Boy, That Explains A Lot

According to a local newspaper yesterday, a Forbes.com report named Milwaukee and Minneapolis as the two drunkest cities in America. No wonder I could actually find a date in those two towns.

Anywho, I've been busy setting up house in my new apartment, putting together tables and desks and shit. I've also had a couple of six-day workweeks recently, once because I went through certification for the new platform we'll all be using to do our jobs once all of the accounts migrate over, and last week I just went in for some overtime pay. There aren't many people left at my job that started with me. Most of them have been shown the door due to too many errors or some other form of incompetence, and some got out for whatever personal reasons. There's a lot of turnover here, which explains why they lowered their standards and hired me. So I'm doing my damndest to hang on and not give them a reason to send me packing. I mean, yes, I'm still tardy a lot; that's just a bad habit I've always had, and I just can't seem to lick it. But I'm not being unprofessional, I'm not making bad/gross jokes, and I'm taking on all assignments unless they try to give me an account with instructions that I simply cannot comprehend. "All assignments" includes running the garbage on my way out almost every night. I even volunteered (well, someone pointed at me because I'm a man, but I could have refused like when they asked me to do something similar at CEDA) to go to the garbage room and arrange the bags so that they weren't spilling over into the hallway. The only weird part about that is that someone took down all of our names after we did it, but I didn't ask why, and I haven't heard back about it since, and that was two weeks ago. Hmm, I don't know if I'm cool with my name floating around on a piece of paper for some unknown reason. But then again, I'm paranoid.

My ladyfriend and I continue to talk almost every evening about anything and everything. Recent topics include glancing vs. gawking, raising a child, lazy Sundays, and oral sex. We'll be able to finish each other's sentences by this time next year at this rate. It feels so good to know that someone misses you as much as you miss them when you're apart. It's always been so one-sided for me, so this is new. And she's a smart cookie, so she still tosses things out here and there to indicate that she's not fully trusting of me yet. I need that. It's a reminder of the piece of crap I've been before when women have trusted me. This blog may be filled with rants and raves about how wrong I've been done, but I have to always remember that my response to being wronged or abandoned has been very immature--lying, cheating, angry letters, accusations, emotional abuse, shutting down. My actions have been very ugly, almost as ugly as what's been done to me, and my friend, having never been in a relationship, needs a lot more time to make sure that she won't be another victim of my temper if we don't work out. There's not much I can do until she arrives at that place except keep being myself and assuring her that I'm real and my feelings for her are real. But I am not discouraged, not when she says she's "in this for the long haul" and tells me that a 90-minute conversation wasn't long enough on a given evening. I really believe she's my life partner. She just may not know it yet.