This Is How I Deal With Rejection.

Tomorrow is my first day back at work in almost three weeks. I am not excited, because I feel like I'm starting a new job. I'm so out of the loop.

When people ask me what I ideally want to do for a living, I'm just going to say, "Not making a living." Because, honestly, the last two and a half weeks - despite the whole death thing - have been great because I haven't had to go to work.

I've had a wonderful weekend back in Chicago. I haven't done much; I went to Berlin on Friday night and it was fun and not the usual mess. Sure, all the normal dipshits were there, but I did hang out with friends and make out on the street after closing, and you can't really complain about that, now can you?

The rest of the weekend was low-key: drinks with friends on Saturday night, a pre-Memorial Day cookout on Sunday, and an afternoon walking about Lakeview, buying books and sweating my face off (it's hot all of a sudden!). And after a great night of burgs and brews at Big Chicks, I came home kind of dreading work tomorrow because it means I have to go back to the real world.

And then I got an annoying bit of news I'm not going to share, because I'm trying (honestly!) not to overshare on the Internet these days. But still, I'm kind of bummed and I feel like I'm slipping back into the bitter guy I was four weeks ago. Of course this all happens right before I go back to work. I don't think this is a coincidence.

I will tell this story, because I think it's indicative of how that embittered guy is still resting just under my skin, and how I don't even give a shit about letting him out anymore.

There's this guy that I had a crush on about a month and a half ago. And it was a generally big crush, the kind that grew out of daily IM conversations and at least one actual date that cost me a good fifty bucks. (I know that's lame as hell to say, as if I should be able to write-off any investments I made in courtship.) Anyway, things, obviously, did not progress beyond me professing interest (um, a few times) and him being a general douchebag who didn't give me a straight answer. Finally, after the last time, I took him off my buddy list; a few weeks later, I deleted him as a friend on Facebook and MySpace, and was pretty happy about it.

Then, last week, when I was knee-deep into my "red wine boot camp" as Adam referred to it (you know, the two weeks I spent drinking at least four glasses of wine every single night), I happened to visit his Facebook page for the expected aggravation it would cause me. I saw that he posted a note about songs that reminded him of friends or something (because that's what people without blogs do, apparently), and he mentioned a Neko Case song. But he spelled her name as "Niko."

And this is what I did:



And you know what? I'm still pretty pleased with myself.