Diary of a Network Geek

Well, cancer seems to be on my mind this week.

Go figure, right?
Well, it’s been a long week and I’m tired, but I have two fun links for you regarding cancer. The first is a link to the National Children’s Cancer Society educational publication page, which includes a cancer coloring book called “Sammie’s New Mask: A Coloring Book for Friends of Children with Cancer“.
The second link is to The Adventures of Captain Chemo and the Chemo Command. I’ll let you make your own judgements about both of these, but they struck my strange sense of humor. I know they’re trying, but I think they can do better on the “fun” links for cancer.

Hmm, maybe I should put together a cancer coloring book myself as I go through all this. Might fill some time and keep me amused.
Anyway, it’s the best I can do this week. Better links next week, I promise. Until then, enjoy your weekend. Hell, enjoy every day.

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"No matter what goes wrong, there is always someone who knew it would."

It was an interesting weekend.

So, Friday morning, I get to work within seconds of C. We park in different rows, but make it to the door about at the same time. I notice that her hands are full, so I wait a little longer than I normally would to hold the door for her.
“Wow, you’re wearing jeans for a change. It’s nice to see. You look good in jeans,” she tells me. Now, I’m not vain or concieted, but when I worked at the Front Desk, the black girls all complimented me on my ass. I may not have a lot going for me, but I do know I have a better than average ass for a white boy. I’m pretty sure that’s what she really meant.
“Um, I wear jeans every Friday, C. and have since you worked here.”
“Oh, I guess I never noticed before…”
Well, no shit. Who notices the quiet, polite, professional guy who looks you in the eye not the nipple? Who notices the guy that puts you on the prayer list at church because you’re obviously having trouble with the guy you’re dating and just can’t figure out that you should leave him, be alone and figure out who you really are instead of running from the tragic death of a high-school sweetheart? Apparently, not C. Go figure. Just call me Rodney Skinner. After work, I took my favorite, flirty strawberry-blonde out shopping and for Jack-in-the-Box 99¢ tacos. She might be a bitch, but she’s a cheap date. Hey, I’m talking about Hilda, my dog! C. has artificially enhanced red hair, unless I miss my guess.

So, then Saturday night after church, W. the former mechanic who now works with me and, in fact, is responsible for me having my current job, and K., J.’s former fiance, and I go out to sushi at Koto’s. W. and I have known her for quite awhile and I encouraged him to talk to her via e-mail, because I know she’s been a bit lonely and feeling a little out of the social scene at church. After she and J. broke it off, she got engaged again and that didn’t work out either, though for totally different reasons. She’s a very nice woman who invited me into her home the first Thanksgiving I was alone, the week after the Queen of the Damned left. In any case, they cooked up a dinner out, pre-planned, so that she wouldn’t feel suddenly trapped while everyone else got together and went out.
K. is on the Prayer Team with me at church. Actually, she invited me to join back when she and J. were still together. While we were waiting for everyone else to get together for our group prayer, she and I got pressed into service serving communion, which I had never done at this church before. I swear, when we got up to do it and found our place, J. and L. were staring and whispering about it. It may have been my imagination, but I swear I saw her look right at us then lean over to him and say… Well, something.
After church, we hung around a bit, while W. went and got a table at Koto’s. Apparently he knew the place quite well. Also, he speaks very fluent Japanese, which I’d forgotten. I think he might have been showing off for K., but I’m not sure. Either way, it was great sushi and rock bottom prices and I cannot reccomend it enough. We had a nice dinner, even though I was coughing pretty badly. And, my eyes were bigger than my stomache, so I ended up bringing home a bit of sushi for Hilda. Yes, my amazingly spoiled dog eats sushi, thank you very much!

Sunday, I did nothing and loved it.
This morning, though, W. tells me that K. “likes” me. Now, as a former fiance of perhaps my best friend, she’s automatically off-limits, but I have to admit, I am attracted to her. Still, he’s the second guy who’s seen us interact and said that. I’m starting to wonder if it’s not true. But, I really need it to not be true, and I told him so. His response?
“Well, at least she likes you a lot more than she likes me.”
Oh, God, help me!

Now, for the health update…
Got my chest x-ray this afternoon and got a call from the doctor about 6:00PM. Apparently, the x-ray showed no improvement, or not enough for the imaging center’s liking, so tomorrow morning, after I go see the phlebotomist, so they can check on my anemia, I’ll be off to get a CT scan. Apparently, it’s pretty gruesome.
And, I’m taking this very seriously now, because last night, I listened to a guy share at a men’s support group meeting I attend, about his inoperable cancer. The symptoms that he described going to see the doctor for? The exact same symptoms I ignored for months. Now, I don’t think I have cancer, but I do have a history of it in my family, on both sides, so that scared the shit out of me. No more screwing around, I promise, folks. Uncle Jim is taking it all very, very seriously now. Whatever the doctor says I need to do, I do.

I’ll give you more as I know more.

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"Being right means never having to say you're sorry."
   --Vernor Vinge

Guess who has pneumonia?

I think the doctor was a little surprised to see me walking around, to be honest. He never actually used the word “pneumonia”, but just talked symptoms. I described how things had progressed over the last three months, or so, and how two weeks ago, things had seemed to be getting better. I admited I should have come to see him sooner, but, well, I was a bit thick-headed and from sturdy stock, so I figured I could out last it, whatever it was. I believe his only comment at hearing that I’d fought this for three months was to agree that I was, indeed, a little stubborn. Then, he gave me the inhaler and the first of an eleven-day course of antibiotics, just to help finish “it” off. But, after listening to my lungs, he decided I needed a chest x-ray. Apparently, my right lung wasn’t filling with air very well and he wanted a picture of that. So, he had his staff get me into the imaging center right away. Oh, and he thought I looked a little pale and my blood pressure was a little high. So, they’re doing some blood work on me and, after all the over-the-counter drugs are out of my system, we’ll be checking on that blood pressure.
At the handy, local medical imaging center, they had me fill out a form that included a description of what brought me to their facility. Naturally, I put down “a cough”, because, as far as I was concerned, that’s all it was. The nice lady entering me into their system laughed and said,”Oh, no, honey, your doctor said it was pneumonia, not just a cough.” Naturally, I laughed that off as nothing much to worry about for hardy, Midwestern stock like me. Then she asked me how many days of work I’d missed.
“Well, except for one day travelling for family business, none.”
I mean, c’mon, it takes more than a little pneumonia to keep me from getting the job done. That’s why I get the “big bucks”, right? Yeah, that’s the ticket.
So, in any case, I’ve started my antibiotics and I have my Official Network Geek Inhaler and I’ll hear back about the results of the blood work and x-ray later this week.

Now, on the mental health front…
I had an interesting conversation with C. from work yesterday morning.  Apparently, as a  condition of her full-time employment, she was told she couldn’t date anyone from the company.  According to the grapevine, she put the question to the guy she was seeing, who’s actually “Pappy” from the whole Wild West incident.  Unfortunately, his answer was that his job was more imortant than she was.  Well, there were some other, um, “words” used to, ah, “express” the sentiment that were, to be honest, less articulate and a bit more crude, but that was the gist of it.  In any case, she calls and starts talking about work, but then asks me if anyone is around me.  When I told her no, she starts explaining how important her job is and that “it’s not going to happen”.  I can only assume she meant her going out with me.  Which, frankly, after all the crazy signals and her getting all involved with this other guy, who is a real clown and, well, not much of anything as far as I can see…  Well, let’s just say it left me scratching my head.  Honestly, I think I’d be better off dating the reluctant groom’s former fiance.  And, no, that ‘aint gonna’ happen.

So, now, it’s time to set up the coffee for tomorrow and get some well deserved sleep.

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"If I'd known I was going to live so long, I would have taken better care of myself!"
   --George Burns

As a fourth-generation Chicagoan, I celebrate this day a little differently.
You see, not only is this a day that greeting card companies crafted into a reason to waste money on cards, flowers and candy for someone who should love you without all that junk, but it was also a very important day in Chicago history. Today is the day when, in 1929, Al “Scarface” Capone gathered together seven of his closest friends and gunned them down. Yep, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Old Al was clever, too. Not only did he get seven of his arch rival’s men together, but he dressed his hired guns up as police officers so that if they were spotted any witnesses would assume everything was under control because the police were already there! Yes, sir, that Al sure was an innovator.
So, as you shell out your hard-earned cash for disposable junk that will most likely go to waste, remember how they used to celebrate St. Valentine’s Day on the South Side. Feels about the same, doesn’t it?
Something else to keep in mind this year, the saint for whom this day is named was a martyr. What does that mean to you and me? That means that Saint Valentine was beaten almost to death and then beheaded on this day. Later he went on to perform miracles and all that to become a saint, but, today is the day we celebrate the fact that a hired mob worked him over pretty well with clubs and then chopped his head right off. Sort of sounds like how love feels for some of us about this time of year, doesn’t it?

Hey, all joking and dark humor aside, I hope everyone has a nice day today, whether they have someone to share it with or not.

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"It took me a long time not to judge myself through someone else's eyes."
   --Sally Field

Trouble in mind, I’m blue
But I won’t be blue always,
‘Cause the sun’s gonna shine
In my backdoor some day.

–Trouble in Mind written by Richard Jones and sung by Nina Simone

So, Saturday, I had lunch with my minister.
Now, when he reads this, I have no doubt that he’ll balk at the title of this post, but, for me, it’s no less true. In fact, that was half the reason I wanted to get together with him.

He’d been helping rehearse a wedding, apparently without the benefit of food, because at two o’clock when I came to get him, he asked if we could get lunch instead of coffee. Naturally, that was fine with me, even though I’d eaten. So, we jumped into the Black Beast, as I often refer to my retired police car, and headed out. I think Matt was a little surprised to find Nina Simone in the CD player instead of Ramstein, but, hey, I like to keep my spiritual advisor/fashion consultant on his toes, you know? Anyway, we made a bit of small talk about health and weather and getting older as we zipped past Six Flags over Jesus (aka Second Baptist) to Escalante’s. Matt’s been working on his PhD. in Lubbock and, apparently, they don’t have any good Mexican food there, so he was craving. I just had ice tea, but they were slow and we had enough to justify taking up the table.

By the time we’d walked through the door, Matt knew I wanted to talk about the two most confusing, vexing, baffling subjects known to man: God and women.
God, it turns out, is the less vexing of the two. As I explained to Matt, I still have a hard time with certain things about religion. Belief in a Supreme Being isn’t so hard. Belief that He cares about so insignificant a life as mine, well, that’s a bit of a stretch sometimes. So, too, that whole salvation concept is a little beyond me sometimes, too.
But, he explained it in a way that, somehow, I’d never considered before.
“What if a friend came to you with a problem? A bad habit he’d tried to break, but had given into. What would you tell him?”
“Well, I guess I’d ask him what he learned. I wouldn’t be focused so much on the bad habit, but the behavior and thoughts that led up to the backsliding. I mean, the point isn’t to be perfect, but to learn from the mistake and move on.”
“Well, don’t you think that an all-powerful, all-knowing supreme being is at least as compassionate as you are?”
“Oh…” Yeah, somehow, I lost sight of that whole idea. That God, as powerful and huge as He is, still cares about me at least as much as I care about people who come to me with problems. See? Like I said, Matt may not be comfortable with the label, but Holy Man fits.

Now, as for the women end of things…
Well, I’ve tried every other approach to women that I can think of, so asking a minister seemed like a novel idea. Besides, Matt’s happily married with two kids and a third on the way. I told him about the subject of my posts last week. I gave him all the detail I leave out of this blog. How I made myself vulnerable to her. How I told her what I felt and thought. How I shared my writing with her. The kind of writing I rarely share with anyone, because I never think it’s good enough. I told him how she rarely returns phone calls or e-mails. I told him how I’d made the decision to pull back, for my own safety, but still called to let her know why I was doing that, because I’d always hated seeing someone turn cold to me with no explanation and wondered why. I told him how all my efforts seem to be met with a confusing mix of appreciation and disdain.
Matt summed it up when he made two simple gestures. With one hand, waving me closer. With the other, holding it up to say “stop”. “Come closer, no, wait, go away.”
And, after listening to the whole thing. Hearing my frustration and my embarrassment and my self-directed anger, he said something to me that shocked me down to my bones.
“She’s not worthy of you.”
I hate to admit it, but that’s a fairly alien concept to me. Me not being worthy of someone else, that I get. But, the idea that perhaps there was someone not worthy of my honesty and openness… Well, it certainly made me think. So did the last thing he said to me about all that.
“Guard your heart.”
And, that I got. The trick, as I told Matt, is figuring out the right balance between guarding myself from harm and being transparent enough to be real. I’ve struggled for a long time to rediscover my authentic self and, mostly, I like who I’ve found. And, damn it, Matt’s right, that should be more than enough for anyone who’s paying attention. How many people would take the risk to be honest enough to share their feelings, even after being fairly certain that things weren’t going well at all, just because it’s the right thing to do.

The other thing that surprised me a bit was when Matt asked me if I’d prayed about it. I grew up with the idea that one never asked God for anything for one’s self. That was the height of selfishness and practically heresy. But, he reminded me of Scripture, which I can’t remember now, where Christ told someone to express their wants to God. He told me it was not only okay to tell God I was lonely for that special relationship, but that God wanted me to bring that to Him. God wanted to hear my heart’s deepest longing. Yes, he already knows it, but God wants to hear it from my own heart.
And, I’ll be honest, I am lonely. It’s not that I lack for friends or family or love at all, but it’s different. Yes, if I want to get out to a movie or dinner or just not be alone, I can find someone to be with easily enough. Male or female. But, I’m lonely in a different way. There’s something different about that tender, intimate relationship with a member of the opposite sex that goes beyond simple friendship. I feel like I know so little of that sort of relationship that I can hardly hold a picture of it in my mind, much less describe it. But, this much I do know, it’s a kind of intimacy that goes deeper than anything else. It is, I think, what drives us all, in one way or another. The search for it gets me up in the morning and exhausts me during the day. If I were to remember my dreams at night, I’m sure it would be all I dream.
So, I started praying about that longing to God. I don’t pretend to know what the results will be, but when my holy man instructs me, this student listens.

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers."

I didn’t do anything bad today.

But, I wanted to.
I’ve been craving cigarettes all week, but I haven’t gone and bought any or bummed any.  Nor do I plan to.  Even though I want to chain smoke really badly.
I haven’t had a drink this week.
Oh, I’ve thought about drinking a little 80 proof medicine to “help me sleep”, but I haven’t done it.  I almost bought into the illusion that the drink would help me forget my self-directed anger and my continual embarrassment.  But, the reality is that, even if it did for a few minutes when I was drunk, it’d all come back when I sobered up.  And I’d be embarrassed by having been drunk.
I’ve wanted to pound my fists against something hard in anger and frustration because I just never seem to learn.  But, I didn’t do that, either.

Instead, I cleaned three great, big, black garbage bags of junk my ex-wife left behind out of my house.  They’re by the curb now, waiting to get hauled away.  There’ll be more next week.
And, I made arrangements to join a standing pot-luck dinner at one of my minister’s houses Friday night.  I still don’t know what I’ll bring, but I won’t cook.  I want them to have a good impression that first night, after all.
And, I made a promise to write something for another blogger’s special project.  A project that she’d aimed towards women, until she found out that sometimes men have the same problems women do, even if we don’t talk about them as much.
And, I made an appointment to meet my other minister for coffee on Saturday before church.  Though I have no real idea why, he always seems eager to sit and talk with me.  I must have more interesting spiritual problems than I realized.  Who knew?

So, I did good things today.   I can always do those other things, those things that will slowly eat me up.
But, not today.

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"There's more than one way to do it"
   --Unofficial PERL Coder's Motto

Some things never change.

You know, no matter how hard I try, it seems there are just some things about me that never change. Take, for instance, my terrible luck with the opposite sex. Okay, not so much “luck” as the results of a range of poor interpersonal skill and bad choices. Frankly, every time something like this happens, it’s just like Junior High. (I think they call that “Middle School” in Texas.)
There was a girl, naturally, who caught my fancy right at that special time when we were all “changing” and discovering all these new feelings about our opposite member. Her name was Julie. Nice gal, cute, popular, the works. Sadly, I was not cute nor popular. Only I hadn’t figured out that mattered yet. I was a late bloomer. So, throwing most of my caution to the wind, I wrote her a note, no doubt expressing my undying love for her with all the eloquence my little seventh-grade writing skills could muster. I think I can sum it up by saying I wrote something equivalent to “I like you. You’re pretty. Do you like me?”

I was subtle in my delivery of said note. No go between for me! Nope, I bravely told her she dropped something and handed her the note. Then, I believe I practically ran in the opposite direction. Then, for what felt like the next six years, Julie and her friends, the popular girls, all pointed and laughed and made me feel… Well, I guess they didn’t make me feel anything, but what I felt was strange, bad, small, and “less than”. It was a feeling that chased me all through the rest of Junior High and High School, too.
It was that feeling that made me feel good enough to help the cheerleader with her physics homework, but not good enough to be her actual date. No, that was reserved for her boyfriend who was too busy with his Advanced Placement Physics to help her figure out basic physics. Honestly, I doubt she even remembers my name today.
But, that’s pretty well how things played out over those years. I was the nice guy that all the girls felt safe around, and I worked at that, but, as a result, none of them really thought of me “that way”. In retrospect, I wonder how many of them thought I was gay. Regardless, that’s just how things were. No, I’m not whining about that “nice guys finish last” malarkey. It’s not that they didn’t like me, but, somehow, in being safe and careful with them, I just got shuffled off into another category where dating wasn’t a possibility.

So, flash forward about twenty years and several relationships, including one failed marriage. You’d expect that I’d have learned something, right? Apparently not. I discovered that I’ve made an ass of myself again, doing the same things that I did in Junior High.
I put myself out there. I was as real and genuine as I know how to be. I wore my heart on my sleeve. And, I even got a little response. Enough, at least, to keep me hooked. Oh, I put her on the prayer list at church. I prayed for her, at her request. I even sent prayers along to her. (Prayer and my relationship with God is actually a very private intimate thing that I don’t share with a lot of people.) I was caring and I listened to her problems. The whole nine yards. But, Monday morning, when I got into work, I found out she’d been to a Super Bowl party with someone else as her date. Her and her kids.
The guy who squealed had no idea that I was the most likely reason why she’d sworn him to secrecy, or I’m sure he wouldn’t have told me.
I’ll tell you true, faithful readers. I felt like a right jackass. I was embarrassed and ashamed. I was damn mad at myself for getting into that position yet again. And worse, for letting it get to me. And, yes, it really burns me up that after more than twenty years, when I do this to myself, I can still hear Julie and her friends laughing at me.

A friend told me, via e-mail, that it was just my turn to go through this. Again. Just like everyone else. And, honestly, I know that. Deep in my heart, I know he’s right. And, yes, I can hear my very own father saying “In a hundred years, who will care?” And, yes, I know that’s true, too.
But none of that makes it sting less today.
And, yes, just like in Junior High, I want to say something, do something, to make her see, make her understand how unfair it is. How I felt deceived. How I would have handled it all differently if I’d just known from the outset that I wasn’t dateable. But, I know, just like in Junior High, that none of that would be of any use anyway.
Okay, I’m done feeling sorry for myself today.
Thank you.

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"Plenty of people miss their share of happiness, not because they never found it, but because they didn't stop to enjoy it."
   --W. Feather

So, we had a little excitement at work last week.

Hmm, let’s see if I can tell this story without implicating anyone…
These two guys at work got into it last week. One’s an older guy, probably close to retirement age. We’ll call him Cowboy. The other one is younger, in fact, barely out of high school. We’ll call him Young’un. Young’un used to work in the same department that Cowboy did, but moved on to another area. Young’un, in fact, works here because his father, who we’ll call Pappy, works here in yet another department.
So, Cowboy was always running his mouth about one thing or another and he got into it with Young’un. Things escalated to the point that Cowboy apparently got very upset. He left the heated “conversation” and went to his cubicle. He returned with a paper bag that he started shoving in Young’un’s face. Then, he pulled the bag off his hand and revealed a loaded .45. For those of you unfamiliar with that reference, that’d be a kind of handgun.

Well, somehow, things de-escalated to the point that they both walked away without incident. But, Young’un was bothered by this behavior, to say the least. Based on what I pieced together, he talked to several people about it, including Pappy. Pappy, being a standard, protective father, wanted to handle things “the country boy way”, his words, and stomp the excrement out of Cowboy after work. Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed and the police were called.
Turns out, Cowboy had a rather long rapsheet. Several counts of burglary of various flavors, spiced with prior weapons charges and assorted felonies. In fact, he was in the last year of his parole for his latest felony. Now, again, for those of you not familiar with our criminal justice system, it is illegal for a convicted felon to possess and handgun. It’s also a violation of his parole.
When I left Thursday night, after working a little late, the nice officers were still doing their paperwork, but, I’m told, that he’s now a guest of the State. His car was still in our parking lot most of the weekend, but was gone this morning when I came in. The gossip grapevine hasn’t delivered any news regarding his ultimate legal fate, but I suspect he’s be a guest at the Gray Bar Inn for quite some time.

Okay, now, I have to be honest about this. As glad as I am that he’s off the street, I feel a little sorry for the old guy. I just try to put myself in his shoes and imagine the long string of bad decisions that led him to this place. In spite of having made some really big mistakes in my own life, honestly, it’s a bit hard to see myself doing that many things that wrong.
Still, I pray that God will take care of even so lost a lamb. And, I pray that I never get so lost.

UPDATE:  Apparently, Cowboy is out on bond.  Not sure how that could have happened, all things considered, but there’s limits to my grapevine.

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"It is better to be approximately right than precisely wrong."
   --Warren Buffet

Johnny was a chemist’s son,
But Johnny is no more.
What Johnny thought was H20
was H2SO4.

Well, I guess this “chemistry” business might be more important than I was willing to believe.
In short, I got the brush-off via e-mail last night. S. liked me well enough, according to her e-mail, but just didn’t see us as a couple. It was actually a very polite, simple, straight to the point note. I know the modern relationship experts say you shouldn’t do that sort of thing via e-mail, but, considering that we met via Match.com and only went out twice, it seemed fine to me. At least she actually told me what was going on, gave an understandable reason for her decision and didn’t try to dance around with it. So often, especially with the on-line stuff, communication just stops with no reason or explanation or anything. And, yes, that goes both ways. Men do that to women as often as women do it to men.

In any case, it’s done and that’s fine.
Really, on the way home from work last night, I found myself thinking about the last chemistry post and the comments there and I started asking myself what I was doing. What was my goal in all this? I guess I knew it wasn’t working, too, but thought, or hoped, that another date or two would change things a bit. Ah, well, I’ve always been good at thinking myself into circles. I don’t trust my feelings when it comes to making decisions, especially about people. I don’t know, maybe I’ve been fooled so many times by people who present themselves as one thing only to turn out totally different. Appearances, truly can be deceiving.

Right now, though, going with that “feeling” stuff, the only people I’m interested in are off-limits for various reasons.
The two women I feel most drawn to, the most chemistry with, are a friend’s ex-fiance that he’s far from over, no matter what he says, and C., the receptionist at work with a Drama Quotient so high it’s practically off the scale.
See why I shy away from trusting my feelings or relying on chemistry?

(Incidentally, that little ditty at the start of the post is on a t-hsirt at Think Geek. And H2SO4 is sulfuric acid. Or, to steal a quote from the Naked Gun, “It’s like eating a spoonful of Drano, sure it’ll clean you out, but it’ll leave you hollow inside. “)

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"When you handle yourself, use your head; when you handle other, use your heart."
   --Donna Reed

“Is there any chemistry?”

I was asked that question this weekend in reference to the nice, Chinese girl, S., from Match.com. I was telling J. and L. about my first date with her, and my second date Friday, which went well, by the way. I’ve graduated from handshakes to hugs. I also apparently rated her real name, which, it turns out, has nothing to do with the letter “S” at all! That was just a name she used on Match to stay safe. Smart girl.

In any case, we went out to dinner again last Friday. Interestingly enough, I think I’d eaten in that restaurant before. It’s a place called Thai Gourmet. (Notice a theme to our dining?) I got there just a few minutes before her and, gentleman that I am, rose to greet her when she came through the door. As last time, we had a good meal and better conversation. I did notice, though, that the more comfortable she seems with me, the thicker her accent gets. I found that sort of interesting. I also found it interesting that she volunteered to pay for half of dinner. I didn’t let her, mainly because she took me by surprise, but also, Thai restaurants are usually pretty inexpensive.
Then we went to a Starbucks off Westheimer where I let her buy me a chai latte. And we talked some more. She’s an interesting girl, that’s for sure. Turns out she’s probably less than a year away from getting her greencard. After that, she ought to be able to travel fairly easily so she can go back to Shanghai and see her family.
She asked me a funny sort of question, though. Again, since she caught me by surprise, I probably was a little more honest than I’d have been given some time to think about it. She asked me how important I thought looks were. Now, I probably should have hesitated and thought about it, but, being me, I didn’t.
“What’s more important to me,” I told her, “is how someone treats me. Don’t get me wrong, looks are important, but not as important as the way someone treats me.” And, after a moment’s pause, I added, “I suppose I think about that a bit more since the divorce, but being pretty on the outside doesn’t matter much or for long if someone is ugly on the inside.” From her reaction, I’d say she like that answer.

So, as we’re gathering everyone for dinner after church, I’m updating J. and L. about my two dates. I emphasized how nice S. is and how intelligent and easy to talk to. And, L. asks that question,”Is there any chemistry?”
Naturally, I ignored the question and just kept on talking about, well, anything but the answer to that question, frankly. She asked me twice more before catching on that I was just going to ignore the question. Though, I have to admit, I was mulling an answer over in my head. It went something like this…

Chemistry is over-rated. Chemistry led me to an unhappy marriage and a painful divorce. Chemistry had me chasing every “pretty on the outside, ugly on the inside” woman I ever ran into that gave me a second glance. Chemistry is what damn near ruined my life and draws me like a stupid moth to a white-hot chemical fire.
If I were to follow this chemistry business, I’d chase after the receptionist at work who’s Drama Quotient is off the scale. In the name of this chemistry nonsense, I’d batter what was left of myself against the giant monolith of a hopeless cause.
No thanks. This time, I’m going to ignore the damn chemistry and do the smart thing. The “chemistry” will follow, if everything else works, too.

I told J. as much Sunday afternoon. He agreed that it was the smarter thing to do, but then he tried to tell me how important chemistry was to a long-term relationship. I think I managed to keep a straight face.
The truth is, there is a bit of chemistry there with S. It’s not the white-hot, searing burn of an over-heated crucible that will burn my fingerprints off, but, it’s there enough to make it all work. If we work at it.
Only time will tell.

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go."