Act natural

( Friday, Sept. 13, 2002 1:07 am )

>I'm just a jealous guy

Oh kids, oh kids, I am a jealous, bitter girl. I hate to see my friends doing better than I am. Today I felt terrible because I got an email out of the blue from the first and only friend I had in my first year at PCU, that I haven't spoken to in a million years. She was a weird character, a nervous, depressed, fastidious kid whose dearest desire while attending the east coast's most liberal college was to get married and have kids. She listened to the oldies station and had exactly two cassette tapes, Dean Martin and Instrumentals for Weddings. I've never met anyone better able to suck all the air out of a room. At the same time, though, she was wicked, wicked smart, and probably taught me more over dinner about aspects of literature than I got in all my hours of class time. Plus she introduced me to the wonderful world of Jane Austen film adaptions and other period melodramas, and we'd watch movies in the dorm basement, writhing in delight at tragedy and marriage plots, and then she'd explain Mr. Darcy and Mr. Rochester and whatever that guy's name is in the Tenant of Wildfell Hall who brings the tenant woman a puppy and a book (wouldn't you fall in love with him then?). But anyway, so I finally heard from her after not speaking to her for a couple of years (the aforementioned depression and air-sucking-out-of-room finally weighed on me too much), and I was distressed to hear that she's doing very well, and handily trumped me on two levels by living in Brooklyn (the normal resting place of PCU graduates) and being employed in publishing. NYC beats Philly by a couple of coolness points and career-related-to-major beats aimless wandering by about a million. However, I had to talk myself down from this by realizing that for a year after graduation she lived with her parents (not cool), and that working in publishing (vaguely all she said) could easily mean some very low-level assistanting for some anonymous little house. Publishing isn't even interesting anymore, anyway; they don't even deal with the editorial aspects of the books, just the business. Literary agents do the editing. See, this is what it takes to make me stop chewing over my inferiority.

In other jealousy news, I was briefly jealous when I heard that Ellie asked Junebug to babysit for her. Even though I have no baby experience whatsoever and even though I didn't even see Ellie at all today so she couldn't have asked me, I still felt odd about it, as though I'm somehow obviously unmaternal. If I only had bigger boobs. Ellie canceled at the last minute anyway, making me think she had second thoughts about leaving her child with someone who, while clearly a responsible student and on-time rent payer living in close proximity to the family, is not a proven entity in the childcare field. I mean, she trusts us with general hallway maintenance, but maybe not with the infant yet. He's such a cute baby too--he's got all this hair that's always sticking up. Ah, frowsy baby-head, you remind me that I have a uterus.

To update my list of People Who Love Me Based on Receipt of Postal or E Mail: cousin Derrick (more pictures of the girlfriend today), my mother (postcard from the Grand Canyon), Angela (my aforementioned old PCU friend, unexpectedly), and Justine (from home, who sent an annoying in tone but pleasantly informative email today). Everyone else is resisting my charms. I can only say: do not resist!

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