Julia broke up with me. She dropped the “I’ve been wanting to tell you” line last night when she came over for pie with the folks. I don’t blame her. She left her family party bursting with 63 relatives playing 12 simultaneous games of Killer Uno and stuffing themselves comatose with 17 different kinds of pie to come over to an empty, coldish house where my mom served freaking sweet potato pie on antique china plates, which she then proceeded to tell Julia about for 45 minutes, culminating in how her great-great-great-great-grand-uncle fought with Washington and that’s how she got to be the president of the local chapter of the DAR. My dad just ate his pie and went back to his computer, taking the Maltese dogs with him, which had been the best company in the room. Not exactly the picture of domestic bliss. On top of that, I dropped out of her life for about a month while I was studying for the GRE. If I’d known I’d still get a crappy score, I may have made different decisions. I definitely would have made different decisions if I’d realized that the “elder” that was getting home right at the same time was her old high school boyfriend. I didn’t know girls “had” elders. I just assumed she was talking about… hell, I didn’t know what she was talking about. I was too busy relearning trigonometry to ask. I met “Elder Fairbanks” for the first time the day after I took the GRE. Julia gave him a ride to church. Man, you just can’t compete with dudes right off the mission. After they’ve been home a while and they’re like Abe and they swear and fart in public and date six girls at once and play X-box until 3 a.m., maybe then. But it’s just cruel to put a non-Mormon, 80th percentile, lapsed Quaker sucker against someone who has single-handedly saved the world by the age of 21. She didn’t say anything about him last night when we were talking, but she said she had to “stop by” the Fairbankses after she left last night. “Damn girl, no need to look so timid,” I wanted to tell her. Hell, I would have broken up with me too.
But the break-up comes at a good time. My grandma had a stroke a week and a half ago, and I’ve decided to go out there and stay with them for a couple of months, maybe even until May. They need someone to drive them around and read the Bible to. I’ll have a chance to work on graduate school applications (hope springs eternal) and brush up on my minor prophets. It’ll be a good time to think about things. Then my dad’s talked me into doing a summer internship at his office starting in June, and after that, we’ll see. The horizon of my knowable life stretches out to September. Plenty of time to think up a future for myself.
So that means that I’ll be retiring from the bloggernacle, for a while at least. My grandparents have dial-up at home, and they think the computer is a waste of time anyway (not too far off, in my case). I’ll be close to Miranda, and we may try to meet up sometime. I don’t think I’ll ever meet Septimus, which makes me sad since he’s my freaking Greek god of practically everything. I’ll miss you, man. Thanks for making me feel so included all the time. Aaron, you’re one crazy dude but I wish you luck wherever you go. Mari, thanks for being the most decent member of the Banner. You had more sense and more smarts than any of us combined. Miranda, thanks for being the life force of this blog. Jenn, now that I’ll be in PA, do you think we could finally give dating a try? Mormon girls love me, trust me on this one.
Black Friday (today) was so named because it was supposedly when retail stores left the red and started turning a profit–entering the black, so to speak. That’s funny to think about. All year long, you wait and wait and wait and wait, manning the cash register, restocking the shelves, moving the supply chain along, ordering more products, advertising. All year long you do all this work, and only at the very end, with only a month left before the whole thing starts over again, do you see that little black “+ $.01” on the ledger. Is it worth it? All of this effort so you can enjoy one month of being in the black, one freezing, dark, sunless month of profitability? A penny’s profit for eleven months’ labor. Whose economy is this, anyway?
But maybe that’s not the analogy I’m trying to draw here. Maybe what I’m trying to say is that it is all worth it. Working in the red, risking on success, shacking up with the Mormons for a spell, taking the freaking GRE, writing for a blog, dating a beautiful girl just to give it a try. Everything that we’ve already gone through, everything in the past–that’s all sunk costs. That one-cent profit–that’s the grace of God.