Sunday, November 18, 2007

Fake It If You Don't Belong

She pushed the "Try Me!" button on the box, and the heads of Ernie and Cookie Monster started bobbing and vibrating violently. She looked at me and giggled.

I rolled my eyes, playfully, "Do you really have to push all the buttons?"

Cardigan ran her hand down the shelf and tapped all the "Try Me!" buttons. An army of Ernie and Cookie Monster heads started bobbing and singing.

She did a slight in-place hop and bob motion and laughed, hand-over-mouth.

Cardigan was accompanying me to a local Toys'R'Us. I was getting some early Christmas gift shopping for my nieces and nephews out of the way.

There's something about being in a toy store or the toy section of a store with a girl. They can be some weird strong, confident, West Coast, grad school law student variety, and yet at the sight of some toys and "Try Me!" buttons, they still get giddy and childish, wide-eyed and giggling at every cute, singing doll.

As the shelf full of Sesame Street heads bobbed and sang, I couldn't help but smile, watching Cardigan cheer childishly.

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About two months ago, Titty got a hefty promotion for his performance at his company. He'd been there a year and a half, and after considering his contributions to the organization, they offered a huge chunk of money to make sure he never leaves.

About a month ago, Wall took a job in India. He felt that the experience and money was worth leaving home, and besides, he had no baggage holding him down. The salary difference was jaw-dropping, and the company would be taking care of all his living expenses. He flew out Wednesday.

Two weeks ago, I sat in on a meeting with the Client and their architects. As a front-end developer, I sit in these meetings only to know what to expect of the back-end model; I never care or contribute to the design. In this particular meeting, though, the Client had wrapped themselves into a problem they couldn't get their heads around. One of the analysts turned to me and asked if I had any opinions on the design. I took it upon myself to step up to the whiteboard and propose an alternative model.

Apparently impressed, The Company has since hired a new grad to take the front-end legwork from me. A principle had been sent out to oversee the business processes, and I was given responsibility in the design phase.

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Last week, I was having a drink with Plucker, and he seemed reluctant to go out on the town. Titty, Wall, Plucker, and I had all gone to school together and taken classes together. We graduated from the same field and from the same school, taking a lot of the same professors.

When we graduated, it was Plucker who did not have the grades to represent his brilliance.

And as the rest of us took positions in big-named international corporations, Plucker took a position at a local office, working with backward technology. And while it's apparent that the rest of us are getting valuable experience and progressing quickly with our respective organizations, it seemed Plucker was being staff-auged in a dead end.

Plucker had decided that it was his time to stop moseying around and get his head straight. He'd decided he'd cut back on the weekends at the bottom of a bottle.

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And so it came to be, this weekend, I had none of my usual drinking partners to accompany me to the usual bars. Instead, Cardigan and I attended a football game of my alma mater -- and her current school.

We won 35-28.

She also, then, agreed to make a Toys'R'Us run with me for some early Christmas shopping.

And I followed up by taking her to dinner at a family-oriented Italian restaurant, topping the night off at a mom-and-pop beignet coffee shop that my Third Brother used to take me to when we were younger.

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I never realized how dehumanized I had become until I watched Cardigan childishly play with all the toys on the shelves. She would clasp her hands together in amazement as little fuzzy things did the silliest things.

For years, the people I hang out with were in bars, the girls I meet were in bars. The last time I took a girl out and neither of us ended the night shitfaced, it was 2003.