A Mildly Flattering Ride Home

On the subway this evening I got hit on by a rich guy. His name was Serge and he worked in a bank.

Maybe it wasn't a bank, but it was something financial. He worked at King and Yonge—my milieu of yore—and did something involving charts and graphs and tables of numbers. I know because he showed me them. And then he said, "I'm not bullshitting you—this is really what I do."

He told me several times that he worked in finance. He told me about how he had two bachelor's degrees, one MBA, and was working on getting his CFA. After he got that, he said, he would go back to school and get a second master's in finance. "I want to be more competitive," he told me, "so that I can get a nice seven-figure salary." He said this several times—the part about the seven-figure salary, that is. I wondered if perhaps he'd meant to say six, but I didn't bother asking.

Then he gave me his business card and told me to email him sometime. "I might do that," I said, politely. To which he replied, "If you do, I just might respond."

I briefly toyed with the idea of contacting him. In a world of careful image construction, you've got to respect someone who wears his toolishness on his sleeve. I'm quite sure he would make a show of taking me somewhere lavish, and, you know, I don't mind putting out for a free meal.

But, not surprisingly, I decided against it. I would have a lot more casual sex if I didn't dislike people so much. I am far too misanthropic for a life of sin.

AMZB vs. Disease/Self-Pity

[Copied over from facebook for consistency.]

My great achievement of the day is not blowing chunks. For the second time in two weeks, I am facing an epic battle against nausea, dizziness, and fever.

Feeling sick gives you lots of time not to do the work you're being paid to get done by Tuesday. Instead, you get to hang out by the toilet (in case you should need it in a hurry) or else lie down because you feel weak and dizzy.

Since both these things are a little boring, I eventually needed a little entertainment. So I allowed myself to get sucked into an online conversation with a friend of mine. The gist: he's fucking someone boring, irritating, and stupid. Having woken up to her faults, how can he now get rid of her?

I could sympathize with him. You misjudge someone initially, and then whoops, a few months later you're miserable. You need to end it, but every way out requires that you be an asshole. There's no way to reject someone nicely. So do you break it off now or later?

This is a really fun conversation to have when you can easily imagine someone saying the same shit about you. Got me thinking about my persistent sense of intellectual inferiority within my own social group. About the disconnect that seems to exist between me and other people. About the termtime sense of isolation/alienation that I can't seem to shake.

So I decided to throw a pity party. Location: the bathroom. Invitees: my sense of self-worth, the bile rising at the back of my throat. Fun-filled activities: pin the vomit on the toilet, hide and go freak.

In the end I didn't throw up, but I was left once again with the feeling that I need to prove my worth to the world. Also perhaps to myself. Unsure how to do that. I can't think of anything in my life that I am currently proud of.

In order to feel better about myself, I decided to play a few rounds of Prolific, currently my online boggle-like word game of choice. I wanted to feel like there was something—even something fairly useless—that I could do well. I played six rounds with people whose ratings were lower than mine. I lost every time.

I think the only possible thing I could do to feel more pathetic right now would be to broadcast my momentary sense of self-pity to tons of people on the internet. It would be shameless and incredibly tacky. Good thing I'm not doing that.