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There are bad days and there are bad days. Then there are days like today, thought Leia.
The good news was the new administration was really serious about getting out of at least one of the major conflicts. Leia was all for that. The bad news was the new folks in town wanted assessments, projections and estimates for everything, with a million possible contingencies, and they wanted them about three years ago. They were not only in no mood to increase the budget and therefore maybe give Leia the raise she'd been promised every three months for the past year and a half; they couldn't understand why anyone in her agency could possibly need any more money, given how much money had come their way over the last sixish years.
Leia wanted to pick someone up by the neck and shake them, screaming in their ears, "The contractors got all the money you idiots. I work for the government therefore I get paid jack shit. And you've fired my best friend because he's gay." True, it probably showed poor judgment that he'd talked to reporters while protesting the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy in the military, but they had co-workers who'd be in the news protesting GMO foods and nothing ever happened to them. Andy's lover had also gotten the axe, although she couldn't really blame them for that because he'd never done any work to speak of anyway and treated Andy very badly.
Almost as badly as Doug treated her.
Almost as badly as Doug had treated her. Doug wasn't doing anything to her any more, because Doug had dumped her. By text message.
God that was tacky. I mean, bad to get dumped in public. Worse to get dumped on the phone. Voice and e-mail tied it up for the next step down, but text messaging had to be the worst. But Leia had decided that she'd been moaning about that text message for, how long? She checked her watch. 20 days, 13 hours 9 minutes and some seconds. She was starting to think it was maybe time to move on. They'd only dated for 10 months anyway. If she spent any more time bemoaning his departure, she'd never have a life. She'd wind up with cats or something. Which she was allergic to.
Leia increased the incline on the treadmill. She probably should be lifting or at least circuit training, but when she lifted when she was this angry, she hurt herself. She could try to find a sparring partner, but so far, everyone she liked to train with was taking one look at her and not even bothering to ask how she was doing. When she tried to schedule some time on the mats, they patted her on the back and suggested beer instead, which she was avoiding because of the calories. Which she was worried about because Doug had commented on her weight a month ago. Which she could now safely ignore, but couldn't stop thinking about. She was 5'10" in her stocking feet, and on a good day, she weighed 174, which was just this side of overweight. On a bad day, she weighed 178, which was on the wrong side of overweight. Her doctor wasn't worried about it. The nurses always joked about what she had in her pockets when they weighed her. Most people guessed she weighed at least 20 pounds less. Doug, not so much. He looked at her and where everyone else saw definition and strength and power, he saw too-big and therefore fat.
Never mind that she could break him in half, even if he was three inches taller than her. Oh, he looked strong enough, but it was gym-muscle with a bad trainer: no core to speak of and no stamina. Also, no training. Andy had been trying to get her to dump him since the first date. She kept telling Andy she'd dump Doug when he dumped Owen. Looked like the decision had been taken out of their hands.
She really ought to just give up trying to date guys who were taller than her. They weren't all jackasses, not by a long shot. Nor were all the good ones taken, or gay, the way some of her more obnoxious female coworkers complained. The problem was trying to get the whole package: just dating guys her height and up wiped out half or more of the men, depending on what age you looked at. Trying to get someone who'd finished college, was holding down a steady job, stayed in any kind of shape at all, and didn't bore the crap out of her in the first fifteen minutes was also hard. Oh, and hadn't spent time in jail would be nice, too.
But at thirty, a lot of people around her age were, not necessarily married, but not precisely on the market, either. Some of them had partners. Some of them had kids. Some of them had both, which Leia still wasn't sure if she thought was lucky or unlucky or neither. Certainly those people didn't have any time to socialize. She'd tried online dating, which is how she'd found that prize Doug, and his predecessors Alan, David and John. Each relationship started out promising with some dinners out, some movies, maybe going to a game, maybe a weekend out of town. The sex was never great, but it wasn't awful, either, and it was nice having a steady partner. The problems tended to start when they started talking about family. She was never sure if she should just cut to the chase and find out if this was the do-you-want-to-have-a-family question, because invariably there was a dangerous prelude involving do-you-have-any-siblings and what-are-your-plans-for-Thanksgiving. And then she had to haul out her sob story of how she did have siblings, but they didn't talk to her, and neither did her parents, because she'd had the poor taste to be born into a family of Jehovah's Witnesses and decided not to stay a member. After being baptized. So now they wouldn't even talk to her.
On days like today, it was hard not to think about what the implications of being dumped by her boyfriend and your entire family said about her as a person.
Andy, whose relationship with his father had gone through a particularly bad decade between the ages of 15 and 25, was adamant that all it meant was that she was a decent person who had an unfortunate tendency to be attached to people who weren't so decent. Being attached to her birth family was one thing, but Andy kept telling her she really ought to get some therapy. Which is why, six months ago, she'd started seeing Dr. Foster, consequences to her career be damned.
Dr. Foster said pretty much everything Andy said, and other than that spent a lot of time listening to Leia and trying to get Leia to say what change in her life would make a meaningful difference. Leia had a lot of answers to that question, and Dr. Foster kept gently redirecting Leia to the ones she had some control over. As a result of their twice monthly sessions, Leia had been changing the way she talked to people and, on balance, that had been good. She wasn't getting any more money at work, but her boss was being really, really nice to her. The downside being that Doug decided he didn't like the new, improved, ask-for-what-she-wants and tells-you-no-if-she-doesn't-want Leia and dumped her. By text message.
Leia turned the incline on the treadmill up to maximum.
The real problem, Leia thought, for the millionth or so time, was that she hated her job. She also hated her apartment, her now-ex-boyfriend, and the fact that her childhood had been so fucked up, but the big problem was the job. Which had benefits and paid decently, although not great. It was too good to walk away from, but not so good that it compensated for the trouble her conscience gave her. She might not be pulling triggers on innocents, but she was sure providing a lot of support to people who were and it was getting hard to sleep at night. Unfortunately, all of the obvious other places to go from her current job were just going to get her more of the same.
Maybe she should go back to school. Get some loans. Pick a graduate program, maybe linguistics. Or really switch gears and get an MBA and go be corporate for a while.
She turned the incline back down, and spent ten minutes gradually cooling down before heading to the showers. Dried and dressed, but with still-wet hair, she had to answer her usual Friday evening question: go back to work and wrap up some of the leftovers, go out and try to find someone interesting to talk to at a bar or a club, go home? She mentally tossed a die, and came up with, find a Borders and pick up a new novel. Maybe she'd splurge and get Chinese takeout on the way home. Trashy novel. Trashy food. Trashy life.
Worked for her. Dr. Foster had told her once that sometimes getting to a good space was more about making all the little things right, and not worrying too much about the big things.
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Copyright Rebecca Allen, 2012.
Created: July 9, 2012 Updated: July 9, 2012