Today’s soundtrack: ...
Today at 12:02pm: shaking my umbrella out



Whenever a client leaves the studio I shake their hand at the door and wish them good luck. After shutting the door I always run to the sink and wash my hands immediately. That might look strange if you were watching it on a security camera, but it’s cold-and-flu season and I ain’t taking any chances. Don’t like getting nasty surprises.

And yet nasty surprises roll in, I just got one last night. Girlfriend up and broke up with me. I didn’t see it coming but maybe that’s because I didn’t even have the radar on. That’s what happens when you get comfortable. My radar operator was in the mess hall playing ping-pong with the cook and the artillery guy. “Now look what you’ve done,” I tell him, but hear only the sound of ping-pong balls while the green line spins around and round.

In the relationships I’ve been in, it used to be me, consistently, who bailed out. I was always the first one out of the plane, practically pushing women and children out of the way at the slightest drop in altitude; I couldn’t get the parachute on fast enough. As I got older that changed, and once in a while I’d look up from my book and notice it was suddenly windy, the airplane door was open, and the seat next to me was empty.

The most common reason girls break up with me is because I am emotionally unavailable. (Terribly original of me, I know.) This is the equivalent of being fired for gross incompetence at a corporation: You show up at the office and put in the hours, but you just ain’t doing the job right. The Powerpoint presentations go over your head and you have no idea how to work the fax. One or two performance reviews later Security is escorting you from the building.

I knew about the emotionally-unavailable thing, I knew deep down inside I was a robot. In fact if you were to look deep within my emotional core during moments of intimacy, you would see a tiny little man doing The Robot.

This time around I thought it was different, but apparently it wasn’t. It’s also possible I simply got downsized out of the picture; there was a corporate re-org, and when the dust settled, no more room for my name on the flow-chart. Either way you slice it, I got an apology written on a pink slip.

It’s out of my hands.

Meanwhile I keep washing them.

You can’t make your girlfriend stay but you can try to kill flu germs.