Life...

It’s strange how just one morning, when you’re twenty six and everything, and you’re probably cooking pancakes for your family, and while you’re holding up the spatula, a good idea comes to you. More often than not, this idea is most likely to be one that would change your life forever. For better or worse, though, you just don’t know—or at least not at the moment. Like with most ideas, you never really know how things would turn out until afterwards when whatever is supposed to happen has happened. And anyway, at the moment all that matters is that you’ve come up with an idea, and it’s a good one.

In my case, it was an idea never to be pathetic again.

It got me so excited that as soon as I finished cooking breakfast, and two days had gone by, I told my current girlfriend Zeth, as soon as I’d got hold of her, “I’ve made up my mind. People will never look down on me again.”

Zeth, who was four inches taller than me, looked as thrilled as though this was something she had been waiting for a long time from me to hear. “Uh, OK,” she replied.

“And I mean it, too,” I said. “All my life people have looked at me like I was this poor, pathetic loser, you know? Like I was always ordering coffee at ****** (I mentioned the name of a popular, fashionable, expensive coffee shop) for the first time and I don’t know how it’s properly done, and I use straw instead of the proper stirrer, or sip on the foam instead of scooping it out, and I always drink from the wrong, “uncool” side of the cup or something—you know, things that just convinces everyone I’m not “cool” enough to drink their expensive coffee.”

“I know what you mean.”

“And I’m not just talking about coffee shops either. The same thing happens at the office, or the movies, or parties, or any social gathering at all. You have no idea how I humiliate myslef when I meet someone’s sister for the first time, for example. Or brothers, or filthy rich grandmothers. You definitely don’t know what goes on inside male bathrooms when I’m there.”

“I don’t think I want to know.”

“Well, anyway, whatever that is, I’ve made up my mind that that’s gonna stop from now on. I’ll turn over a new leaf in my life (or however right, fashionable way that idiom goes), and I will never be pathetic again.”

“OK.”

I smiled at her. Truly, no one in my life has shown as much understanding of me as my current girlfriend. I wouldn’t wish to have anyone else but her to be with at that turning point in my life. I want her by my side at that definitive instant my life started to change.

But for one to better appreciate this change, I must tell something about my life.

(Continuation…)

© Jay Santos 2004.