Swirls of Whirls

Today I finished Infinite Jest. Hurray for me. I need to read it again.

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Something I learned at my job this summer is that I have a fear of telling people what to do. Or, more specifically, if someone wants me to do something I have a fear of saying no. But, what I discovered when a large part of my job became telling people what to do and saying "no" to kids all the time is that nothing actually happens. You can express your opinions openly to people who have opposing opinions and wants and that doesn't make you a terrible person.

But I got to use this realization recently when a guy texted me and was like, "When are you going back to school?"

And I said, "the 25th."

And then he didn't say anything for three days.

And then he said, "Okay, cool, I need to give you an inflatable above-ground swimming pool to keep in your apartment. How about I drop it off on September 2nd?"

And the old me wouldn't have wanted the swimming pool but also wouldn't have been confident enough to refuse it. The pool is basically trash and useless but going through the ordeal of taking it would've been better than the dark and mysterious alternative of refusing.

Pre-bossing-little-kids-around Andy would've envisioned something like, "You won't take my inflatable swimming pool?! This is an outrage! I will arrive on a black moose in the middle of the night and stand above your bed and whisper evil incantations that will turn your bowels to gelatin." Or something reasonably terrible like that.

But instead, I said, "No thanks. I don't need it. See if someone else wants it."

And he responded, "Well, how about I just give it to you and then you can see if someone else wants it. Sound like a plan?"

To be clear, at this point my conflict was not over this kind of jerky guy trying to force his unwanted swimming pool on me with a half-baked "plan". Something inside me almost felt bad for the swimming pool itself. I get overly attached to inanimate objects so that I start seeing it less like trash this guy just wants to get rid of and more like a sheltered animal you see in a commercial with Sarah McLachlin music.

I start seeing this neglected and abused swimming pool sitting on this crappy front lawn, half-deflated. It's got a nasty, leaky hose on top of it pouring out brackish looking water which is overflowing and running on to the head of the passed out little boy next to it who tried to do a dizzy-bat belly-flop into the pool combination trick and missed. The water washes over the unconscious boy's head and now is ruining his soggy, half-eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwich that he'd left on a paper plate by the pool and a bird comes along and tries to pick it up and bring it back to her chicks but it's too heavy and it throws off her gyroscopic stability and she gets hit by a car and the little babies squeak and squeak from the branch just above the pool but their mommy never comes back.

DON'T YOU WORRY LITTLE SWIMMING POOL! IN THE ARMS OF AN ANGEL, YOU MAY FIND SOME COMFORT HERE!

But no! I don't need that kind of paralyzing doubt. I need to make manly, bearded decisions and weed out things that weigh me down and hold me back.

So I politely declined AGAIN! "No thanks. I don't want it. See if someone else does."

I still don't have a beard but I imagine with confident texts like that I'll be getting one in the mail any six to eight weeks from now.