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2007-03-06 - 4:08 p.m.

I work in an office building, right? A big, suburban, mirrored-window, four-story office building with plenty of parking. And there are all kinds of people here that I never would associate with otherwise and I've always considered myself the tolerant type. Sticks up for the disadvantaged and plays the other side when conversations ever get racy or saucy or otherwise racist or mean.

So why is it that the mentally disabled guy who works in the mailroom gets to me? I don't want him to get to me. I want to like him. When I'm in the men's room, at the urinal, it seems he's always either in there already or just behind me. He talks to himself, sort of a stream-of-whisper and you can make out some of the words. He wears his pants way high on his belly and his watch on the outside of his sweatshirt, halfway up his forearm. He's about 45 with salt-and-pepper hair and he's tall, four or five inches taller than me. Every time I see him, and it's just for a half-second, I cringe on the inside. It's a gut reaction. I know that. I haven't told myself to act this way, and that's what makes it worse. I wish I could shake it or convince myself not to react that way. In all respects, he's a harmless guy who delivers FedEx packages and lets people know when they've got visitors and helps out wheeling boxes of paper around the four floors.

So that's a strange thing about me.

In less introspective news, I'll be buying the shit out of the new Arcade Fire album later today.

I have five student short stories to read and mark up before 7 p.m. tomorrow. Forecasts call for one to three inches of snow during the day tomorrow.

Also, what would we do without memories that spring from nowhere, the ones that pierce and make us laugh? Specifically, yesterday, while putting stuff in my cup of coffee, I remembered the time my junior year of college when three of us found a stack of quarter- to half-eaten pizzas bound for the trash outside the administration building and then took them back to our apartment and ate pizza for a week. There were ten or twelve of them. We had to carry an armful each.

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