the better bits: April 2008 Archives

Years ago, I ran my first marathon, and days later, announced on my blog that I was quitting my job, and indeed, the law altogether. My boss, a regular reader of both my blog and my waning interest in my work, accepted my apparently pending resignation.

In the early sunmer months after that, I gave both landscaping and unemployment a try, but found both occupations tiring and dehydrating. Eventually, a friend connected me to a job on the fringe of the legal industry, and I took it. People would ask what I did in my new job, and I would try to tell them, but invariably, most of them had to ask me again every time they talked to me, because my new station in life was so wonderfully non-descript and unmemorable.

What I did was this: I worked as a temporary contract employee for a public relations firm that did not only PR work, but litigation support for, a law firm engaged in a certain major lawsuit.

That description, of course, really explained very little, but is still more than most people really wanted to know.

Modern companies and bureaucracies, the type that tend to get sued a lot, produce tremendous amounts of documents. Sue one of them, and many of those documents become legally discoverable. Discovery is the nasty, brutish lead-in to the sort of finer, highly intellectual combat people mistakenly think attorneys engage in. Each side asks for just about everything possible from the other side, largely to increase the annoyance value. And the other side is often happy to oblige, also largely for the annoyance value, handing over enough material to fill the offices of opposing counsel, to line the walls and cover the fine mahogany tables in once-stately and pristine conference rooms, and sometimes, enough to fill warehouses.

In the days of L.A. Law and the lawsuits against Joe Camel, legal discovery became almost medieval in its scale, tactics, and absurdity. Thirty-pound bankers boxes of memoranda were hurled great distances into the midst of opposing counsel by catapults and trebuchets. Filing cabinets of boiling, sticky records were poured over the ramparts of law firm to burn and vex the advancing hordes of lawyers.

Things changed, of course. Younger attorneys stopped wearing pleated pants in favor of flat fronts, tassels began disappearing from loafers in favor of squared toes, a Lexus in the hand became as good as a Benz in the bush, and emails and their attachments began to exponentially overwhelm paper in volume. Disk drives and terabytes largely replaced boxes and paper.

A whole weird branch of the legal industry has developed to accomodate this new electronic reality, like yet another underbelly on a multi-bellied snake, and a new lawyer subculture has been spawned. $375 an hour attorneys don't want to waste time looking for needles in mind-numbingly dull haystacks. There are, however, masses of attorneys flooding the world that are sliding below the industry's radar: new lawyers waiting for their bar exam results; transplants not licensed to practice in their new home state; attorneys lacking the common sense or personality to hold a job; and, of course, lawyers that burned out on a profession they never wanted in the first place, who decided to quit without the benefit of "having another job lined up" or "savings."

So, falling into at least two of those categories, I fell into the the world of legal document review. In that first job, there were thousands and thousands of emails, electronic, and scanned documents managed by a piece of popular litigation document management software. I say "popular" in the same way I would use the word to describe a heavily-used brand of commercial-grade weevil poison, acoustic ceiling tile, or urinal cakes.

I sat at a computer, read each document, and checked one of four boxes to indicate that a document was: irrelevant; relevant; legally privileged but irrelevant; or legally privileged and relevant.

That's pretty much it. Well, I did other things.

I looked out the huge window I sat in front of. It was like sitting in the nose of an old bomber, with the world panoramic around me. It looked south down Congress Avenue, the asphalt emotional center of Austin - I could sense the big, pink granite capitol building just north of us, out of sight, and I could feel the lake glimmering just out of sight to the south of us.

I watched clouds move behind the big chocolate-brown building across from me, and I often wondered how tall the giant, unnecessarily-generic-looking white address numbers on the top are. My best guess was 12 to 15 feet.

I watched bike messengers pedal down the middle of the street, talking to each other before peeling off down side streets. I would recognize some of them - Ben, temporarily on his classic Bianchi road bike (in "Celeste" green, of course), while his single-speed bike was out of commission. I'd see the one guy with the nice unlabeled red track bike. From my glass Olympus, they moved below in complete smoothness and silence, like birds gliding in a slight breeze that I often thought I could hear, only to discover it was the air conditioning that kept the office like a meat locker.

I would chat with my three officemates. At times, we had group activities. One week, Tricia discovered my middle name was Earl, and the others decided that we all needed trailer-park names. Jolene, Lurlene, and I couldn't come up with one for Lee, though "Lee" itself almost worked, so Lurlene got on the department of corrections website to look at the names of women on death row. We didn't find a good, really unique name, but it kept us occupied for a while.

The documents we reviewed were entirely emails produced by a high-tech company. They were a mix of dull and arcane babbling about hardware and code and cost centers, co-mingled with forwarded inspirational crapmail, urban legends, tasteless jokes, and pornography.

We had every email generated, sent, and received by this company, over a terabyte of information. Reading it all sometimes went beyond a mere voyeurism. A person only shares so much with another, maybe just this piece of information, but there will always be someone else that gets another piece. The entire web of communication, business and personal, played across my monitor, and I knew far more than any one of the emailers does. Eventually, I began to feel sort of omniscient, looking down on this little universe as a god would.

The thing is, as a god, I would never create a world like this, unless I was doing it merely to have something to test plagues and floods and massive meteor strikes on.

It's largely a world of nonsense, a complete sham.

The first thing I noticed was the persistent and frequent use and abuse of the word "leverage." I've always thought the word itself is nothing more than a bit of MBA-generated gibberish. But, if it's to be used at all, it should convey the idea of using one thing in such a way that gaining an advantage is an indirect consequence. For example, I could say that I am going to leverage my friend's relationship with the bartender to get myself a free beer.

At this company, however, "leverage" had simply supplanted the word "use." I actually saw emails where someone suggested they leverage an assistant to bring in some lunch. Again, if the suggestion was that making a sacrifice of an assistant might please the lunch god in such a way to make tacos appear, then I'd give them a pass. But this is not what they meant, not at all.

Unfortunately, the word appears to be the hot buzzword of this early millennium, much like "monotheistic" was in the previous one. It was not uncommon to see it levera... used as many as four to five times in a single paragraph.

Nouns were routinely transformed alchemically into verbs, continuing a trend that started innocuously enough with words like "access". Now, apparently, people do "costing," and other vile nouns to each other.

It doesn't seem to matter that a perfectly good, often shorter word already exists in the english language. It is apparently more important to exhibit proactive wordification than to leverage existing language, so the perfectly good words are discarded in favor of stupid new ones, much to the chagrin of observers - or rather, "observants" - like myself.

People are no longer hired, but rather they're "onboarded," clearly intended to convey a much more Love Boat-ey Big Happy Family vibe, at least until someone comes in with a gun and lots of ammunition.

This sort of spin must be fooling someone, if only the people doing the spinning, because it's obviously the only way these people can communicate. There was an awful lot of nurturing and advancing, enhancing and empowering. I have to assume stuff wouldn't seem like such nonsense if i had a marketing degree, or a substantial lobotomy:

"From an expectation perspective, it is not realistic that i will have it to you by Monday..."

"The key is what is under the hood and gaining traction with significant partners that can fully leverage your professional services resources so your software model can quickly scale."

"I am not suggesting plagiarism, only creative, thought-provoking use."

Yet, for all of this hideous linguistic creativity, many of these people were clearly incapable of forming complete, sensical sentences. The words "their" and "there" followed some sort of strangely relativistic laws. Meanwhile, apostrophes are a matter of quantum mechanics, governed by a grammatical uncertainty principle, always popping in and out of time and space without any real predictability, rhyme, or reason. You could only believe that there was a universe where they were all properly situated and living happy, unabused apostrophic lives.

I always felt it was to easy and oversimplistic to demonize corporate America, but reading its emails convinced me that corporate america is indeed a demon universe that is constantly creating itself in its own image. The serfs in the particular corporate city-state I was looking in on were apparently encouraged to identify themselves by the role they play in their little society, "messaging" cryptic, if not nonsensical, taglines (all typos are copyright of the original authors):

"I integrate promotional strategies to generate awareness for our product."

"I passionately communicate the value of our enterprise to empower our clients to revolutionize their customers experience."

"I apply technology to our solutions because your Customers Really Matter."

"I apply the verve that helps my clients and colleagues visualize our enterprise's empowerment solutions."

"I enable a transparent and responsive structure of communication between my clients and their projects."

"I help my clients realize [our company's] full potential in helping them to compete in their market space by delivering World Class Professional Service."

"I engage the demands of the market place to deliver an empowered experience that benefits the client through increased profitability and customer delight."

The thing is, these identities and this language really seemed to point to some worldview in which an MBA textbook on total quality management was the Bible.

"I have failed to execute on my personal objective. I had promised to hold public praise for those who go above and beyond the call. My apologies to everyone, for allowing external factors to affect my commitment to you," from a "client advocate" whose mission in life is to "passionately create and nurture dynamic, scalable technologies that empower our clients to succeed."

It got to the point that I was starting to become really despondent about the state of not only the english language, but of humanity itself. Then, in a batch of emails from one employee, I found a trend of personal emails mixed in. Emails to and from the kids in college. They enjoyed the visit. Another lost his credit card - was he supposed to, like, call the company or something? His wife was suffering from severe headaches.

Then, around Christmas a few years ago, there were emails to friends, to coworkers, letting them know in varying tones and with varying degrees of formality, that his wife had been diagnosed with a pair of brain tumors.

When I finished a batch of five thousand documents, I'd be assigned a new one, and they were not always consecutive. I'd watch the numbers creep upwards towards the end of one batch, like watching the clock approach the hour during an episode of a television show, and I would hope that each email would be the one to tell the end of the story - if his wife recovered, if she lived or died.

But at document #140,000, the very last of a batch, she was still in chemo, though stepping down from a more aggressive phase of it. The next batch pulled me thousands of documents away, threw me backwards several years, to a time when his two kids weren't in college yet, before his mother went into assisted living, and when his wife was healthy, and he was primarily focused on coming up with an inane little motto that would uniquely identify him in his email signature block.

I moved on to another document review project at a different employer before I ever found how his story ended. But for a while, in a time when my own future was so uncertain, it was as if I knew his future, or a good piece of it, in my electronic omniscience. I wanted to warn that 2002 version of him, to reply to one of the old emails and reach who he was then, but I didn't know what I would say.

So, I would sit, and work, and stare out into the world moving quietly around me. I would see what was then my now, the present, constantly becoming the past, stretching out towards the river before me. A flight of motorcycle cops guiding a truck with a car on a flatbed trailer down Congress Avenue, filming a scene from the Quentin Tarantino movie I would see a year later. I could see the actors in the car, the interior lit by fake sunlight that was brighter than the daylight outside. A couple of bike messengers sitting on a bench in the shade. Hundreds of lives moving up and down the sidewalks. People in the building across from me, under the big white numbers, working, chatting, flipping through the Internet, talking on the phone, all those lives on view like fish in an aquarium.

I sat, in my godlike omniscience and impotence, and I saw futures past in black and white, the endings just as unknown to me, but all in there somewhere, and I clicked, clicked, clicked - irrelevant, irrelevant, irrelevant.

As our relationship entered its death throes in early 2002, Chandra begged me to get back into therapy and onto the medication I had stopped taking when my insurance ran out. The pills had run out days after I was laid off my job in February, the victim of a reduction in force of one. My health insurance, such as it was, lapsed at the end of the month, creating great concern in my parents, who nevertheless continue to toe the conservative line on national health insurance.

I was living with Chandra, working hard to find a job during that vast employment drought of 2002, paying some rent, and trying to make myself a little useful with small household chores, like installing a sink, building a pergola, learning what a "pergola" was, and installing garage doors openers, drywall, microwave ovens, etc., all of which she graciously accepted in lieu of rent in some months. On a steady diet of unemployment checks, I was making my credit card payments and still paying for the brand new, gently pre-owned Lexus LX-450 I had bought in December, believing that I would not only continue to be able to afford the payments, but that I was soon to embark on a life that necessitated a big, lumbering SUV.

By July, the relationship was over. There would be no immediate or foreseeable need for a big, lumbering SUV, and I was quickly a homeless, jobless guy in a Lexus with unemployment running out and a need for serotonin-balancing meds. I was finally directed to the county's mental health clinic over on the east side of town.

The wait at the clinic was the worst I've ever seen in the medical industry, or even in the car repair industry. I could easily go there and wait for half an hour to see the administrator downstairs, before being sent upstairs to wait two or three hours for a 15-20 minute appointment with the psychiatrist du jour. Apparently, the thought of having less than completely sane people sitting and staring at each other in a small waiting area for hours failed to disturb the county or the psychiatrists that worked there.

So, for months of visits to the clinic, I had Catch-22 in hand, dragging myself through the classic with difficulty. Two years later, I still have not finished the book, or even motivated myself sufficiently to rent the video. I tried to stay pressed to the storyline, but it was difficult reading about crazy people when you were surrounded by the real thing.

One day, it was the guy in the Confederate flag cap, who looked as if he were carved out of a single piece of stained sandstone, that was lecturing the waiting room on exactly how to kill a man with a single, hopefully provoked blow to the throat.

"They don't tell you about it, but they can teach you how to kill a man if you hit him right here." He demonstrated with a quick jab at his own throat, and the large woman that was his primary audience recoiled slightly, her eyes wide in terror. "They taught me how to do it, but I had enough of that shit."

Another day, I was swept into a small crime drama. A woman in the primary waiting area sat clutching a giant brown plastic trash bag, which contained possibly food, possibly clothes, or possibly the still-warm remains of her ex-husband. At some point, she got up to go to the restroom, and left the bag resting right next to the door. Nearby, a mother and her son, who sported a trucker's cap, discussed loudly the fact that his sister had run off with the disability check, and that they'd kick her ass if she tried to come back home. Resting quietly in agreement on that point of family business for a moment, their eyes came to rest on the plastic bag.

I kept my head down, reading and re-reading carefully one paragraph of Mr. Heller's masterpiece. But I saw out of the corner of my eye the mother walk casually over to the bag, pick it up, then stuff it into her own massive canvas tote bag, not even examining the contents first.

When the bag's owner emerged, she immediately began screaming that her bag was gone. I knew the scene was about to become ridiculous, but, egged on by a mix of a desire for justice and a desire for mayhem, I looked up just enough to catch her eye, then twitched my head in the direction of the mother and son.

Just then, I was called by the administrator, and I slapped the book closed and hustled away, as I heard the Springerian ruckus behind me erupt.

On what would become my last visit to the clinic, I was scheduled to see a nurse practitioner instead of a psychiatrist, presumably because all the psychiatrists had killed themselves and/or each other, or left to join the circus. I may have seen one psychiatrist twice. Jeopardy has less turnover than this place.

After another interminable wait, I was called into an office, where I waited a bit longer. Finally, the nurse practitioner appeared and introduced himself, but I was in shock - he didn't just resemble, he was sometime David Letterman star Larry "Bud" Melman, the short, white-haired, goggle-glassed old man who played the blinking straight man to a number of Letterman's gags.

Nurse Larry Bud plopped down in the chair in front of me. Wide suspenders over his short-sleeved white dress shirt kept his black polyester long-waisted pants pulled across his wide, not so-long waist, where they were free to bulge as if he were in the middle of his period and retaining just a whole lot of water.

Nurse Melman studied his fingernails for a moment, perhaps running through the vast pharmaceutical database shielded behind glasses that seemed as impenetrable as the Oval Office's windows, and that had the same horribly distorting optical effect. Then he reached into his desk, pulled out a small tool, and proceeded to clip his fingernails.

He asked a few questions, namely: he noted I had worked for the insurance department almost a decade ago. How was that? Would I consider working for the state again?

From these two questions, he arrived at a diagnosis. "Well, it seems like you're doing pretty well."

No wonder people here never seemed to get better, only angrier. "Well, but then, you haven't really asked me how I'm doing, have you?"

Larry Bud was clearly unprepared for any input from the patient. He looked up at me for the first time and put the fingernail clippers back in the drawer. He asked a few questions about the medications I had tried. I told him that any medication that had no effect other than leaving me almost totally unable to taste food would certainly drive me to kill others or myself.

He pondered this, disappeared wordlessly, then returned with some papers. He handed me a poorly copied flyer and began discussing the alternatives... lithium being right up there as a strong possibility. Lithium. I knew only the following of lithium: that it was a primary ingredient in notebook computer batteries. Cool. I knew a friend in law school that was on it. I remember having to go get her apartment manager to let us in several times when she wouldn't show up at school, answer the phone, or the door for up to a week. I knew the Nirvana song, knew it was a Nirvana song because Kurt Cobain had been on lithium at some point. We all see how that went.

My eyes began to blur, and I felt my lips tighten. I told him I'd just like to try a higher dose of what I was taking. He shrugged, I picked up the prescription from the office with the parrot in it, and my patronage of the county mental health system was over.

Walking out, I looked down at the vial of pills in my hand. The $26 check I had written for it would surely bounce. I walked out past the people waiting, yelling at the receptionist, smoking and mumbling to themselves outside the door. Perhaps they glanced up as the alarm on my Lexus SUV beeped loudly, perhaps they wondered about it, but perhaps they knew it just didn't matter.

"Do you wanna go in?"

I looked through the windows, saw the people lining the inner walls of the cathedral, supplementing hundreds more in the pews. I had no disrespect for the Virgen de Guadalupe, and I actually sort of believed the story of the young boy, of the roses, and of the image that burned into his cloak like some divine Polaroid. I believed it was there inside, perhaps the only bona fide miracle I'd ever be able to stand in line to see. But I was tired. Mexico City had worn me thin, and damn it, I was tired.

Don't get me wrong, I loved the city. At home in Austin, Texas, I was jaded by the oldest buildings I had ever encountered, with their cornerstones dating back to an almost-prehistoric 1800 and something or the other, and their easily imaginable histories. Here in Mexico City, though, buildings of a scope and heritage completely foreign to me had reigned for centuries. Even more mind-boggling, beneath those ancient buildings, they had found pyramids, statues, remnants of even greater kingdoms long gone.

But it's one big-ass city. We had walked through most of it, my girlfriend Margo and I, her sister and three other girlfriends. We had crisscrossed the city on the surprisingly clean and modern Metro system for the rest of the time, struggling to stake out enough room to breathe, our chest cavities compressed by throngs of surprisingly but unfailingly polite locals, our arms quivering with exertion as we held our bags over our heads to make more room. And just the day before, we had done epic battle with a gang of pickpockets that took advantage of dimwitted tourists with shallow pockets that stood on crowded subways with their hands up in the air on the verge of asphyxiation.

Here, faced with the prospect of viewing the evidence of the miracle that had changed the course of Catholicism in the Americas, I was underwhelmed. I declined, and everyone but Margo and I, including, interestingly, her Hindu friend Swarna, moved inside.

Margo and I waited out in the courtyard. The courtyard was filled with these... really impressive buildings that were old, and the night sky stretched out, muted by light pollution from a city that stretched across the earth forever, so you didn't know which ended first, the sky or the city, and the stones all cool through the soles of our feet, blah blah blah.

I'm sorry. I suffer from a peculiar laziness now, that doesn't serve a writer well at all. Once, the previous paragraph would have been in itself a miracle of prose, the image of the courtyard and the Mexico City night burned onto the page, and into the reader's mind, just like the portrait of the Virgin Mary in that kid's cloak. But these days, I erupt straight to what seems to be the point, the moments; the points and steps of the proof are more often lost to me, too tedious to drag myself through. I only want the answers, the counterbalance to the weight I feel, the ending to the unsatisfying story that is living me.

So anyway, we fell quiet, steeping in the moment, and I think we felt that maybe we were missing something, like we were emotionally stunted and unable to feel the meaning of where we stood. Still, maybe I sent a hope or a wish to the ancient buildings, to the boy's cloak inside the cathedral. I knew better than to expect answers or a timely service call. God just refuses to work that way, and that's OK, because at a minimum, being your own boss seems like a god's prerogative.

Margo and I would alternately talk, then fall silent for a while, soaking in the afore-inadequately-described night and history that surrounded us. As we stood there alone, in one of those moments of silence, we heard a snuffling sound, and we turned towards the gate behind us, where a scraggly, limping little dog stepped through the gate. His tail wagged, and for a second, I recalled the zen koan that questioned whether the wind blew the flag, or the flag the wind. The mutt walked up and sat there before us, patiently and quietly, tail wagging happily but calmly, asking for nothing, in his friendly eyes, the warm cool depth of the night sky above, unmarred by the light.

We stood alone, the three of us, surrounded by hundreds of years of man's monuments and institutionalization of the sacred, his attempts to reach God with stones and steeples. Inside, 30 yards away, insulated by the modern cathedral, hundreds, maybe thousands, waited to catch a glimpse of the image of the mother of God on a bit of cloth.

Margo and I looked at each other and laughed a little. We never talked about it, really, but at the time, we felt the same inexplicable, unexpected, unlikely flash of recognition. The city seemed to grow completely quiet, the thin and polluted air crisp and alive.

Where impatience held me from description earlier, now something else does, something bigger and undeniable, something I can still feel now, years later, but can come no closer to putting into words without trivializing it.

I still held the cup of crema and maiz, bought from a street vendor out of hungry desperation. I pulled the spoon out of the cup, tore the top half of it off, and set it in front of the dog.

And there, in a city of countless millions, amidst the devout and the hopeless, ourselves a bit of each, on worn stones that joined history to new religion, the wind blew gently, Margo held my hand, and God ate from a Styrofoam cup, my offering of crema y maiz gracefully and gratefully consumed. And we didn't even have to stand in line.

So, homeless, jobless, near penniless, and less my most recent intense relationship, I have decided to turn my attentions to finding the girl of my dreams. Given the numbers, one should think this easy - there are just so many options. I know and my friends constantly reinforce that the keys are to be open-minded, and to just put yourself out there to be... had. As if I have not been had enough in relationships.

There is, for example, the girl working at the local coffee shop, perhaps a bit young for me, shy, coquettish smile, a bright vision through the haze of body odor poorly masked by patchouli that so many of the angst-ridden, coffee-swilling intelligentsia clientele there seem to emit. For the sake of conversation only, I will call her Celeste. Ahh, Celeste. Perhaps, tomorrow morning I'll smile with my probably ten years of additional mature appeal as Celeste hands me my slice of rosemary apple pie and iced tea. I'll quote Sartre or Camus, or someone else that I haven't actually read but whose orts of wisdom are quickly and easily accessible on the Internet. She won't be familiar with the arcane quote either, being only a freshman journalism major who hasn't quite made it through Intro to Literature during her provisional summer school coursework.

Nevertheless, Celeste will recognize my superior age and wisdom, lower her head into a smile, and blush, and I'll ask for her name. She's undoubtedly as intelligent as she is cute, and I know she's probably The One. We'll skip together along the lake as the summer loses its burn slowly to fall, see both art-house movies and the latest Vin Diesel flick. We'll be the cute couple everyone gravitates towards at the mix of happy hours with my balding friends, and at the keggers with her smelly young friends that we attend.

We will love and respect and be completely and utterly devoted to each other. A couple of months into our relationship, I will walk in on her and a Spanish exchange student named "Joaquin," who is actually a French exchange student named "Remy." She will cover her nakedness and look ashamedly away, as Remy/Joaquin/Euro Shit Boy tries to assure me in soothing tones that while I was like a father to her, he was like the brother that never touched her the way he did. He further validates this Oedipal bit of B.S. by reciting a line from that Spanish poet guy that had a movie made about him with the subtitles. He will get halfway through the second verse when I smite him utterly and completely across his beautiful cheekbones with the first thing I find handy, which is the tire iron from the trunk of my car, parked two blocks away.

There is always, of course, the girl in the Aveda shop at the mall. Last September, I was there because I thought the mall was a good place to hang out on the state's annual tax-free weekend debacle. And it is, in fact, a great place to be at that time, for families wishing to save $16 on $200 worth of seemingly pre-mutilated Abercrombie & Fitch t-shirts, and for pedophiles lacking fast and reliable Internet access.

Anyway, I walked by the store and saw her, in her black smock, a good four to five years older than that whore Celeste, her eyes locked on me, smiling in a way different and more meaningful than the usual sales representative smile. For one thing, I clearly, visibly, have no need for Aveda products or any other cosmetic assistance. My hair is long and shiny, with a natural wave, needing no anti-humectant gels or de-frizzing pomades, and generally requiring little more than my allowing it to have its own space and political beliefs. My skin is smooth and unflawed, except where there are acne, blemishes, scars, and dry patches.

Clearly, this girl was looking with interest, looking longingly, feeling the tinge of primal familiarity deep in her soul. The so-human longing that is within most of us to make that one true connection flared brightly within both of us, poles aligning, gravitation struggling to pull us into mutual orbit, into the dance of mutual attraction and union.

I hesitated, uncertain. I smiled at her, decided that was a substantial-enough first move, and went to look at the exciting new Air Jordans at Foot Locker, the ones with the red trim rather than the blue. As I tried them on with no intention of purchasing them, they made me think of her.

I went back a few weeks later with my friend, Daryl. Daryl, despite her name, is a girl. Daryl's a close friend that constantly provides me with comfort and guidance, which includes useful nuggets of practical wisdom like, "Please do not give your child a sexually ambiguous name." Taking a girl with me made my presence in the store plausible. The whole scenario was rendered further perfect by the fact that Daryl, also unemployed (though neither homeless nor hideously and desperately alone in life like myself), had recently decided to stop shaving her legs. I decided this threw enough ambiguity in the mix to keep my own availability a very real possibility.

We cased the joint with a couple of close passes, and then went in. My girl, she who touched my soul, and who my instincts tell me is named "Alyssa," was not there. In her place were two, not-as-helpful trolls who, though probably perfectly attractive, are as dim, lesser brown dwarf stars, drowned in the pure white light of the quasar that is Alyssa. While Daryl asked impressively realistic-sounding questions about various hair-care products, I glanced about the store, careful to neither glance furtively, nor to allow my eyes to form the narrow slits that would have revealed our true purpose.

In our debriefing, Daryl and I surmised that Alyssa may only work there on the weekends, seeking not the extra pay, but only the pleasure of bringing wrinkled, frizzy, and otherwise awkward-looking commoners some small measure of the beauty God has blessed her with. Each week, via an elaborate system of couriers and faxing, she exchanges this additional income for gift certificates to a popular Peruvian department store, which she then sends to an orphanage for girls in La Paz.

During the week, Alyssa's time is spent in more selfish pursuits, as a leading researcher in the fight against SOID, Supine-Onset Indigestion Disorder, which did not kill her birth mother, but often caused her to have to wait an hour after eating before going to bed. Meanwhile, Alyssa's long-distance correspondence with astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has resulted in some practical experiments that require her presence aboard the International Space Station for a few weeks a year, but I could live with that, because we would talk nightly, and the time delay in communication isn't really as bad or awkward as some astronauts or Asimov and his nerdish cronies would have you believe.

Alyssa and I will do well - I just know it. In the first month, we'll travel to Australia and Sierra Leone, go to concerts and basketball games, talk about the knowable and unknowable in the universe. We'll throw dinner parties in my new apartment or her loft in downtown Austin, and couples will walk away, sated from the fine wine and the cuisine Alyssa and I create, and they'll make a vow beneath the stars to have as healthy and loving a relationship as we clearly have. She'll wake me up in the middle of the night to ask my opinion on her application of a Fibonacci sequence to one of the components of her almost-completed, self-proving Grand Unified Field Theory. I'll laugh at the kind of mistakes she makes when she gets all drowsy, and at how cute and childlike she looks, and then she'll laugh, and I'll kiss her forehead, and we'll make gentle but passionate love (did I mention her incredible stamina and flexibility?) for two hours and eighteen minutes, before we stop because I know she needs the sleep.

Unfortunately, two months into our relationship, and just a few lines shy of completing her Unified Field Theory equation, Alyssa injects herself with a complex protein-oxidase derivative. So noble in her refusal to acquiesce to the offers and demands and death threats of the pharmaceutico-military-FDA complex, and unwilling to test the formula on a defenseless animal (even though Rob Schneider was available), she gives her own life to science, for the cause of all the people that have problems digesting when they lay down right after they eat. It is clear to me that foul play was involved, as I find evidence of tampering in her lab. It falls to me to bring the powerful men who conspired to kill her to justice, but hey, I'm not so young, and I have to move on.

Dating is so hard, it just seems overwhelming sometimes. I suppose there's the woman I always run into at the local HEB, but while I think I have fallen in love with her and she might be The One, I'm pretty sure she's a lawyer and a complete shrew. Yeah, to hell with her.

My nipples hurt.

To explain how they got to this state, we have to examine the role of chance in the universe. Despite our desire to believe in free will, that we control our fate with the choices we make, it's clear to me that many events in our lives, even major ones, take place entirely by accident. Some would argue that it's a matter of fate, but I firmly belive that there is a strong element of random chance that shapes the course of human events. I don't see this as an aetheistic view, because I think randomness is a perfectly good device for a busy god.

A series of chance mishaps causes two people to meet that are perfect for each other. People find themselves pregnant. Fleming discovers penicillin. Fate? Destiny? Maybe. But I am confident in saying that as of about 5:45 last night, I accidentally began training for a half marathon.

About a week ago, my friend Diane invited me to come join her running group for a run, followed by beer. She had joined up with a group at her office that was training to run the Susan Komen Race for the Cure, and they were meeting at the Run-Tex Store for Psycho Running People on Riverside Drive. When I wavered on accepting the invite, Diane... well, she pouted a bit. So, knowing that Diane was a complete beginner at running and still had her doubts about it, I figured the gig would be easy enough for me, and would be followed by beer.

Yesterday afternoon, it rained, and I rejoiced. Then it stopped, and a massive rainbow appeared over the city, bringing with it a great sense of dread and sorrow. Nonetheless, I left work a bit early, changed clothes, and hustled down to the Run-Tex Store for Psycho Running People on Lake Austin Boulevard.

There was already a fair-sized collection of people there when I arrived. Some obvious beginners, and a lot of the gaunt, tanned and taut types stretching and chatting in the parking lot. I bounced up and down, untied and retied my shoes several times, and fake-stretched to try to look inconspicuous as I scanned the crowd for Diane, who was not there.

Eventually, a woman with carrying a clipboard that clearly denoted some sort of official status called for everyone's attention. She asked for all those training for the half marathon or marathon to come forward, and then started saying things about beginner, intermedate, and advanced runners.

It seemed clear to me that there were four groups of people here. Beginner, intermediate, and advanced runners. Then there was the fourth group, the freakish running addicts who were training to run either 13 or 26 miles.

History tells us that the marathon got its name when a well-conditioned and apparently overenthusiastic Greek runner named Phidippides ran 24 miles to Athens to tell the Greek king that the vastly outnumbered Greek army had defeated the invading Persian Army at the village of Marathon. Then he died. Why he wasn't given a horse to travel 24 miles is unclear. Why someone found it necessary to add two miles to the modern day marathon is also shrouded in mystery. What is further unclear is why centuries later, runners are so eager to fully reenact the event that killed its first participant.

Furthermore, a "half-marathon" of thirteen miles did not sound half-better to me. It sounded suspiciously like "half-dead", or "half-stupid," which as we all know, is still dead and stupid.

So, I thought, surely these delusional types were being separated out from the rest of the runners to discuss with them what a bad idea running 13 or 26 miles is, or to make them feel silly, or at least to prevent them from recruiting any more of the weak-minded for their little CoolMax-clad death sprint.

The beginners were given directions, and people began jogging down the hill towards the running trail. Still no Diane. I fell in with them, and began plotting. We would run right by my car. If I could get to the back, I could then dive behind my car and get away. But I couldn't get to the back, trapped by dozens of chatty runners. So, I reverted to my original logic of, "how bad could it be?"

We ran about a mile and a half to Zilker Park, where the now clearly evil woman with the clipboard ordered us through a series of calisthenic exercises. Then interval training. My shirt, which failed to have any of the evaporative properties of today's high-tech athletic gear, grew heavy with sweat, and was seriously beginning to chafe my nipples. Ugly, but true. Though my new socks were extremely high-tech, I immediately exceeded their absorbent capacity, and I could feel water puddling in my cool Nike Shox running shoes, which I had never intended to subject to such abuse as "running."

I was even more amazed and impressed at Diane than before, because, even being in fair shape, I was clearly going to die in the park. After several minutes of asking frantic-sounding questions, I discovered that this, in fact, was the training group for the half-marathon. My anger at Diane increased, then the street names "Riverside Drive" and "Lake Austin Boulevard" made brief and accusatory appearances in my mind. Applying all the skills that my English degree certifies me to have, I determined that these street names were not the same.

There are three Run-Tex Stores for Psycho Running People, and I had clearly gone to the wrong one. Diane was somewhere already done and drinking beer. Here, everyone was sweaty and insane and not going for beer afterwards, and I, unwittingly, was among them. Like Caesar crossing the Rubicon, the die had been cast. Mistakes had been made, and now I would have to pay the price.

After the calisthenics and about a mile and a half of interval training, we were allowed water, from a cooler on the back of a car. I was concerned about the logistics of our return trip. There were dozens of runners, and only one vehicle that I could see, a Pontiac Sunbird. Was a bus coming? Would it be air-conditioned? Or would Evil Woman With Clipboard reduce us to savages, fighting for three to four precious spots in the Pontiac?

It quickly became obvious that we were expected to get back to our cars under our own power. I fell in behind some of the kind people I had met in the course of this ugly, ugly accident. I had found their camaraderie, gallows-humor and enthusiastic support of each other infectious. One of them who had patiently listened to me explain how this was all a big mistake asked if I was going to stick with it, if I was going to train for and try to run the half-marathon in February.

The nipples were getting pretty painful, and I tried to hold my shirt away from them. My hamstring was developing a twinge, and my cool shoes would almost certainly never look the same again. But I grudgingly had to admit to myself that I was sort of pleased with myself, that I enjoyed pushing myself physically, and that I even sort of had fun in some sick way. It took me a while to answer through my labored breathing, to be loud enough to be heard over the soggy sound of my shoes, but I told her, "Yeah. Why the hell not."