tanaise | In which I ramble about things that probably bore you. i.e., there's a reason there's a cut tag.

Meh. The Tom-clone even had his facial expressions. Personally, I'm amazed I still remember them, but apparently I do, and Ben made the same faces. I wish I had my group photo that i had up on the wall at ESSI, cause I would take a picture of it so you all would understand how utterly strange it is to have encountered his twin. I see people who look like other people all the time (my theory is that my brain only has a certain amount of space for different people, so it just starts grouping them after a time. Thus one of the guys there also looked very much like Brendan. And a few others reminded me to a lesser extent of other old friends/coworkers/etc.) Tom was relatively normal looking in the 'average height, average weight" type thing. Where he stood out was his hair, which was a dirty blond/light brown. When he came to lunch right after a shower, it hung in Heath Ledger type ringlets, and I'd remember how beautiful it was. By the time he came to dinner, though, he would have brushed the daylights out of it, and it would look much more like a dandelion seed puff thing. Usually he pulled it back off his face in a pony tail. His hair was basically just like mine, only I try and work with my hair, where as Tom always tried to get it to bend to his wishes. And he would drive me crazy because I thought he was so beautiful--always, really--but I wanted to show him off looking that good, and he'd never go for it. He wanted people to like him the way that he was, and that was it. Once, when he was dating Christina (

laurelwen), she some how got him to gell it down, but that was a disaster! For me at least. I wanted to see curls, not a for-once obedient ponytail. bah!

So there's a fairly unique physical presence to start with, or at least unique so far as I've known, and it's weird enough that someone looks like him. But honestly, the clone even *acts* like him. I mean, I suppose they're not like, totally unique facial expressions, and it's probably more the combination of the expressions and the skin and facial hair coloring and all. But it's so weird.

See, I loved Tom. I mean, he's off now and married and all that, but the Tom I *knew*, the one I saw every day on campus, that one isn't married. If you understand what I'm saying. They're different Toms, the one who's real and married, and the one who is just in my memories. I know this. I'm sure I talked about this before, but maybe not. I think most of you know, anyways. He's one of the boys I all but dated. Heck, I was in college at the time--it probably was more like dating than it would have been like if we really had been a couple. I usually call him my almost-boyfriend, but that takes explaining. I totally adored him in college. He was a junior my freshman year, came back from Aix-en-Provence. I thought he was so funny looking the first time I saw him, and I was scared to death of him, because he was a junior, and thus very grown up and all (and when I was a junior, I nearly wet myself with retrospective laughter). He had an English class with me (and in retrospect, this was *some* english class, as most of my college crushes took it with me. they weren't all simultaneously crushes, but over the 4 years I was there, nearly all of them were in that class. Heck, the others might have been as well, I know I don't remember all of them), and I just fell in love with him.

And I gradually ended up doing *everything* with him, which is why I sometimes save time and just call him my boyfriend, because if it wasn't for the fact that there was always Christina along with us, there would be no doubt at all that we were dating. And so very very many of my favorite memories involve him and Christina, which is why I always forgave Christina, I think, because she always reminded me of how very happy I'd been. This is ironic, for reasons I'll disclose in a moment. Anyways, end of the quarter rolls around, I had a breakdown, went out for coffee, had another one while out--very dramatic evening. When I walked back from there--I'm pretty sure it was the same night. It *may* have been the next night, it was exam time and all the days ran together, he went up with me, and we had 'the talk' which in our case was, "we should have been dating, but it was so comfortable, we didn't want to rock the boat." And we promised to write, and then I went home for the summer, and we emailed, and it was all well and good until fourth of July when he and Christina started dating. And it was horribly tragic for a while, but like I said, I forgave her because we hadn't actually been dating, and because it wasn't just a fling, which would have been hard to forgive, but they dated for a year and a half or so. (Though some of my friends were perfectly willing to go out there and break her kneecaps for me if I'd just said the word.)

I do wonder sometimes why I never thought about working on campus over the summer, and what my life might have been like if I had done it. And it's not that I think it was the wrong thing, what I did. I just wonder.

And they eventually had a messy messy breakup, and I lost touch with him, and heard later that he'd gotten married (that, on the other hand, I'm bitter about. He could have at least asked me!), and I don't think I heard from him directly until last year when I dug up his email and wrote to him (because I sold Wounds, and Wounds is one of my stories with a Tom character in it, though I didn't tell him that). And I'd truly love to be in touch with him, but he seems to only be able to answer one email from me a year, much like Alex, the other junior, the one my roommate had such the crush on. Though he may just not check email all that often--I'll see if he does write back. He *asked* what I was up to and all that--I assumed he was actually curious.

I was trying to explain to Andrea just a minute ago, how I can be over him and still get so disturbed by the sight of the boy who looks like him, and I'm not really sure. Out of sight, out of mind is probably a big part of it. And the rest of it is mostly the knowledge that the boy I have such a crush on is just a memory. I don't know what it would be like to actually run into him again. I never fell in love with anyone else like that, really, so I don't know what it feels like to see someone with someone who isn't you. It wasn't fun, exactly, with Christina and him, but it wasn't squeeze-your-heart bad either. So I don't know what it would feel like to meet him and his wife either. It's never something I've looked forward to. I know I always fall for taken boys, but I try not to think about their girlfriends. Like I said, Out of site, out of mind. ;)

Anyways, if, for example, Christina is reading this, she may be laughing herself sick over how wrong my memories are, but that's not the point. They're *my* memories, and I'm allowed to be the star in them.

I applied for a job as a proofreader at Houghton Mifflin. I *think* I'm qualified, but I can't quite tell if the job is for a proofreader (which I am, and have experience as) or a Lead Proofreader (which I'm not yet.). I hope my resume looks good. I hope they decide to pull it for an interview. Oh please oh please oh please. I finished work early today--I'm pretty sure I forgot one or two little things my supervisor had wanted me to do, but I knew they weren't much, and since the boss had been so cranky about me coming in today, I decided to leave early in the hopes that it would make him think fondly of me, and have me come back next week. Unless I can get a $15/hr job somewhere else, which would also rock, but I'm not holding my breath. (interview interview interview) I left my email address and phone number with for my supervisor, along with a copy of my resume and cover letter. In the (rather gushy) letter I wrote, I said they were so she could see what all I was capable of, if they want me to come back and temp later. Of course, it's also incase they've got any jobs I'd be good for. (hint hint hint, though I hadn't known about the proofreader's job when I left it there.)

I've got a list of all the books I remember working on. And it's kinda sad, really. I mean, some of them are listed as "the one with all the tables" (I'm pretty sure that's Hispanic Serving Institutions) and "The one with all the charts" (Possibly school crime. Oh, no, wait. It was some sort of indicators.) I will never track all these things down. What I *should* have done was written them in various forms--a simple list, a spelled out list, maybe something all fancy with a hyperlinked dealie, perhaps as a powerpoint display of covers, and burned them onto CD with even some of the PDFs. That's what I *should* have done. Instead, I have a sheet of paper that's almost readable, and a page of write up on the computer.

There's all sorts of things I should be doing, but clearly the most important thing was to write a forty million word discussion of something you probably weren't that interested in anyways. I need dinner.