Pancakes for one are always depressing
My girlfriend has recently broken up with me, taking the opportunity to call me while driving home one night. “Can you hold on?” she asks me. “I’ve got to put my headset on.” It seems funny to me. Once everything is in place, she gets back to the task at hand, which is filled with so much grim foreboding. “It’s not that you’re a bad person,” she says, “It’s just that you lack any sort of drive. –I mean, you really do just seem to be coasting.” I latch on to that word, appreciating the syllables as they make their way off of my tongue. “Coasting,” I say contemplatively. “Yeah,” she fires back, “I mean, there’s just no sense of get-up-and-go.” It’s difficult for me to determine, but the verbiage being suggested really does seem evocative of the car ride: drive, coasting, get-up-and-go. I try and imagine the motions suggested by these words but am so far detached from these concepts that I actually have to ask. “So what you’re saying is that you’d be way more into me if I had a better job or something?” That makes some amount of sense, I have to admit. Going out to dinner or anywhere that involved any sort of monetary exchange was always a particularly awkward time, never being able to pay. And her parents seemed particularly unnerved with my lack of a 401K. “Yeah,” she admonishes, “TAKE A NIGHT CLASS, or do SOMETHING.” There is pause, where she tries to fiure out something else that I could do—the necessary locomotion a life should carry, the motions and movements which add up to time well spent in the arithmetic of civility. “What about that literacy program?? she wants to know. “Weren’t you going to do a literacy program?” Night classes, literacy programs: the shoes or hair I could actually concede to, but these things seem totally superfluous to me. But ah, well: I should have seen it coming. My life, on paper, is not very impressive. In the end, there’s nothing I can do but give in. “It’s all true,” I tell her compassionately. “I know exactly what you’re saying.” It seems weird to be able to achieve the level of detachment which allows you to see things objectively, but I seem to have done that: “I know I wasn’t always easy to deal with,” I tell her sympathetically. “I guess I’ll see you,” I say before hanging up the phone.

Lying back on my bed, it’s hard not to concede that something seems seriously amiss with me. And it wouldn’t be so bad except that I just had this same conversation with another girlfriend, five years removed. She recently called me up and rehashed some things. Iceberg, I think she may have said, before blowing up my spot totally with the very incendiary scather by-the-way of Destiny’s Child lyrics. All you can really do is shake your head when someone actually quotes Destiny’s Child lyrics to insult you. And then I remember what was fundamentally wrong with that situation: differing tastes in music.

On TV I take comfort in a rerun of Seinfeld. They are seated in the diner, when Jerry begins relating a near-death experience. –You always say that you’re going to live your life differently from that moment on, he says, but nobody ever does. And what would that imply? Elaine asks. WHAT ISN’T A WASTE OF TIME?? I MEAN, CAN’T YOU EVEN DRINK A CUP OF COFFEE ANYMORE? she says. And then I remember: my girlfriend hated that show, too.