I went to American Reunion yesterday by myself. It was stupid and predictable and funny. I ate buttered popcorn. It was good to see Stiffler and everybody else. I cried during the movie and then later that night.

After the movie, I went to a reading for a few classmates from grad school. It was the last one of the semester and the last one of my school career. I graduate next week. The poets read things I couldn’t understand but they had pretty voices and the rhythms were nice.

I had my last day at my current job this week and start a new one on Monday. I have to wear slacks. I’m a little bit scared I won’t be good at it and even if I am, that I’ll turn into the type of person who signs up for an Applebee’s rewards card.

I’m not great at change. I’m not great at endings or goodbyes or really anything to do with moving on. When I leave a room, a lot of the time I tell people to have a nice life. They laugh because it sounds a little callous. I wish I were more the type of person who told people they looked great.

I think I must have been a sophomore in high school when American Pie came out. I don’t remember whom I saw it with, only that I loved it. I was, and still am, all about embarrassing sexual exploits. I’m all about the kitsch manufacturing of happiness and friendships and love. I think it’s the best thing ever.

I sat by one of my best friends during the reading. It was really crowded so we sat on the floor against the wall. For a while, I stared at a big woman in front of me. First her underwear was showing, and then she readjusted herself and then it was her ass crack. I thought about the three years I’d spent at grad school and that being more than a tenth of my life.

I fear that nobody at my new job will think poop is funny. I fear that nobody will look up from their cubicles and that I’ll eat alone. I fear the headsets will be uncomfortable. I fear I’ll be awkward and quiet, like I always am until I know who to be afraid of. I also fear that I’ll like the job. That the money will be good enough and the promotions will be good enough and that life will be good enough.

I think if I were the kind of person who greeted others by saying, Well, you look great, I’d be better at change. I would live in the moment and appreciate others and all that shit. Maybe I’d be better at keeping in touch. Maybe I’d answer my phone and maybe even pick it up and dial a number.

In American Reunion, they are all dealing with the same things. Their lives weren’t as they planned. They felt threatened by the next generation and they felt confused and old but not that old and poor Stiffler just wants to keep the party going. I always wanted to be Stiffler, but I’m more Jim, maybe Kevin. I cried because I’d felt old watching the original thirteen years ago.

After the reading, I talked with my advisor and the editor of the magazine I’ve interned at for the last three years. We talked about wanting to be famous and people not caring and about what happens next. I felt like a child and a peer. The reading cleared out. I hugged the editor and shook my advisor’s hand. I was one of the last people to leave.

The truth is that happy hour at Applebee’s probably isn’t that bad. Neither are slacks. I like the way they make my crotch look, like there’s something there. And the truth is it’s just a job and everywhere I go, I get along with at least a few people. The truth is I need insurance and need to grow up and am almost thirty and I need to start paying off debt. The truth is also that I’ve complained about every job I’ve ever had, but motherfucker, those jobs seem like the best times of my life after a while.

I know nostalgia is pretty much a useless emotion. I know it’s not real. I know there’s a heavy component of self-pity for any good nostalgic self-created montage—the juxtaposition of current not so-great-circumstances with a highlight reel of past memories. And this is what I created last night. That song that sounds like REM on the Call of Duty commercial came on and I drove in the dark and felt bad about everything and wanted to wrap my arms around everybody I’ve ever told to have a nice life. I could only sustain the self-pity for so long. I switched the radio to sports talk radio. I listened to people talk about the death of Junior Seau. I got home and was greeted by my dog and cat and then my wife. I lay down and we watched The Real Housewives of Some City. My wife told me it’d be fine, to quit being a pussy. I thought about the movie, how their lives turned out worse than they’d thought in high school. My shit was so much better. So much fucking better.

Yesterday, I went to some marketing lunch. I guess I was technically hosting it. I don’t work for this company and really don’t know what they do but I said I would as a favor to certain people and I showed up to the Denver Tech Center with a smile and hair gel and slacks that gave me both a gunt and man-toe. I was the only man. Most of the women were old and their faces looked like avalanches. Some of the girls were sexy in that DECA-still-shopping-at-Forever 21 way. I tried to be charming and smart and I think I did okay.

I only messed up the name of the company I was representing once.

During my little speech, I was doing fine, but then the waiter brought this French bread into the little banquet room, and for some reason, I completely stopped what I was saying. I said, Yo, that bread looks good.

People laughed.

I’m not usually one to say yo and this for sure wasn’t the crowd to break it out on, but I did better after that, loosened the fuck up.

We sat at three tables of ten. I was next to a pregnant woman who kept burping into her napkin. On my other side was a doctor with a Russian accent that I completely ignored because I couldn’t understand what the fuck she was saying. A redhead sat across from me and I felt a certain solidarity in our matching rings of armpit sweat. I ate salad and salmon. I skipped dessert.

Everybody seemed so nervous. Everybody had something to sell and it was scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-suck-your-cock and it was uncomfortable. I didn’t really give a fuck because I had no real dog in the fight. This seemed to work well. I asked questions and made jokes and was a different person than I normally in, if only because I wasn’t trying to get something from these people.

Maybe there’s something to that.

Maybe there’s some life lesson that everybody has learned years ago, but like most of those things, this little nugget passed me by. Maybe people can feel desperation. Maybe people can feel neediness. Maybe they know when they are being pitched at and demanded to pay attention and expected to give something in return. And maybe this sensing of neediness and desperation is as repellent as two-girls-one-cup (to the general population, that is) and maybe the key to any successful “marketing” or “networking” is not giving a fuck about what you are selling or being sold.

Easier said than done.

I’m a slobbery mess at AWP.

And I guess it boils down to what almost everything in life boils down to: the fear of loosing something you have or not getting what you want. For the burping pregnant girl, it was not getting business for her company. For me, it’s not having magazines accept my work or at least recognize my name. It’s failure. It’s not getting what we want. And that creates the neediness. The desire to please and be accepted and deemed worthy to be part of whatever small circle we constantly feel on the outskirts of.

So if my single day as a marketer taught me anything, it’s to realize that the little literary world I put on a pedestal is just as silly as the field these women are in, at least seen from an outsider. It’s to not take it all so goddamn seriously. That I’ll do just fine being nice to people, being real, treating others like actual motherfucking humans, saying yo.

I’ve been watching a lot of Mad Men. In fact, I watched four seasons in about two weeks time. School’s done and I only work part time and I sent off the third round of edits for the novel and my new work is a little strange—not psyched on short stories and am scared to start the process of writing another novel. So I have time. I have Netflix.

I don’t love the show.

I like it, but it hasn’t changed my life or my expectations for what TV dramas can do (these are lofty ideals, but after hearing people talk about the show, that’s kind of what I was expecting).

But I’d sit on Don Draper’s face.

Or maybe the less-gay way of saying this is that I am drawn to him, as I think everybody is. He’s not overly handsome, and his breath is probability sour as hell from the cigarettes, and he doesn’t seem extraordinarily smart or nice or kind or really anything. But he has something I want, which probably boils down to confidence and properly tailored clothes.

I think about being a copywriter.

It doesn’t seem like the worst thing ever.

I have an idea for a commercial. It’s for that campaign for some airline or something where they say Need to get away? I think it would be funny if a husband’s sitting on a couch and his wife is standing next to him and they’re watching the notebook and then she leans over to lift a cheek and farts. Need to get away?

I think farts are funny and poop too.

I can just imagine some medical company asking how their product relates to poop and masturbating, as my copy indicates.

Maybe copywriting isn’t in the cards for this guy.

And maybe I’m not supposed to wear nice suits and slick my hair and be in an office and maybe I’m not supposed to be Don Draper. I don’t smoke and I don’t drink and I don’t think I’m smarter than anyone and I like to spend my time alone writing stories about people who try so hard to get something they think will make them happy. But a guy can dream. He can imagine that going to an office would be fun. He can imagine people would pay him more than two contributor copies for his work. He can imagine a world where people speak of his brilliance, where girls come at him with those snowcone-shaped tits, where it’s perfectly okay to drink all day and sleep on your couch and ignore your children and live an invented persona.

I finally read Steve Elliott’s Adderall Diaries. It was the best memoir I’ve read in a long time, if not ever. It was honest in a way most every other book isn’t, which I found to be the most beautiful kind of heartbreaking.

I told myself that I’d only do one fantasy baseball team this year, but I ended up drafting four. Most of them are no good, heavy on outfielders who were good in 2003.

There’s a girl at Starbucks right now who looks just like Emily Valentine. I had such a crush on her, even after she went all psycho-killer qu’est-ce que c’est.

I defended my thesis and it was a bit of a Peter Stenson jerk-session, which made me feel good. Then I drove back to Denver and went to a party for a girl I know who’s moving and it was weird because half the group was writers and the other half investment bankers and I drank an NA beer and felt a little like a loser. We’re maybe too old to sit around and complain, but that’s what we did. It was like Freaky Friday, all of us wanting to switch places for a while. A guy who made a hundred K a year told me he was jealous of my beard, which was really him saying he was jealous of me not having to go to work everyday and being able to hang out and maybe even my ability to tie a few sentences together. I thought about the shit I’d be able to do with a hundred K and I’d be able to get the lump in my ribs checked out with insurance. This guy was tall and confident. I really liked Freaky Friday, the one with Lindsay Lohan. My wife and I watched it with my father and he cried at the party scene at the end. Maybe it makes us feel good to complain. Maybe it’s a game of self-pity and victimization or maybe it’s a common denominator for my generation—one or two past X, one brought up on Yo MTV Raps and the explosion of the Internet and the crystallization of amphetamines—all of us sitting around talking about how bleak shit is, how we’re miserable. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just conversation. Maybe it’s easier for me to talk about making $9.75 an hour instead of the fact I sold a book to a Big Six. Maybe it’s modesty. Maybe it’s false modesty. Maybe it’s the thought that everybody has something better and is happier and has more sex with bigger dicks and nicer clothes and skinnier waistlines. Maybe it’s nothing.

Reading Steve’s memoir, I thought I would like to switch lives with him for a day or two. To feel the deep hurt he puts into words.

Every fantasy baseball team is me playing GM.

Poor old Emily Valentine, that bitch just wanted to be part of the group, would have given anything to be Brenda.

I don’t know. The girl who looks like Emily keeps giving me eyes and I have to go to work and fold clothes and it’s sunny and I feel skinny and the third round of edits for the novel are done and I just sold a story and things are pretty good. That’s my Freaky Friday moment, the one where I’m grateful for those around me, for the life I have.

I’m really psyched on Dance Moms.

I told this to a friend the other day, me and my love for this Lifetime show, and he said I was either a pussy or a pedophile. I tried to explain myself, telling him it was funny and heartbreaking and ridiculous and adorable and he said, Pussy and a pedophile.

Now he calls me Pedie Pete.

Whatever.

I can take those comments because I’m secure enough in my masculinity and my not-being-a-fiddler to know that it’s something else that draws me to the show. It’s a fat woman who screams at children and parents and demands perfection. It’s judging her. Feeling like she’s a cunt. But it’s also knowing that she’s right. Everybody is replaceable. As hard as you are working at something, there is somebody who is doing more, who wants it more, who will usurp you when you least expect it. I agree with this.

This got me thinking about my soccer career. Career might be the wrong word, but I was better than average, All-State, ODP, all that shit. But I eventually started to suck because I couldn’t stop freebasing dirty crank and then all of a sudden teammates were playing Division I and I was smoking res from charred foil and then I wasn’t starting on my club team and then I quit.

I dream about it all the fucking time.

It’s me with short shorts and long hair and being in the midfield, the ball coming, my first touch like a brick wall, give-away after give-away, my coach all small with his Buzz Beamer sun glasses yelling, my father silent in his disappointment.

It’s failure.

It’s being good at something. It’s being told that you can do great things. It’s being anointed before you’ve done a fucking thing. It’s resting on your laurels. It’s whatever cliché you want to denote the fact that you aren’t good enough.

Sure, I’ll blame it on speed.

I’ll blame it on jambands and my girlfriend’s pussy that was just the right amount of hairy. I’ll blame it on my parents and other interests and too much pressure.

But here’s what I never blamed it on—I wasn’t good enough to take soccer to the next level.

So here’s me, watching an entire season of Dance Moms in one sitting. My wife and I are saying how horrible the fat lady is, the moms just as bad. We’re smiling when they yell. I’m crying when they all get selected to be in that god-awful music video. And really, I’m thinking about the fact that none of them will make it, at least not how they want. None of them want it as much as the underprivileged whose only shot is dance, those from countries that train toddlers like sweatshops. Sure, maybe they will be Rockettes for a Christmas run or two, but that’s about it. And I’m wondering if that will be enough for them, these preteens who only know dance. I’m wondering if they’ll be twenty-eight and washed-up, having the same dream once a week, the one where they stumble during a twirl, one where their coach yells and yells, while their mothers are watch on in silence.