The Bubble Bursts

14/08/2006 – 5:12am

It’s hard to say whether I’m blogging at 5 on a Monday morning because I had a crap-arse night last night or there are just a lot of things in my head at the moment. Last night I went to dinner with my family because Rachel, prodigal daughter, finally came home from the Americas. We ended up at Jimenez, a Mexican restaurant, and I drank half a jug of frozen strawberry margarita. Add to that a large Mexican meal. Bad, bad idea. I didn’t regurgitate anything but I felt decidedly crook for the rest of the night.

My dad drove me to Waverton but I had to doze for most of the way so I told him I didn’t want to talk about anything, least of all his most recent argument with my mum (incidentally my mum started chiding me for ‘being rude to’ my aunt at my housewarming last week. In my defence, I’d been actively hosting all night – as Sir is a passive hostess – as well as drinking and had only just sat down to actually chat to people when they unexpectedly dropped in).

So I stumbled in, dry retched into the toilet bowl, had a shower and went to bed at 10pm. Woke up at 4am feeling restless so woke up and mended the hem of my pants (yes, I do these kinds of things in the early hours of a restless morning). Went back to bed about 20 minutes later and dozed for a bit but just couldn’t settle so got up again (5am) and decided to blog.

The big news this week is that, in my eyes at least, Paul has had a complete fall from grace. I’m happy that I found out about him sooner rather than later before I wasted precious minutes pining about someone who is not the person I thought he was. This tale begins on Friday night, as do most tawdry work incidents. Actually, he began rather well – Lizzie called a 4pm finish but I was just at the end of a topic so I decided to work ‘back’ to 4:30pm so I could finish up instead of hanging it over the weekend. Paul, who had already left with the others, came back 20 minutes later to check if I was coming, which I thought was nice of him and, let’s face it, which I thought meant something.

Evidently not. I made it to the pub and chatted to Vanessa mei mei (V2) who bought me a drink because I gave her my Catherine Manuell scarf (hey, I put it up for sale at the markets but no one bought it) but she then went outside for a smoke. I joined a group containing Melissa and Sean, James and Paul so talked to them for a bit. Found out a bit more about Paul’s girlfriend; her name is Lucy, she’s vegetarian, she practically lives with him and they’ve been going out for 6 or 7 years. According to James, she’s also incredibly smart. Then spoke to Vanessa (V1) and Dom, who was great to chat to. At some point some people shifted so V1 and I squeezed in next to Jess and started talking about how cute Ben is and then we decided to go home.

Went to the train station where Jess caught a ‘special’ to Central. V1 and I decided not to catch it and instead I went to get ‘food’ from the 7-Eleven (I think I ended up getting some sort of Mexican pie?). V1 caught the next train, which was also a ‘special’ but instead of waiting for the next one I decided to go back to the pub. This is where the night begins to get seedy so I’m going to avoid naming anyone other than Paul and James. I found a bunch of workmates hanging around outside, then we were all shepherded off the footpath into the pub because of zoning or whatever.

Inside I was chatting to a couple of them about the concept of love, many points on which we agreed to disagree. At one point I recall having a heated discussion with Paul about the value of creative intelligence, where the main argument was that a poem or song written about you (benevolently) was a symbol of love. He argued that the poem had to have the correct rhyme and meter to mean anything and the way he was going on about it clearly indicated that he held no value in creative intelligence. His hold on me slipped.

Then a bunch of them left, leaving four of us; James and I chatting and Paul chatting to C* (anonymous co-worker). I saw an available pool table so I suggested to James that we play, which Paul overheard and counter-suggested that he and C* play against James and I. We played. In between his shots, Paul’s hands were busy fondling C*. She hadn’t led him on. Although she was clearly uncomfortable, she was too drunk to throw him off. Admittedly, we’d all had a bit to drink and I’m not sure how many Paul, James and C* had consumed but I was certainly the most sober, having avoided alcohol for the previous hour.

There are three things that stand out for me following the incident:

Paul is not a touchy feely person – this was out of character

Paul has a long term girlfriend (see above)

Paul is C*’s boss, therefore this incident was not only unprofessional but even went into sexual harrassment territory. Knowing C*, she won’t take a stand. Paul is too powerful.


Two other things struck me. One, purely selfishly, was that where I expected to find some sort of jealousy, I could only find disgust for Paul. He had been diminishing for me the whole night, just through side comments really, but a series of them, and with this he finally toppled off his pedestal. The second was James’ reaction, rather lack thereof. I have a lot of respect for James, and I still do, but I think he’s intimidated by Paul although they’ve been friends for years. I actually asked him directly (as Paul was busy taking a shot) whether Paul was "usually like this when he drinks" to which James declined to reply. Fair enough, he has a loyalty to his mate, but in the light of this kind of behaviour you would at least expect either a condemnation of the behaviour or defence of his friend. Not nothing.

In other news, Clint got with Shannon, the new receptionist (he’d been sweet to her since she came… and he’d also been dumped by his girlfriend earlier in the week), the Reds and Greens drew 2-all on Wednesday (good game, too), I had tea then went shopping in Newtown with V2 on Saturday arvo (told her the news but kept C*’s ID secret) and lunch with Anne and her boyfriend Aaron yesterday.

I’m due to have a ‘debrief’ about the incident with C* this morning before work so I’ll let you know what entails. The only reason I’ve been concealing her name is that I’m not sure how she feels about me speaking about it. We talked about it when we left the pub, after we split from the boys, but not enough. She also called me on Saturday arvo but I was out with V2 so had to limit the conversation. As I said, I’ll let you know.