Chapter 28: The One Who Makes You Laugh

I haven’t written in quite some time. Remember that stress thing I was trying to deal with? It’s taking on a physical form, I have blown up to 300 pounds and started to sport a mustache. I’m totally kidding. But I have started to grind my teeth in my sleep. At least I think I have. A couple of weeks ago my tooth started to hurt, thinking it was a cavity I tried to ignore it hoping it would disappear (since we all know how I feel about the dentist office). When the tooth ache turned in to a “teeth” ache I began to think maybe sinuses were the culprit. When the “teeth” ache turned into a Charlie horse in my jaw I began to seek help. So about a week ago I called the dentist to set up an appointment to get my teeth cleaned, and possibly fix my jaw if that was an option. But later that same night that I made the appointment my jaw hurt so badly that I went to Patient First. The doctor there…well, he’s not what I would call the best, but probably only because he didn’t have an answer for me. He prescribed some sinus medication and told me that if the pain didn’t stop I might have to go to an Ear, nose, and throat doctor. Yippee. The next morning I went to the dentist expecting to have to get an emergency root canal or at least have a cavity. Good news, no cavities, no need for a root canal; bad news, my jaw still hurt. I’m almost out of that prescription and I’m not fond of taking 4 ibuprofen at a time, so I suppose next week I need to try and get over to my regular doctor and see what he thinks. In the mean time I am wearing a mouth guard at night, which makes me feel a little weird, like a football player, or a horse. I am examining the mouth guard to see where the wear and tear is. Sure enough it’s on the side that hurts all the time, so it looks like I either grind or clinch my teeth. I bet this was probably the most interesting thing that you have read in a long time. Glad I could help.
Ok on to topics that I personally enjoy. A bit of sad news first though, this past Tuesday was the last time I work with TDH for a good month. We may run into each other here and there and we may have a team meeting that we’ll see each other at, but I have been so used to working only with him during our training classes that I think I may go through withdrawal. The good news is that this past Tuesday I worked with TDH. There was only suppose to be a night class on Tuesday and I was supposed to teach it, but our manager’s manager (our manager is out of town) called me earlier on Tuesday saying that there was a girl there who had been told it would be okay to come to the noon class because she couldn’t make the 5 o’clock class. The big miscommunication there is that there wasn’t a 12 o’clock class. But I live no more then 5 minutes away from the building so I agreed to come down there and make a special class for this girl. She kept apologizing and I told her not to worry about it because all it meant was that I didn’t have to teach the afternoon class, which would be about 20 times bigger then what we had going on. So I thanked her for the mistake. TDH came in when we were finishing up and he just smiled and told me how he got the voicemail too late but thought to himself that I would jump at the idea of teaching a one on one rather then teaching the evening class. He knows me too well. I finished with that class and then TDH and I spent the hour in between to fix up the room for the larger class. Manager’s manager came up to us when we were in the hallway and started to talk about our new store opening in about a month, as she was talking I looked over and TDH was just looking at me. I smiled and he just kept making eye contact with me. I was always under the assumption that you make eye contact with the person who is speaking. Which I quickly returned to doing. Later, when TDH was teaching the class he mentioned eye contact to the trainees, and how you make eye contact, but don’t hold it for too long because then it becomes a stare down. He said that 10 seconds was way too long to hold eye contact, and the whole time he is saying this he is looking directly at me so I start laughing because it was more then 10 seconds and I think we were having a stare down. But he always does that. When we have team meetings he is always looking at me when he talks and I don’t know if I am just the only one who is actually looking at him when he talks or what. Then he always uses me as an example, the last team meeting we were talking about something and he used me as an example for it, giving me a nice weekend in Florida. It was fantastic, unfortunately I no longer have family connections in Florida to make that vacation a reality. Now, I realize that I may be reading into everything with TDH because I want to read into everything. I want him to like me, doesn’t mean he does.
I like to pretend that I am the only girl his age that he knows. Of course this is impossible, unless I somehow isolate him from all that he does know. There’s a thought…no, I won’t do that, it’s too much of an undertaking and to be honest I think I am too busy for that right now. I’ll admit though it hasn’t stopped me from pretending that he is madly in love with me but afraid to say anything about it because of how small our team is and how closely we have to work together. Which of course, in the end, just can’t end well.
I’d like to believe that we are at least friends, because it certainly does feel like we are. I don’t think you make that much eye contact with someone who you don’t want to at least be friends with right? But sometimes I wonder if I am just coming across as stalkerish if I e-mail him or leave him a message on the ever so popular Myspace. I’m not about to have a friend DTR (define the relationship) with a guy at work. I just hope he would feel comfortable enough to tell me to not stalk him anymore, and then I would stop…at least stop letting him know I was. Ha-ha.
To jump back into the story from this past Tuesday, after the class was finished up he was writing up evaluations on people that didn’t do so well on the test and he was trying to write, “in light of” but I may have already mentioned, he is a horrible speller. So he asked me if “light” would be l-i-g-h-t or if it would be l-i-t-e. I sat there for a second and finally said, “You know, I don’t think l-i-t-e is actually a word. I think it’s a slang spelling.” To which he replied, “Bud lite,” and just had that look of, “of course it’s a word.” I only looked at him and said, “Seriously? You’re going to get your vocabulary from Budweiser?” He chose to put l-i-g-h-t but I don’t think he fully came to terms with the fact that Budweiser would lie to him about spelling. Sigh. He’s my favorite person to work with.
To go along with this, however it’s possible that only I can see the connection, I will admit to the fact that I love the show “Sex and the City”. I know, bad me, slap myself across the face at least two times. I don’t know, there’s something that appeals to me about it. Of course I am getting the edited version on TBS rather then the full on scandalous version on HBO. Still there are times when I just change the channel. I don’t necessarily agree with the idea per se of the show, but there are good quotes. These women, aside from there hussiness of sleeping around, relate very closely to my friends and I. There was an episode on the other night talking about Modelizers, which by definition are similar to womanizers, except it’s only with models. Luckily I don’t have this exact problem in Richmond, Virginia. But Sarah Jessica Parker’s character is a journalist and she writes about her experiences and so she’s doing research on why it’s so difficult to find a descent guy, especially as you are always getting older.
The part I liked best was the introduction of Mr. Big. Which name Sarah Jessica Parker’s character has given him. It’s a lot like what I do, I give people these nicknames to protect their identity so I don’t feel bad posting this or anything like that. Through the episode she thinks that Mr. Big is a modelizer. At one point he is asking her what she does and she explains that she writes a column and is writing about men who date models and asks him if he had any insight into that (in a sarcastic, “I’ve already figured you out” way). He says, “Just that they are the luckiest men,” or something to that effect. She writes…or narrates, after this party where she had that conversation with Mr. Big, that she had never felt so invisible in her life. Mr. Big tracks her down near the end of the episode to the coffee shop that she sometimes writes her articles at, while she’s writing a somewhat bitter approach to modelizers. He comes in and sits across from her and says he’s on his way to a meeting but wanted to tell her that, “After a while, you just want to be with the one who makes you laugh” regarding their conversation about modelizers. I thought it was the greatest thing for a man to say. By the way, they end up dating.
I think it goes both ways. Men sometimes just want to be with the woman who makes them laugh and girls sometimes just want to be with the man who makes them laugh. It kind of reminds me of this story a lady at church told. She was teaching a lesson on marriage so she decided to ask her children what they looked for in a future spouse. She had her 17 year old son and a 14 year old daughter. When she asked her daughter she said that she got a far off look on her face and said, “He’ll be tall and blond and athletic.” She moved on to her son (at a different time) and asked him what he would want. He said, “mom, honestly, I just want someone who doesn’t annoy me after three months.” …Good answer. You can tell by the answer who has had more experience with the whole dating game.
Take home message here is that my new motto in life is that after a while you just want to be with the one who makes you laugh. Here’s the B.H. salute to Mr. Big.