as told to (your name here)

Affair

I'm listening to Los Lonely Boys right now. I like the whole album pretty much, it's got a generally upbeat energy (for lack of a better word) that makes me dance (for lack of a better word) in my chair tilting my head from left to right kinda the way the Beatles did in their old videos (for lack of a better example). I'm really tempted to type out the lyrics to one of the mas groovy songs and have that suffice for a blog entry, but I won't. You'll have to suffer my stream of consciousness for another day.

I promised you the story of my friend having an affair, so I'll get on with the gossip. To preserve his undeserved anonimity, let's call this friend 'T-Bone'. I picked the nickname T-Bone because his real name is Tom (both start with T) and he recently became vegetarian, so the cut of beef is doubly-appropriate. (aside: I have another friend with a bovine nickname, Porterhouse - He's just like T-Bone, just much thicker.) I've known T-Bone for about 6 years now, and we worked together for 3 years, so I'd say I know him pretty well. I always thought he was a great guy, he just never aspired to much as far as I could tell. He still works for the same company, the company that has treated him like shit for approaching 5 years now. He just never aspired to anything better. He never took it upon himself to do better, work harder, learn more, or generally do what is required to either move up in the company or get hired away by a bigger & better firm. But hey, there's something to be said for contentment in life. How many of us can say we're truly satisfied? Not me, and maybe that's why I'm a grumpy, bitter person blogging away in the dark. But I digress. So I left the company last year and we kept up almost daily, either via email, IM, or telephone. Met for lunch a lot. I don't remember exactly when it stopped, but it stopped cold. No matter what mode of conversation I tried, the only response I could get from him was, "Too busy, gotta go." So we drifted apart as ex-coworkers often do. As I said before, I'm not going to be the only one holding onto a relationship. Your world doesn't have to revolve around me (aside: but it's so much easier for you if it does) but I deserve a little effort. Well, T-Bone and I have other mutual friends who aren't too busy to send me an email once a month, and one mutual friend told me that the gossip was that he was having an affair with a woman at work. Mutual friend #2 confirmed additional suspicious activity, including the existence of a credit card that Mrs. T-Bone doesn't know about because it's delivered to the office instead of home. Texas is a community-property state, so that's automatically her debt too.

I'm an adult, so I get that affairs happen everyday. It's not ok, but I'm not so fragile that I can't handle it. I'm judgemental, but not so much that it gets in the way of friendship. What really gets me is that this is going on with a guy who just doesn't seem to care about upgrading anything in his life. As I said before, he doesn't aspire to the corner office, a Mercedes-Benz, or a 50' yacht. He isn't the kind of guy who aspires to a trophy wife. (aside: I knew the woman he's cheating with. She's no trophy, but she is hotter than his wife.) He's just not a bigger, better deal kinda guy, and that bugs me the most. I don't think I'm explaining this well enough. I don't think mutual friends 1 & 2 really get what bothers me most about it either. They just point to the fact that he met his wife while they were both cheating on their respective boyfriend/girlfriend, so they say "once a cheater, always a cheater."

I prefer not to subscribe to that philosophy, so rather than figure this guy out I'll end with a quote from Emily Dickinson (aside: whom I always confuse with Angie Dickinson) that describes me better than him- "Futile the winds to a heart at port."

posted by tinyhands @ 11:59 PM