After I finally got out of work last night, I was standing on the TRAX platform at the Gallivan Plaza stop, the heart of what little activity there is on downtown Main Street following the end of the business day. I was waiting with a dozen or so fellow commuters and passing the time by watching pedestrians across the street. That particular block is a rich environment for people-watching; there are always a few homeless folks around, and usually a mob of scruffy teen and twentysomethings who seem to have nothing better to do than sit on the big planter boxes in front of Sam Weller’s and be obnoxious. You also see a lot of beautiful people along that stretch of sidewalk, thanks to a popular nearby club called Keys on Main, and the interactions between the clubgoers and the miscreants are often pretty entertaining.

The street show on this particular evening starred a young woman, a redhead dressed in the shortest miniskirt I’ve ever seen outside an Austin Powers movie. And if that wasn’t enough to grab the attention of any heterosexual male with a pulse, she was also wearing thigh-high, patent-leather, lace-up, platform-souled boots that made her legs look about 175 feet long. Think of Julia Roberts strutting down Rodeo Drive in that scene from Pretty Woman and you’ll get the idea.

As noteworthy as the woman herself may have been, though, what really made me smile was the reaction she was getting from, well, everybody. I guess she was killing time waiting for Keys to open or something, because she walked from the club down to the corner and back several times. And every time she did, the heads of every man on the block — including, I’m not too proud to admit, my own — very obviously turned to follow her.

It was like watching a slow-motion tennis match.

In yet another sign that I worry too damn much, I started thinking yesterday afternoon that people might not get what I was trying to say in my “Cool Quiet, and Time to Think” entry, and hurt feelings could result. So I went back and added an addendum to try and clear the air. Problem solved, right?

Ha, no! You obviously don’t know me as well as you believe. Because today I’ve been thinking that no one really goes back to a blog entry they’ve already read, and perhaps there’s someone out there right now who read that thing before I got the addendum written and is even now sitting in a funk somewhere, getting angrier and/or more depressed with every passing minute because they think I don’t want to hang out with them. Which most assuredly is not true. But how is this person to know that since they haven’t gone back and re-read that ego-busting, anti-social, curmudgeonly, leave-me-alone rant to see the bit where I say, “it’s not you, it’s me?”

So, in the interest of soothing my own conscience as well as any potentially ruffled feathers, I now present, in its entirety… the addendum:

[Addendum: It occurs to me that my various loved ones and friends could possibly misinterpret the “social engagements = obligations” remark above. So, to be clear, I am not complaining about the time I spend with people or their desire to spend time with me. These are good things in my life that I have no wish to give up or change. My frustration basically stems from a lousy work/life balance. I have a good job that I like, but my office’s long business hours, coupled with the time I spend commuting, place me home on most nights somewhere between 7:00 and 7:30. After I eat dinner, I have maybe an hour in which to try and be productive before my brain completely fogs over, and most nights productivity doesn’t happen anyway for one reason or another. So I end up feeling more-or-less constant pressure to get caught up, and guilt because I’m leaving too many things undone or half-finished… and me being me, I tend to beat myself up for not doing a better job of managing it all better. And then it’s time for bed and — lately, at least — a really lousy night’s sleep, and then it’s up and at ’em to repeat the whole cycle over again. I’ve been keeping this schedule for over four years now, and it’s starting to really grate. You wouldn’t think working a mere hour or two later than most everyone else would make that much of a difference, but it absolutely does. Social activities are virtually impossible on a work night, and my body — never a paragon of athleticism, I must admit — has gone completely to hell because any kind of exercise regimen is just too damn hard to squeeze into an already tight schedule.

 

Basically, I’m tired of getting home so late and never managing to accomplish anything, night after night after night. I’m tired of not having a life. I know everyone says or feels that to one degree or another… but I personally feel it very keenly. It’s not healthy, either physically or psychologically. And lately the situation has been exacerbated by a lot of other things — my birthday, the problems with my car, the realization that certain ambitions are becoming more unlikely to pan out and that I’m not the man I used to think I was going to be — and, well, I just need to scream once in a while. Thoreau never imagined blogs, or he might have written that “quiet desperation” line differently… ]

Interestingly enough, I’m writing the comments which surround this copy block at 6:08 on a Friday night in the middle of a deathly silent cube farm. Yep, you guessed it, I’m stuck late at work again, waiting around for other people to do their jobs so I can do mine. Meanwhile, my stomach is rumbling, it’s getting dark outside, and The Girlfriend is at home waiting for me.

Point proven.

Sigh.