Okay, I Guess That's Better.

But I seriously have to get a fucking handle on my self-esteem as it relates to men.

It goes a little something like this: if the guy I'm interested in gives me even the slightest, most fragile sign of interest, or of anything my over-eager mind can even interpret as interest, then all is well with the world. Otherwise: gloom and black despair.

Guess which option we went with today?

And he's not INTERESTED. He's FRIENDLY. There's a difference. But someone please explain that to my interior eleven-year-old girl. Preferably using a large, heavy object--a cudgel, perhaps, or a large housebrick. And while you're bludgeoning, please ALSO explain to this interior eleven-year-old brat that she is NOT entitled to control my self-image. Because she's really, seriously dancing on my last fucking nerve.

(Friendly, interested, or in-between, it was still great fun to spend the day e-mailing each other with a running dialogue between George Bush and Karl Rove about (among other things) whose turn it was to feed Cthulhu. (Yes, we're nerds. Don't ask.))

People at work are starting to grasp that I'm not going to be around any more, which is a) true and b) awesome. And it has benefits, as well: Noreen (yes, the same Noreen with whom I spent my first three years at war and the last two in an uneasy detente) brought in my favorite coffeecake--and an extra whole coffeecake for me to take home--this morning. And she hugged me and told me how much she was going to miss me, and how even though we'd had our differences, she felt like she'd learned a lot from me. Which...wow, you know? Just...wow. (Also, coffeecake.)

I'm pretty sure that some of the accolades, though, come from the almost-universal unhappiness with which the announcement of my successor has been greeted. Sam is a great tech, but he's not an easy man to get along with--especially when women try to tell him what to do. (It may be cultural.) Everyone who knows anything about him has had to be reassured, more than once, that he will take good care of them. But what they're really looking for, I think, is reassurance that Sam will be as easy to run over as I was--and I can't give them that. (I've almost killed him three times in the past two days, so you can imagine how reassuring I'd be anyway, under the circumstances.)

Today on the train home the Brit asked me if I'd be celebrating this weekend. And I thought about it for a minute, and I told him: "Probably not. I'll probably go home and go about my business, and get up on Monday and go to work, only it'll just be a different 'work'." And I thought about how sad that was, though I tried not to make it sound to him like "poor me, I have no one to celebrate with"--except...well, I HAVE no one to celebrate with. I SHOULD, but I don't. I don't have a problem with that; I'm a solitary person and people, by and large, are hard work for me. But it just seems kinda wrong to me that even the person I'm supposedly closest to probably won't acknowledge that anything is even worth celebrating.

Two more days, anyway. Woo hoo.