Purging

Diego is such a treasure. He put up with all of my bitching last night about unreliable queens and disappointing relatives. Hopefully I've gotten the negativity out of my system, at least for a while. I'm still sore at being passed over last weekend--and it doesn't help that I'm reminded every time I check Facebook. Obvious solution: stop checking Facebook. A week of far more interesting things to do should take care of that.

In other purge news, I'm giving up on Rubeus and ottr4bear for good. It's been nearly two months since I bearded them in their lair and I haven't heard a damn thing from either of them. As I told Diego, I feel better at least knowing where I stand. Before, the uncertainty always nagged at me; now I know that one really does hate my guts and the other doesn't like them enough to pick up the phone and give me a call. As monshu says, "Fuck 'em." They were great friends for many years, but if we live long enough we all outgrow each other.

Fuck the neighbours as well. monshu struggled for weeks to fix a date for the next condo meeting only to have everyone bitch about not getting enough notice or having to come late. So they've chosen to reschedule for next week when we're out of town. I guess it's fitting that his presidential term ends with a whimper rather than what might well be the last competently-run meeting of that group for months if not years. Now someone else can have the joy of herding those feral cats.

Class blinders

As usual after lunch today, I was craving something sweet. Usually that means coming back to the office and filching a chocolate from generous (not to mention enabling) colleague. But fate put Andy's Frozen Custard into my line of sight. I've been curious about it ever since it opened, but strong-willed enough to steer myself on to Red Mango for frozen yoghurt instead. Today, I weakened.

The counterman greeted me by name, which confused me so much I misheard it and was convinced he had confused me with someone else. But then he repeated it, meaning he was confusing me with someone who not only looked me but also had the same name? I tried desperately to place him but had no luck at all until he said, "From Jon's party?"

I can identify a number of factors behind this lapse. The first is that I've gotten a lot worse at pairing names and faces as I've gotten older. A second is that I've always been mediocre at remember people who don't turn my crank. I could tell you the name of the cute little daddy I met at the party without a moment's hesitation; with anyone else, I'd just be guessing.

But the most significant factor is class bias. At this stage in my life, I just don't expect to be socialising with people who work at food service counters. For good bourgeois lads like me (and which I assume everyone I meet to be as well), this is a chrysalis stage we pass through before getting a Real Job somewhere. I don't mean that I'm above making friends with servers, but I don't expect to know them through other channels. What this means is, the moment he said he knew me, I tried to remember where I had met him in a food service context. I didn't even think to check bar associations, much less invitation-only gatherings.

It's an understandable bias to have, if an unattractive and increasingly anachronistic one. After all, as the American middle class continues to lose ground, more and more of us will find that a college degree does not exempt us from having to wear a funny hat for longer than a summer or two.

Incidentally, in case you care about the custard, it was pretty unmemorable. Certainly not a patch on that fabulous place his_regard took me on Friday night, let alone the towering colossus of the South Side of St Louis, Ted "Concrete" Drewes.