Last night I had a friend over and we were chatting about work stuff and somehow I ended up flashing back to talking about this guy. I explained how he was basically a complete caricature of a person--complete with oversimplified and ignorant beliefs about women and black people, privileged obliviousness, obsession with his hairstyle, and incessant rambling about his golf game and his townhouse and his failure of a romantic life. Women, you see, never wanted to date him because they were so "crazy" and immature. This led to such unreasonable actions as telling him they have a boyfriend after he harassed them at work three times, walking away from him without a word when he hit on them at a gas station at 7:30 in the morning, and agreeing after a year of pestering to go on a date with him and then mysteriously not answering his calls or texts. Crazy women, I tell ya! And these were tales he told us in the office. We didn't have the kind of workplace where talk like this was common, either (though maybe it was partly because the secretary is non-partner-seeking and everybody else was married).
And let's not forget how his demands for very specific, unnecessary aesthetic specifications on proposals and other documents caused me to spend an inordinate amount of time on design that was ultimately not necessary. We'd snipe at each other a lot over this--me insisting that content was more important, him claiming that the look of the document sent a vital message (to the tune of keeping me in the office long into the wee hours sometimes, because he wanted the page number of the proposal to be encased in a line-art palm tree, or because his dividers needed to have custom-designed full-page designs on them that used up all my printer ink and required processing in a copy shop because he was adamant that the color go all the way to the edges and my printers could not do that).
Some of these logs were absolutely hilarious. I can't believe I used to be so funny.
I don't really write stuff like this much anymore. I don't have a place where I do it. This blog is supposed to be relatively dignified, and though it's not entirely focused on my writing, it is associated with it--with me as a brand as well as a blogger and human being. I actually do still maintain my LiveJournal with a weekly post that's very similar to my Saturday Personal Digest, but I don't tend to post personal rambles there anymore. Maybe partly because very little of what I have to say needs to be private anymore.
Still, the uncensored, unfiltered version of me is explosive and far more entertaining than I thought I was. I hope that doesn't sound egotistical, but seriously, I was reading through these old logs thinking what a shame it was that they were friends-locked and couldn't be consumed by the public. It's almost to the point where I wish I could adapt the content so it wouldn't be able to be associated with the real people in the story and share it in a way not connected to me.
Maybe I will someday.
But it brings me back to when I wrote so often, about so many things, and spent so much more time producing enjoyable content. I miss doing that now that I'm in a sort of unproductive phase (writing-wise). Writing has always been a way I record what I'm thinking, share my emotions, and entertain people (including myself), but I'm not using it as much or in as many ways these days. And I think I'm probably kinda out of practice being as funny as I was, too. I never really thought I could write humor, but man. Maybe I should give it a try.
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