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Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2003 - 8:47 p.m. NONEXISTENCE Something occurred to me today, as I sat in my half, or probably not even half, cubicle in basically a closet with four other coworkers, with countless others walking in and out. Actually, it did not just occur to me today, in fact, it is just becoming more and more brutally apparent. If I were to disappear from the face of the earth today, the only people who would know about it would be my coworkers, and the only reason they would care would be because they could get me in trouble for missing work. If they did not know, perhaps a week down the road my parents would call me at home, but my parents would not assume that I am gone even if I did not answer. It might take a few unreturned phonecalls for them to be concerned. Other than that, no one on this planet would even notice. I remember when I was a kid riding home every day on a school bus. We would always ride past this house with a large bay window facing its front yard. Through it, you could see this elderly woman--the decrepit, overweight type that always wore rollers in her hair--hunched over a kitchen table apparently eating. Every day, I mean every day, you would pass and see this woman there, in the same seated position, hunched over the table, as though she fell dead in her oatmeal. It was like that for two to three months. Her yard became overgrown with weeds, the old car in the driveway never moved, and it occurred to me that it was possible she was dead, and that no one even knew about it. As a manic child, I sickly grinned at the idea and kept my mouth shut, and one day I passed by and no longer saw her in the window. Whatever happened, whether she was dead or alive, I have no idea. I seems that everyone nowadays owns a cell phone. Old people have them, kids have them, everybody has them. I do not. Why? I have no one to call me! How sad is that? When I come home in the evening, my answering machine is never flashing. I never get more than two or three personal e-mails a week, and those are from family or this crumby diary. And 99% of the time I ever do get contacted is when I initiate contact. (OK, I will give my Houston roommate credit, he did recently contact me first). And when I do get phonecalls its either my parents or something informational dealing with a volunteer organization I left my number with. And now they are upping the ante with the overtime I will be putting in. If you had any idea about the work I do, you would have to wonder if my life has any meaning whatsoever. In essence, I put in hundreds of hours helping to put together a report that no one will ever read. My life is God's sick version of a cruel Dilbert joke. Twenty-seven years-old, intelligent, educated, friendly, charming, funny, good-looking, athletic, well-mannered, cultured, moral, etc. I must not exist. |