Another installment of: Nedlum beats himself up for a coward.
Another good day at work at the Other Tiger bookstore today. I pressed yet another copy of The Eyre Affair on a middle-aged fellow, made a girl take home Bridge to Terabithia (which to my endless shame I cannot parley into a joke about having a bridge to sell to the credulous), and will have sold a copy of The Book Of Three, when it comes in, to a boy who will love it, or else. I also got Loraine, a coworker, to promise to watch Firefly, which I think she'd like, as she's apparently a bit of a Trekkie.
But I never rest on my laurels. Nope, ain't my style. Instead, I pull the laurels apart, twine them together into a whip, and begin the self flagellation.
So, what idiotic thing have I done or failed to do today, knowing full well that the path I'm taking and the path that I ought to take are the same path, in the same way that 95-North is in a sense the same road as 95-South? This one is a simpler source of angst than many, which may or may not be helpful. Let the flashback proceed:
Duringan average work day, there are a multitude of tasks one can perform. Open boxes of books that UPS dropped off, make sure they're all there, receive them into the computer, and shelve them; that whole chain is arguably the biggest of the lot. But you only do it on the weekdays. Other tasks occur every day, but take less time: emptying the PO Coral, the holding screen in the computer for books we just sold out of that we may or may not want to keep in stock; making sure everything moved from the Coral into the Penguin Order is something we actually want (aka: second guessing your fellow employees); pulling down overstock to make the shelf tighter packed; alphabetizing books; and other general cleaning tasks.
But that really can only go on for so long. And, before you know it, you're back at the task which is, at it's best, the most rewarding thing you can do, and at the worst the most mindless: patrolling the store in a quick walk-about, asking everyone you see "How's it going?" or "Having any luck?" or, if you're not sure the message got through "You need any help over here?", all the while hoping that the customers think that you're just trying to be helpful, rather than assuming you're nosy, pushy, or suspecting them of shoplifting. A good ten percent of the time, they won't notice you, leaving you to decide whether it's better to be snubbed in silence or to push yourself on them. Perhaps twenty percent of the time, they do need your help. Mostly, though, the average customer is an Ayn Rand hero, able to thrive by their own intellectual might without the mollycoddling of the Book Store Employee. I don't know nothing about Ayn Rand.
Anyway, I was just, for the fifth time today, making sure that fiction was well stocked, when I saw that a rather comely girl was holding a stack of books, four or five high, with her mother holding another bunch. One of those the younger girl held was a copy of The Big Over Easy. I asked her if she'd read his other books? She had. I told her that Over Easy was good, but Jack Sprat was no Thursday Next.
A bit later, she was browsing the Fantasy Sci-Fi section, examining The Privilege of the Sword by Ellen Kushner (a book that I'd judged by the cover, and found most intriguing). I suggested The Dragonbone Chair by Tad Williams, my favorite author that nobody knows about, to which she said that already she'd read and enjoyed it, to which I said that she was probably the first person I'd met to read it, and that meant the pattern in which every person I recommended it to failed to read it survived as intact as ever.
Speaking of tact, along the line, I learned she was entering her sophomore year at Swarthmore (which was starting rather late this semester), and that she normally lived in Florida, information gleamed in the typical, circumspect way one would expect from such a suave gentlemen as myself. I'm amazed that I didn't stab myself with a pen in the process. So, I definitely had enough information to know that this was a girl I could be interested in, something which I'd been rather sure of when I first saw her because she was a girl of a fitting age in a bookstore. What other information had I learned through my cunning?
Her last name? No idea. Her first name? Nope. Phone number? Not a digit. Email address? AIM handle, LJ, Facebook, Myspace, Xanga? Nada.
Plenty of easy excuses to be offered, the most readily available being that, while a hundred odd miles isn't that long a distance in terms of long-distance relationships (especially as one could probably take a train the entire way), I'm of the, perhaps ignorant, opinion that while a long distance relationship is by no means a doomed one, there should be a relationship that exists before the distance. Phone calls, E-Mails, instant messaging: they're great. But I'm not yet convinced that, even laying aside the physical (a concept which mankind does not easily lay aside), we can entirely dispense with face to face contact, in life in general and in relationships especially.
But, of course, that's all crap. It may be true. It is true, every word of it. But it's crap. Because the reason I didn't ask this nameless girl if I could call her some time is because I don't have a working car, and because the idea of doing it, in hindsight as rational as three, was at the time rather like saying I ought to turn all those Magic: The Gathering novels we'll never sell into bars of gold.
But, there is always a chance. So, in the great spirit Missed Connections, a cry to the heavens that will never be heard:
I offered you Tad Williams; you'd already read him. Meet me for coffee, and I'll tell you what else to read.
It's a godawful small affair