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CHAPTER 2
ALARIC
This whole day has sucked balls.
Or maybe it’s just that I had such high hopes. I read it somewhere that Happiness equals Reality minus Expectations. So even if reality is pretty good, if your expectations were too high, you have a negative overall experience. Put it this way: if you expect to receive board games for your birthday and you get a bike, you’re happy. But if you get a new bike for your birthday when you were expecting a pony, you’re unhappy.
I guess I was expecting the pony.
First day of my new job, first day wearing new clothes, first day moved into my new apartment, first day of making some new friends in this new city…it was like my first days on a university campus, actually, and just like that time, I hoped for more than I got.
At thirty-four years old and living in the Washington DC suburbs of Northern Virginia, I thought I’d always be stuck in a SysAdmin job, running corporate servers, never quite good enough to get moved into software development. I kept feeling like I was never quite good enough to get promoted or do anything really interesting, until I got headhunted by this software developer company in Rivertown. Everybody in the industry has heard of TechBridge, and it seemed like such a great place to work.
It still seems like a great place to work. I just feel so awkward. Like I don’t fit in. Like I’ve never fit in and I’m never going to.
I was always the guy that girls turned down. Called me geek, called me nerd, called me weird and “on the spectrum.” They said I liked weird geeky shit. They said I dressed weird.
I know TechBridge employees dress a little better than IT employees everywhere else I’ve worked, so I made sure to go buy some new clothes. Business casual, I told the guy in the men’s department. Todd at Macy’s sent me home with dress pants and snug-fitting button-down shirts, and shoes that look nice but feel strange. No more t-shirts and jeans at work. So now I have “business casual” clothes but a lot less money, and still no clue how to make this shit look good on me.
Worse? My coworkers didn’t invite me to lunch. I got my PB&J out of my Green Dragon Inn lunchbox (you know, the one serving Bywater and Hobbiton) and sat at my desk with it, and two people said “cool lunchbox” but didn’t ask me to eat with them.
I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.
And I got lost walking from my apartment to TechBridge this morning, even though it’s only three blocks from the Cassian building and I had it pulled up on my phone app. Not sure what happened there.
For sure, that apartment building is way cooler than I am. I ventured into the gym over the weekend, and felt like everyone was staring at me, even though I do know how to use the free weights and can run six miles in half an hour. Maybe it was my shitty workout clothes, I don’t know.
Maybe it’s my name. Sometimes I want to ask my mother where she picked my name from, because it’s fucking weird. In college, I kept asking people to call me Ric, but somehow they’d find out it’s really Alaric, and they’d say “how cool” and call me Alaric, and then stop treating me like just another guy.
I still feel like I don’t fit in.
And I’m fucking lonely.
I can’t say why I am so convinced that there’s a woman out there for me. Except that I am. There’s a woman out there who likes the things I like—or most of the things I like—and who’s going to like me.
And I’m going to like her. I’m going to like spending time with her. I’m going to fall in love with her, and we will be in love together, and we’ll get married and maybe we’ll have some kids, maybe we won’t, but either way we’ll be happy.
Never tell me that dreams don’t come true. I believe they do. True, I’ve got very little evidence from my own life, except that somebody thought I’d be a good addition to TechBridge staff, and I know I will be.
I will be.
I will figure this shit out.
I’ll look at the bosses at TechBridge and I’ll remind myself that I’m allowed to dress nicer than I used to. I don’t need to wear Chucks and a Star Wars t-shirt to work; I can wear them at home so I don’t feel like a fraud.
I’ll see what the guys in the Cassian wear to the gym and try to emulate it.
I’ll ask my coworkers to go to lunch with me, instead of waiting for them to ask.
And I’ll ask out all the women who catch my interest. Sooner or later, one of them might be interested back.
Because that woman who’s meant for me? My soulmate? I know she’s out there.
I stop at Mindy’s and eat dinner while rereading the Mistborn Trilogy on my phone, then walk back to my apartment on the ground floor of the Cassian, wishing I had some friends.
I go work out in my Rand al-Thor t-shirt and ripped shorts, deciding not to care about the blonde woman ignoring me from the lat machine, or the two dudebros taking turns on the rowing machine. I do my forty sit-ups and run my six miles on the treadmill, and go take a shower.
My apartment has barely any furniture in it, but it does have a bed and a desk. I need a couch…and a cat. I miss having a cat.
