The twelve days of pamie

i go neurotic about hosting

I will never catch up on my journal reading. I am just going to accept that and move on with my life.

My sniffly, sneezy life.

I can’t seem to shake this cold. I’m still all stuffed up, and my nose is chapped from wiping it with toilet paper because I have no kleenex (I feel so white trash). I realized that I couldn’t call in sick on the first day back after my lengthy vacation… but no one said I couldn’t try and go home early, which is exactly what I plan on doing. I keep sneezing. For some reason I just can’t sneeze like a normal person with this cold. I must sneeze nine times in a row. I have to just stand there like I’m having some sort of brain malfunction and my eyes glass over and my fingers are all stretched out and my mouth is open and I just wait. I guess I look a little like a Crazy Girl (see yesterday).

I am trying, really trying to like this new Beck album. It is not working. Enough with the banjo! Rock out for me! Dammit!

If you haven’t purchased the Unkle album, you should do so at your earliest convenience.

So, here I am, back at work. Nothing seems to change except the faces. There’s a few new ones here. But my job is still the same. I’ve decided to stop playing games with my Tamagotchi and just feed him snacks whenever he’s unhappy. Just fill him up with chocolate cake to make him shutup. It works. Except they gain a pound whenever you feed them a snack. Soon I shall have a doughboy Tamagotchi. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I shall give him food issues. Make him like a real person. He wants to play sports, but he never really had that experience growing up. He was always plunked down in front of the television with a turkey pot pie. He spent hours in his room writing poetry no one will ever read. He learns computers with ease.

I’ll make a comedian out of that Tamagotchi yet.

Eric’s brother went home yesterday. Last night Eric got home from work and we both kind of looked at each other and said at the same time, “I miss Kevin.” It was strange having the apartment to ourselves. I always wonder after having a houseguest for some time if I’m a good host. You know how when you start living with someone they see the strangest parts of you? How much does that rub off when you have company for a couple of weeks? And what about me is the strange part of me? Did I freak Kevin out when I clipped my toenails while we watched television? Or maybe I made him self-conscious about his grooming habits, since he borrowed my clippers to work on his own hands. Should I have offered to give him a pedicure? Or is that being too familiar? How gross were all of my snot rags all over the apartment? Did I drive him crazy with my nose blowing? Did he think I was mocking his sniffs with my own? Did I comb his bedroom enough to remove discriminating items, or did he end up sleeping next to one of my high school yearbooks? Did I give him enough pillows or did I look like the down princess? Did I tease him too much about playing Metal Gear Solid? And my friends! Did he like my friends? They certainly seemed to like him. But did I force him to be with them, or did he genuinely enjoy his time with them? See? These are things that you don’t think about until you drop your guest off on that plane home and I imagine him sitting back for his flight and sighing, “Oh, thank God I’m going home. If I had to hear that girl sing to her cat one more time I was going to start bleeding from the eyes.”

I sing to my cat, okay? Here’s the words, if you’re interested:

Taylor. Taaaay-lor.
The cat with the fur on his face!
Taylor!

I was in a class once with this girl and we started talking about our cats. She mentioned that she sings to her cat as well. We started singing our songs at the same time. The name of her cat escapes me at the moment, but her song was something like:

Murray. Murray.
He eats a lot of food because he’s a pig.
Murray!

Cat people. We are all one.

Anyway, back to being a good host… I don’t know. Did I feed him enough? Did I keep the house clean enough? My guess is no on that one… every time I cleaned it seemed to be dirty again. I don’t think the apartment is made for three humans and two cats.

Did I get him the right Christmas presents? Did I get him the right stocking stuff? Did I become too parental during his stay? How much television did we watch that neither of us wanted to watch but he thought I wanted to watch it and I thought he wanted to watch it and neither of us changed the channel out of being too polite and instead suffered through hour after hour of bad programming? Does he think that I like Splash? It was just on! I wasn’t watching it, I had just stopped to see her make her dolphin scream and make the televisions explode! I was in the other room, even! He thinks my favorite movie is Splash.

Oh, it’s too late. His trip is over. Any ideas he has of me are there now, forever. I can’t have his stay over again to try and get it perfect. He lived with me for twelve days and now he either can’t wait to come back or lives in constant fear of the day we go to see him graduate.

And now the only remnant I have of him staying over is the cold that he brought over. It was quiet last night. As we got ready to go to bed, Eric went to shut the bedroom door. “Oh, I guess I don’t have to do that, huh?” And then we were quiet again.

It was nice having him around.

It’s hard, having a friend who is a friend because of who you are dating. I’ve gotten close to siblings of boyfriends before, and it always makes me a little sad. That could be the last time I ever see him, if anything ever happened between Eric and me. If we broke up, then there’s all sorts of people that I would never see again. That’s hard, because I really like those people, and I’d hate to lose them. And I hate that those thoughts go through my brain. “This could be the last time I ever see him.” But it’s true, it would be hard to keep up a relationship with someone if your brother never wanted to see that person again. I wouldn’t be invited to any more Thanksgivings, that’s for sure. I’ve lost friends through breaking up with people, and it’s always the strangest, saddest thing. “It’s not you, it’s him. I’d love to stay friends with you, but the guilt that the two of us would have would be terrible, and we’d both feel awkward, and now for no reason at all, we can’t talk anymore.”

I’m getting all sad. I hate this cold. It hurts my funny.

Now I have to go screen a new candidate asking those questions like, “Why do you think you should work here?” and “Tell me something about yourself.” I hate answering those questions, and I’m sure I’m gonna hate asking them. But, whatever, it’s the job. I guess I could make it interesting. “You do know that if you are hired, part of your requirements is to give me foot rubs? Good, just making sure you know everything before we hire you. Tell me something about yourself that even your mother doesn’t know. Oh, and could you show me any tattoos you may have?”

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