Burg, Part 1

Burg was this boy I fell hard for, for a long time. I first met Burg when I came up north a few years ago. I started at the end of August, and he was in my same company and had started a couple of years ahead of me. The first time I met him, I remember thinking to myself, "Wow, he's really cute. Too bad I'm getting married to Engineer." Engineer requires a whole back-story of his own, which will come in due time on this blog.

At some point later that year, I got a sense that Burg may be interested in me, but I was so happily attached to the man of my dreams that I felt sorry for Burg that he was liking someone in vain. And of course, I still thought he was extremely cute, athletic, outdoorsy. All in all, a perfect guy for me if I weren't planning to get married. To someone else.

I started liking Burg the next summer. Engineer had decided that I wasn't important enough for him to stay in town for the summer and took a short-stint job down in DC. By this point, I had been up north for about a year, and with very similar interests, Burg and I ended up having quite a few mutual friends within our company and we had plenty of run-ins that summer.

The most memorable run-in was a camping trip we all took together with some mutual friends. There were two cars going, but we got separated on the drive up. I was in Burg's car with two others, and we got to the campsite first. Being that it was really late and that we were all tired, we went ahead and pitched tents to sleep instead of waiting for the other car. There were two tents for 4 people, and the other two people were kinda sorta dating, so that left me and Burg to sleep in a 2-person tent together. For those not tent-trained, a 2-person tent has a base about the size of a full-size bed. Nothing happened, but I think there was a whole lot of unspoken sexual tension and temptation on both of our parts.

My feelings for Burg grew and grew and grew, and while I harp a lot on religion as the breaking factor for Engineer and me, my lack of exclusive interest for Engineer was also a reason. When Engineer and I broke up in October, I happened to be at a meeting the next day with Email Boy. After the meeting, he went with me and a friend of mine to the nearby pub for some beers. There, I spilled the beans that Engineer and I had broken up, definitely well aware of the fact that I was making sure Burg knew I was now single and not attached.

Thus started a series of dates-that-never-were. At the time, I was in a office that was actually down the hall from him. Granted, it was a long hallway, and we were at opposite ends, but you would think being on the same floor would have been a plus in our favor to develop something. To make a long story short, we sent multiple-page emails to each other at least once a day for about a month, and finally saw a movie together. It was a film that he wanted to see, and he originally also invited two mutual friends along. The two friends had the intuition to not come, so the movie ended up being a "date" with just Burg and me.

All in all, after a month plus of sending emails, I got tired. He never made a move, and all of our communication was always on email. He gave me a book as a present; he got me truffles; he scheduled an ice skating thing around my schedule, skipping a day when I was out of town. Basically, he showed interested, but never acted on interest.

This all came crashing down sometime in January when he asked me to have a talk. This was some 1.5 months after all the ridiculous emailing started. When we sat down to talk, he basically said that he never made a move beyond email because he was scared of commitment. He told a mutual friend over the summer (the same summer we slept in the same tent together) that I'm the kind of girl he sees himself marrying. So when I became available, he was scared that I would be the last relationship that he would ever be in, and he wasn't sure he was ready for that.

"Oh, and by the way, I'm seeing another girl."

F-ing A. He strung me along this whole time just to tell he he's now seeing another girl? He kept emphasizing that she wasn't his girlfriend, and that they've only been on a couple of dates ... but that he liked her better because he didn't know anything about her, whereas we were friends, and he would lose a friend if things didn't work out between us. Since he wasn't one to date multiple girls at the same time, he really thought he should talk to me and tell me that things wouldn't ever lead anywhere between us.

Bullshit.

For the longest time, I imagined that he was dating some brunette bombshell (not blonde, somehow I don't think he's into blondes). A few months later, I found out that the girl is Asian, and has quite a slutty personality. Burg and Slut Asian dated and dated and dated more seriously, all while I went through two boyfriends, countless 1st/2nd dates, all of which flopped. Not to mention that when he started dating Slut Asian, he was 26/27, and she wasn't even allowed to drink legally.

I'm not bitter.

this week's conversation with parents

When I called, my dad asked me to guess what he and mom did this weekend. Of course I couldn't guess, so he told me. He and mom drove some large quantity of hours to Cincinnati for the funeral service of one of my dad's college professors. He got a call from the professor's family on Tuesday that the old man had passed last Saturday. When my dad asked about where the services were to be held so he could send some flowers or something, apparently the son wasn't very keen on sharing.

So my dad decided that he would drive to Cincinnati for the funeral service. Not knowing where it would be, he searched the Cincinnati paper's obituaries for the whole past week. So my parents took Friday off from work, drove all day and night, and showed up at the funeral service Saturday morning at 9:30am.

My dad was very proud of himself for having done this, and claimed that the family was appreciative. I asked him if it was awkward for him to show up like that, especially since the service turned out to be for-family-only small. He said no, that the family was very surprise, but also very grateful that he and mom came all this way.

I didn't say anything else because I didn't want to hurt my dad's feelings, but my inclination would be to say that he was intruding on the family's privacy. They didn't want people to know about the service; they didn't want a whole lot of people to attend. They just wanted a chance for a small family gathering to say goodbye to their father/husband who died. But they couldn't exactly turn my parents away at the door of the funeral home, especially since they had already come such a long way. I mean, talk about awkward.

Sometimes my dad just does crazy stuff like this, and he's very proud of how resourceful or cunning he was in procuring information (like going through the obituaries to find where the services are). I don't have the heart to tell him that he's probably going through more trouble than it's worth, and especially not that his troubles are probably not all that meaningful nor appreciated.

I feel like my dad is getting worse as he's getting older, pulling off more and more of these stunts where he inconveniences those he is trying to show appreciation for, and his saintly intentions are only realized by my mom and me. Or perhaps maybe I am just getting older and starting to see my dad's actions in a different light.

Confession #1: denting a rental van

Last Thursday, I volunteered to drive a moving van to help haul stuff from one end of my company to another. On my last run around, I needed to drop off some boxes in an area with low maneuverability. Driving a large cargo van (slightly bigger than a 15-passenger), I eventually got myself stuck between two metal posts.

Looking left, looking right, I wiggled the van forward and backward, trying to dislodge myself from the bind and eventually was able to drive out of it, but not without hearing a loud "clunk clunk". When I climbed out to look, I had dented the left side of the van in three different places. One was pretty serious, and I think the repairs/body work would be pretty significant because some panels would need replacing.

I said nothing to anyone and hoped that everything would go away, praying that since I wasn't the one who rented the van nor bought the insurance, nor would I be returning the van, that the damage would 1) go unnoticed, or 2) be un-traceable back to me.

That night, I had a long dream about how an email was sent out to the entire company asking for the person who damaged the cargo van to stop being a coward and to step forward. With a guilty conscience, I woke up the next morning and thought about writing an email to confess my crime.

I never did.

Now, four days later, seemingly nothing has happened. I haven't heard anything about damages incurred to a rental cargo van, so perhaps I did get away with it after all...

a haven for confessions

There are so many things I feel like I need to get off my chest. Writing in a personal journal just wasn't motivation enough, and I never seemed to have the time for it. Somehow, writing in a blog seems different, more alluring, perhaps because of the possibility of actually having an audience.

I'm not a perfect person. I make plenty of mistakes, and I often wonder if these mistakes would come back to haunt me at some point down the road. I'm not religious in any way, so I feel almost as if I would carry these mistakes through life as my personal burdens.

So in a way, perhaps, this blog is my haven for confessions.