deeplyshallow // do you, i do

do you, i do

There wasn’t an awful lot to do at work today — yesterday? — I don’t know when this will be posted, so: Thursday. All of my clients are thinking hey, I’ll bet Jason would like to work. Too bad I don’t want him to. Nyah.

So I spent part of the day, a small part, one occupied mostly by meetings, working on a homegrown illustration for the boss, who turns five-plus years older than me today, and also for my short project manager, who is marrying her girlfriend tomorrow. In the drawing they are both potato-shaped, and he is wearing a suit that he thinks makes him look younger, and she is bitching about the wedding dress I have drawn her into.

This is how my time at work is spent, at least during those long, dawdly meetings. Say something innopportune and you’re probably going to get drawn. Recent drawings include my account manager, bent at the waist, pants dropped, hairy butt on full display, snide face over the shoulder yelling HERE’S YOUR SNACK; and also R., happily whistling away at his laptop while around him are the bloody, staked heads of all of the project managers he has separated from their bodies. There are missiles in the background, and fire.

Over time the drawings have accumulated to such a point that I am tired of photographing them and uploading them to the sketch gallery. What began as a small collection of drawings on the corked wall behind my desk has erupted, and now the drawings paper several walls of the large cathedral that our creative team toils in. The two N.s have promised to scan all of these illustrations, and to bind them into a sort of coffee table book, as a thirtieth birthday present to me. They have yet to begin. My birthday is only two months and a few days away. I think they’re going to disappoint me.

But that’s okay.

Felicia’s birthday is only a few days away now. My original plan for her birthday gift — her first tattoos — has been put on hold for a later date, when much thought has been thoughted, and pre-tattoo guilt has been expunged. Instead, I have given her a big honking juicer. It’s what she wanted instead. And then we’re driving north to spend a long day in San Jose, so she can be fuddled by the Winchester Mystery House and salivate over yarn shops and spin ’round a big dance floor when the sun goes down. She’ll be twenty-five.

I don’t remember what I did on my twenty-fifth birthday. Without thinking about it for a moment, I can’t even tell you what year that was. (Now that I’ve thought about it, I can tell you it was 2003.) Oh, wait. I remember now. That was the year that I turned twenty-five, and then a couple of days later my grandfather passed away. That wasn’t the best birthday.

I am not a terribly social person. For a time when I began working where I work now, I played with the idea, and I went out a lot with my new work friends, and got drunk with my new work friends, and mostly had a good time. I don’t go out that often anymore; when I do, it’s usually because there’s something Felicia would like to do, or people she would like to be around, and I go along, and we have a grand old time. I think she appreciates that I can genuinely enjoy myself doing these things with her that I would not otherwise do myself. In exchange she gives me writing days, and makes my favorite meals, and mixes smooth drinks, and sends me gifts at work. I probably do more to deserve these things than just go along with her to beer-and-knitting nights, but I can’t for the life of me imagine what those things I do might be.

She seems to like me pretty well, though. So there must be a few.

I don’t write here very often lately. I think the problem may lie in the fact that I have a tendency to write long, bloated posts, and they wear me out. I don’t look forward to them, but while I’m writing them I find that I enjoy writing them, and then I can’t stop. I could pace myself, spread all of these topics out over multiple days, but I was never very good at that.

My project manager is getting married at a courthouse. She and her partner have been together for I guess a pretty long time, and they have two rowdy dogs, a very serene cat, and a house stuffed with lesbian science fiction novels. My boss is turning thirty-five and comforts himself against the idea that he is getting old by reminding himself that his wife is older than he is. (I think he takes a perverse sense of pleasure from this.)