartic experience I could have was to write my way into a life with 10th Floor Indian Guy or Pink Shirt Wearing Guy or even my Econ teacher from high school.

I guess what I'm saying is that my dreams have always been more satisfying that my realities. And now I remember what I somehow forgot over the years: that the Law of Diminishing Returns can always be broken when it comes to fantasy. I can have the same dream about Rafa Nadal four nights in a row and still be sorry I woke up.
I never even feel like vomiting!

Adam Anders #7227

In high school there was always that one group of people that you wanted to be friends with and you didn't know why.
Once you get to college, there isn't really any one group because groups are everywhere and they don't really know each other.
Unless, of course, you go to a small private christian school the size of a large high school. But that's another story.
Every now and then there is still a group that you want to be a part of even at the most massive of colleges. There are people you want to be friends with that you feel separated from somehow. There is this invisible bubble around them, and as soon as you try to enter this bubble, it bursts and the magic of the group vanishes in your awkward presence, as you stand in front of these people who know that you do not mesh with their obvious chemistry.

Yet in high school, this chemistry is always seen as superior. This group wears the cool clothes you can't afford. They have the cool parties. They date the cool people.

But when I went to college and found a group of Mass Comm kids, they weren't necessarily superior, just tight knit. And maybe it was the fact that they were doing something with their lives that I really wanted to do. They were all diving head first into the unknown of a life in video production. But I wanted to be a part of it. I wanted to be friends with them. I don't think I really had that many friends in college. I knew lots of guys who would masquerade as my friends because they wanted to be my boyfriends, but I didn't have anyone I could call simply because I didn't want to watch the next episode of American Idol all by myself.

Inevitably Adam Anders and others went off to their lives in tv, and I went off to mine in teaching. But I always wondered what would have happened if I hadn't been dating like a rabid animal and had actually shown up to the couple of events they invited me to. I wonder if, with their influence, I would have switched my major to Mass Comm. I wonder if I would be making endless copies of repair and commission invoices, or if I would instead be living off of my creative juices. In some capacity anyway.

I've never really put much stock in making friends. I'm bad at it. I always have been. Friendships have always just happened to me, often as the result of some endless source of conversation by way of some deep ingrained thing we had in common. Its exhausting if there is none. One might wonder why it was so easy to date people who were totally wrong for me if I could never come up with anything to say. But I really don't have an answer for that one. I was great at getting dates, and bad at making friends. And I missed out on them. Adam Anders and others. I missed out, and I still don't know how its all done.

How do you make friends with people if you're so uncomfortable around them?
How do you convince someone that you're worth knowing if they don't think so already?

...And Counting

Boyfriend Count: 0

Women Attempting to Fix Me Up with One Count: 2

Book Idea Count: 5

Full Finished Drafts: 0

Dreams I've Had Involving Imaginary Boyfriends: 4

Imaginary Boyfriend Count: 11

These may include: Raphael Nadal, Young Marlon Brando, Edward of Twilight, Eric of True Blood, the hot Indian guy on the 10th floor at work, Gael Garcia Bernal, Elijah Wood, Jack from Titanic just before the boat sinks (He's always so worried about me), Taylor Lautner, George Willard from Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Slater of Saved by the Bell, and occasionally Rufio from the movie Hook.

Hours I Have to Turn Beautiful, Painful, Hopeless, Longing for Imaginary Lovers into Book Construction: 72... and counting.

Thank you, Labor Day Weekend.

Alec Dorman #3581

Breckin Moore had taken me to a bar on the "downtown" square of our rinky dink college town that had an upstairs that functioned as a concert venue. Local talent, mostly crap, would play thinking they were going somewhere in the music business, which was, often unfortunately, their major.

"Yeah, I'm a RIM major, how did you know that?!"

They smoke packs at a time and borrow money to follow their dreams as an "artist." They wear vintage western snap button shirts and jeans holier than swiss Jesus. They wear old beat up sneakers and perfect the hairstyle that says "I spent an hour this morning making sure you'd know I don't care about my hair." Then of course there are others that really don't care about their hair. Or basic hygiene. At the bar upstairs in said two-story venue bar they wait for the show to start and drink PBR while chain smoking and nodding to whatever craptastic band is playing over the speakers.

Girls in short skirts and leggings wander and laugh aimlessly while seeming to bump into each other on purpose. They wear too much eye make up. Smokey eyes, crazy eye-liner eyes, smeared-because-I'm-already-drunk eyes.

I sat at the bar with Breckin and various PBR drinking RIM majors, I assume. I wore black and made sarcastic-eyes at everyone. Only for a split second though, because I was covering the fact that I was really trying to find people I knew. I didn't live in that city any more. But the waiting game of starting my independent life kept drawing be back to that place where everyone was waiting. Though most of them seemed to be screwing things up while they did so. Maybe I thought I was immune.

"College kids are stupid," my reluctant college freshman brother used to say.

"Guess what, you are one," I would counter.

The bar was starting to buzz with the ensuing show as three boys in vests and loose ties started their sound check. How sweet. They wanted to look mainstream. The bar was full, there were no more stools, and I stood up at my seat to check the text message that vibrated in my back pocket. I flipped it on and illuminated my face with blue smokey light.

Breckin was now completely ignoring me. Some girls near the door to downstairs were discussing something very funny with him and flailing about, lightly brushing his shoulder or arm with their spirit fingers.

"What's so interesting?" I looked up from my phone to see a guy wearing a snap button western shirt in front of me. His hair was shaggy and he had this clueless look about him even though I knew he wasn't. I had noticed him flitting from crowd to crowd around the room. He obviously knew a lot of people.

"Um. My phone." I say this deadpan, because I am actually irritated that he isn't more attractive. At a distance the black rimmed glasses had looked sexy in a nerdy, I'm-a-hipster kind of way. Now they looked like they were trying to be hipster glasses.

"Well duh!" He was unfazed. "You must have a text-ual relationship." I'd never heard of that before. And I told him so.

"Huh. I've never heard of that before. But I guess I do. I'm actually getting pretty fast with this phone texting kind of thing." I had just discovered T9-word.

I glanced over at Breckin, still basking in blonde attention. I had wanted to know where he was so he wouldn't notice what I knew would happen next.

Hipster-would-be wiped his brow.

"I'm Alec. It's nice to meet you. Would you by any chance like to get to know me... textually?"

I don't know how anyone ever got past a line like that. But the truth is that I've always been a sucker for puns.

In high school, I had a Biology teacher who used to tell a bad joke at least every other day. And a Murray Middle I used some of them to teach the "pun" as figurative language:

"You guys hear about the shootout in the Gap the other day? There were many casual-tees."

I considered it the high point of the unit.

Alec started texting me the next day and didn't stop for at least three weeks. I found out he was actually twenty-nine, divorced, and working at a fancy furniture store for eccentric rich people. I pictured him sweating, wearing a snap button vintage western shirt, and trying to force a zebra stripe mohair couch up a flight of stairs.

But that was really all there was to Alec Dorman for me. Once someone tells you they were married before, you don't really think about driving to East Nashville to have a cuddle party with them. Its not fun to cuddle a big ball of debt, repressed emotional baggage, and unfortunate fashion decisions. You draw back, extend one hand in warning, and warily say, "Uh, that's okay. I really can't right now." When the truth is they might have less emotional baggage than you.

An Emergency Post on Vh1's Tool Academy

I just want to SCREAM at that girl. What the hell are you doing!? Get a backbone! He wants to ruin his own life, don't let him take you with him.

...Oh hell no! Do not run after him and calm him down! He should be begging for your forgiveness for making a fool of himself on tv!!! 

Did she take off her shoes?! What!? O. M. G. This--this is exactly what I have been talking about! She's running to him because she doesn't know what to do with herself without him! She's not even thinking about herself! It's all-- he's upset. And let's leave. WTF. Seriously. 

Its just like, all this time I had thought, maybe by arguing I am being selfish. I should just give in. Make peace, you know. Because there wouldn't be an argument if I didn't say anything. And what do you know, after a few months, a few years, I had become my mother. And not only that, I had become something less than a person. People have feelings and opinions and they don't have to be right, they just have to be heard. When you're so over it that you don't even say how you feel, you end up isolating yourself and your emotions and...

ugh, GET THE HELL OUT OF THE LIMO! 

God. I just want to SHAKE her. She didn't even THINK to herself that she could leave without him. It wasn't an option. 

Well its an option for me, I'll tell you that much. I freakin love being alone these days. 

--No no no no no. Do NOT tell him you LOVE him!!? 

I cannot STAND this!!!

But I can't stop watching. 

And... oh yeah, Antonio Sabato Jr. is hot and ethnic, which I love, but has two children. Who as of yet are no where near the set of My Antonio. This means that the show is a total farce. Because he's just another crappy father who apparently left is young children for months to advance his career on Vh1. Yeah, another one of those. 

And with that, I'm turning off my television. So much for winding down.