studentdriver

Happy Boxing Day. I skipped Christmas on here- I logged on long enough for my Folding@Home client to get another work-unit- and, frankly, have skipped SG much of this week. Apathy, exhaustion, and more than a little drinking have all conspired to send me to bed for 14-16 hours at a time... blame the holidays, I suppose.

The weather's been fun, though a bit of a bitch. I love cold and snow, and thus enjoyed the large amount we got early last week... my Kia's handled the roads well, so I'm pretty happy. The only hitch has been at work, with a poor lot-plowing crew making for a hellish few days.

Heather B. asked me to go with her to dinner with her adoptive parents, and we all met at Olive Garden, not my usual choice of restaurants. The girl who was to seat us turned out to be someone I had a massive crush on a few years ago, Cheryl. We caught up as much as possible in 30 seconds, we hugged a couple of times. Promises to contact, which I'd actually like to follow through with; I never lost that crush on her, and did occasionally wonder what had happened to her. A mutual friend told me a few months ago that Cheryl'd had a massive crush on me as well, and felt it to be unrequited, so...

(A quick aside of how I met Cheryl; at work a couple of years ago, I was walking somewhere when I walked past a couple of Hot-Topics-aged gothy-type girls. Glanced at Cheryl, was immediately entranced by and locked into her eyes. We both turned around as we passed, and I ended up walking backwards, not wanting to stop looking at her. That is the only time I've ever done anything like that; my usual reaction is to look down when someone sees me looking, but her eyes were just too captivating. The girls came into work a few times after, and Cheryl eventually came up and asked if she could snap a photograph of me. After that, they came by at least weekly for over a year, spending hours in the pharmacy talking to me... Fear on my part kept me from asking her out, and apparently she spent the whole time wishing I would. Damn.)

Dinner itself was awkward; Heather has a love/hate thing with her parents, whom I found to be genial. Heather was the dampening influence; with any sort of friendliness from her, the table would have been much more lively. She seems ashamed of them, considers them plebeian and beneath her station, whatever that station is. She seemed offended to even be at an Olive Garden.

After dinner with Heather, I went over to Tony's, played a bit of Trivial Pursuit with him and his friend Dave, and when Dave left, we headed out for our traditional Christmas Eve midnight meal at Waffle & Steak. It was fairly busy, and was unusually populated with quite a few pretty women. Tony and I sat and moped about the holiday, loneliness, etc... we were in a good mood, though, especially when we contrasted the meal with the first Christmas Eve we'd spent at W&S- his first Christmas after his wife had left, and only a couple of weeks after my own divorce had been granted.

One of the women in the diner walked past to the jukebox, we locked eyes for a bit, and we smiled while the world seemed to stop for a few seconds. Tony says she kept looking back at me after she went back to her seat, but I didn't know how to deal with it. I was still a bit too into having run into Cheryl, anyway, to think much about a stranger.

I ended up giving our waitress a $10 tip on a $9 meal, a Christmas gesture. She seemed genuinely thankful... I think she earned it by being willing to work at a diner as Christmas rolled around, serving the lonely of the southside.

Not much else happening... feel like I'm coming down with a cold. Whee.