A little piece of advice

Hey there, kiddos. It's been a while since I've tried to dispense advice that I'm unqualified to give, and I thought you might be going through withdrawal. Hence, I've got something to share.

TIP: Do not mess around with a graduate student if you'll later be embarrassed by any association with said graduate student.

Here's the dealio:

About. . . oh. . . two years ago, I was dating a guy who chewed his orange juice and refused to commit (also referred to as "The Original Subscript"), so I decided that I would declare it an open relationshit, and start dating another guy as well.

This is when psych grad student came onto the scene. PGS, who loves Star Wars, has the maturity level of a twelve-year-old, and, if his apartment is any indication, has never heard of a single cleaning product, was just the kind of mistake I was looking for.

So I had a few meaningless encounters with PGS, forgot about him for about a year, and then followed up by having a few meaningless drunken encounters with PGS. And then, when I got pissed about hickies left on my neck by PGS, I decided to forget about him once again.

I had succeeded. Until today that is. Until moments ago.

That's when Miso, my good friend who has learned to tolerate all of the weird nicknames with weird spellings that I have assigned to her persona, looked up from her computer and said, "What was your grad student's name?"

It was then, just moments ago, that I knew I was in trouble. Meesa was looking at the course catalog. She was picking her classes for next semester. And suddenly, she wanted to know PGS's name.

Uh oh.

You guessed it, folks. PGS is teaching. He's teaching a course that Miseh is required to take. And he is teaching the only open section of that course.

Misa gets to spend an entire semester with my mistake. How embarrassing.

Learn from my mistakes, kids. Don't date a grad student at your university if you cringe at the thought of your friends' taking classes taught by that person.

(Just wait to make your mistakes until you go home for the summer. Then you can be sure of your ability to hide said mistakes from the people whose opinions matter.)

I found it.

I found a reason to hate him. It was easier than I expected. I didn't have to search or anything. One day it just kind of appeared, shouting out at me, "Hey! Why are you ignoring this? It's perfect! It's annoying. It's heinous. So hate him! Hate him!"

And it's not nearly as satisfying as I thought it would be.

It's disappointing really.

Let's consider a somewhat analogous situation.

This summer, I lost my stamps. This is the same book of stamps I've been using since the middle of 2006. I simply don't mail things very often. So one day, after mailing out a bill or two, the stamps disappeared. Gone. Vanished. Without a trace.

I searched my car, my apartment, my tote bags, my pockets, my car, my apartment, my desk, the organizer thingies that cover my desk, my closet, and then my entire apartment again. I didn't find the stamps.

Readers, I live in an efficiency apartment. Some of you might call it a studio apartment. The point is: I live in one room. One ****ing room, and I lost something. How do you do that?

So I was pissed. I was determined to find the stamps. I was on a mission. And that meant that I had to go to the post office every time I needed to mail something. And rather than buying stamps while I was at the post office, I would come home empty-handed, continuing to be pissed off about my missing stamps.

Until one day earlier this week, I was looking for a specific stack of post-it notes in one of the drawers of one of the organizer thingies upon my desk, and I found the stamps.

Recall that I had searched that same damn drawer many times during my frantic search for the stamps. Could I have found the stamps the first time around? Noooooooooo. That would have been far too simple.

And yet, when I finally found the stamps, when I was no longer looking for the stamps, I felt nothing. No sense of victory, no triumph, no joy, no elation, nothing. They were just stamps -- left exactly where they should have been.

In case you're not following the logic here, let's wrap up the analogy.

I don't hate him, but now I have a reason to, should I ever want to. And I don't feel good about that. Don't get me wrong -- I don't feel bad about it. This just isn't what I expected.

What happened to the good old days, when finding the missing stamps was fun?

My sister's words of wisdom

"I need a reason to hate him, and I don't have one."

"Clearly you don't know him well enough."