And Now For Something Completely Different

I had my interview yesterday. I think it went okay. The most interesting part about it was that I switched up my usual interview style for something completely different.

I knew when I applied for this job and was invited for an interview that I didn't have the exact type of experience they were looking for. However, it doesn't say on my resume that I do. Their decision to interview me anyway made me think that they were willing to train a new employee, possibly because no one with a lot of experience applied. The partner who interviewed me asked me about my experience in his practice area, and I told him about one related transaction and a few semi-related transactions, but he didn't seem impressed. I started to feel like the interview wasn't going well. Honestly, it pissed me off a little bit because I paid for expensive train tickets to get to the interview and took a day off without pay to be there. My resume details my experience, and they shouldn't have invited me for an interview if it was insufficient.

At that point in the interview, I had a mini-dialogue with myself that took place in about a millisecond. I decided that I wanted to be offered this job. I hate my current day job (my night job is okay, but it's petering out), and while I'm not so keen on moving, I could wrap my mind around it. I liked the partner I met, and I could see myself being satisfied working with him. So, I had only one real option if I wanted to give myself any chance at getting an offer: sell myself.

I am not good at self-promotion. In the past, I haven't needed to be. My resume and my accomplishments speak for themselves, and employers took note. In this economy, with so many similarly highly-qualified applicants looking for work, my credentials alone will probably not be enough to land me a job. In this situation, I did everything I could to convince the interviewer that my personality is a good fit for the firm's culture and that I am a smart person who will pick up the work quickly to compensate for my lack of experience.

I don't know if it will work. The partner may have mentally checked out of the interview the minute he heard about my experience shortage. But this was the only play available to me, and I tried to make the most of it. I'm proud of myself for trying something new, and I hope the gambit pays off.

I should say that I didn't try the drastic maneuver that Mango advocated, which was to exaggerate my experience. According to his shady ass, my unwillingness to lie means I will not last long in the legal profession. Personally, I'm hoping to get this job, but I'd rather not get it and be honest about my experience than deceive my employer into hiring me. It's not like they won't figure out that I lied, and then I'd probably get fired. I have enough problems without that blot on my escutcheon.

The Tyranny of Evil Men

I learned something yesterday about the corporate culture of my day job that helped me to understand why everyone thinks my temp supervisor is so delightful when he is, in fact, a complete weenis. The managing partner of the firm thinks it's appropriate to scream obscenities at his subordinates (i.e., everyone) until they cry. The Ghost of Christmas Future said that he yells at his secretary when she leaves her desk to go to the bathroom. What is the poor woman supposed to do? Pee in her trash can? Rumor has it that she keeps a journal of everything he says to her, and I hope she uses that information to sue his ass off one day. (I'm not really sure what cause of action she could use. As I understand it, one defense to a claim of hostile work environment is that the defendant was an asshole to everyone. Nice.)

When the leader of the firm sets the example that it is perfectly acceptable to be abusive to underlings, then how can I be surprised that my temp supervisor is horrible to me? When you compare his passive-aggressive pettiness to the cruelty of his ultimate boss, he looks like a sweetie-pie.

Do I Make Your Heart Beat Like an 808 Drum? Is My Love Your Drug?

Mango is a shitty boyfriend. Besides the facts that he moved in with his girlfriend to avoid finding a warm grate on which to make his home and that he has no intention of either marrying her or telling her he doesn't want to marry her (facts that are pretty damning), he is also not thoughtful.

I asked him today if he would get me a cookie when he went out to get his lunch. I started out about halfway kidding about it, but when he humorlessly refused, I got annoyed. He told me that he doesn't even get his girlfriend cookies when she asks for them. At that point, I scratched him right off my list of potential boyfriends.

It's one thing for him to refuse to get me a cookie, even though he was pretty much just being a dick. But his girlfriend asks him for cookies and he doesn't provide them? No. That is breaking the basic code of conduct for being a boyfriend. I don't expect a man to read my mind, but if I ask him to give me something specific, and it is within his power to do so, then I expect him to do it. I think men are hardwired to provide for the women they like. It's embedded into their DNA as hunter-gatherers. In my opinion, if I ask a man to hunt and gather for me and he won't do it, then he's not very interested in me and is kind of a shithead.

Casey Jones, You'd Better Watch Your Speed

Sometimes, I think the only reason my temp supervisor hasn't tried to get me fired yet is because he'd hate to miss out on the chance to be a dick to me. I emailed him this morning to alert him to the fact that I'm going to be out of town on Wednesday. I let him know that I'm going to be spending seven or eight hours on the Acela train, which has wireless internet access (the only thing I need to do my job), and requested permission to work remotely. He sent me a response email just saying, "You cannot work remotely." No explanation, no reason. Just no.

I understand that working remotely is a privilege and not a right. But I have asked to work remotely only once before, and I don't think it's unreasonable to work remotely once every couple months. I'm going to be stuck on a train for the span of a work day, and I thought it would be beneficial both to me and to my employer for me to use that to work. Apparently, he prefers to be petty and vindictive than to make money for the firm by having an employee do billable work. I also think that unless you are a parent telling a child to do something, "no" is not a sufficient response. It needs to be no plus a reason, like, "No, because we're not allowing anyone to work remotely." Right now, I just feel like he's saying no to me because he doesn't like me.

I really don't understand what this guy's problem is. I get the sense that I offended him or pissed him off somehow (as opposed to the possibility that he just doesn't like me because our personalities don't gel) to his petty, unprofessional behavior. Whatever I did, it was unintentional. I hate confronting problems directly, but if I thought it would help, I would ask him what I did to offend him in the hopes of clearing the air and moving on to a more productive relationship. With his personality, I think that would do more harm than good.

I feel so frustrated. I can't really leave this job right now, but I am constantly panicked that he's going to try to find a way to get rid of me. He's the only supervisor-level attorney who works with the temps, so if he bad-mouths me to his superiors, there isn't anyone to stick up for me. Also, everyone else in the firm adores him. Every single day, at least one person tells me how nice he is. It's like I'm living in The Emperor's New Clothes but instead of the emperor being naked, the emperor is a colossal dickweed. I'm putting a lot of unhealthy pressure on myself to knock Wednesday's interview out of the park just because I'm desperate to move on to a new and (one hopes) better position. Until I can find something else, I guess I just have to tolerate him.

Please Come to Boston for the Springtime

The law firm that shadily invited me in for an interview and then canceled almost immediately finally rescheduled with me for this coming Wednesday. I'm going to have to take a day off of work from my day job (or get permission to work remotely, which didn't work out for me very well the last time I did it) and travel to Beantown for the interview.

Since I used to live in the Bean, I have a lot of friends there. I didn't plan on telling any of them that I was coming for the interview. That probably won't seem strange to anyone who was ever done a very long-term job search. When I first started looking for a job, before I realized just how long a haul I was in for, I told my friends about every interview I went on. As the rejections started to pile up, I stopped. It's hard enough to deal with my own cresting hopes and crashing disappointments without also having to tell every well-meaning friend who inquires how a certain interview went that it didn't work out. The response is always the same: something else will come along, hang in there, keep your chin up. There isn't anything else for people to say, and it's not that people intend to be unsupportive (quite the opposite), but it's fucking irritating anyway. So, I just stopped telling people when I have interviews. I feel guilty about it in this instance since I'm traveling to a city I haven't visited since I moved away last June and since I could, theoretically, squeeze in visits to one or two people (though I'll be spending most of the day traveling, and I can't stay overnight because of work), but I'm assuming that people will forgive me if I end up getting the job and moving back.

In this case, I've had to make an exception. A friend of mine currently lives in the Bean but is moving to a foreign country this summer. She has asked me at least three or four times in the past two weeks when I'm coming to see her before she leaves.

What I want to say is, "Um...never?" I don't mean that in the sense that I don't like this woman or don't consider her my friend, but I have learned that I have a very different concept of friendship than other people do.

On the Myers-Briggs scale, I'm an INFJ. Like other introverts, I expend energy in social situations instead of gaining energy like extroverts do. Right now, I use up all my energy between Monday and Friday in sending out resumes and stopping myself from telling my supervisor to go fuck himself. When Saturday and Sunday roll around, I don't even feel like spending time with a friend in my own city. I sure as shit don't feel like hauling myself up to the Bean to run around seeing six different friends in two days. Just the thought of it makes me feel trapped and exhausted. Besides that, money is tight right now since I'm working as a temp, and I would have to put Teh Doggeh in an expensive kennel. Ideally, I would also like to stay in a hotel since that gives me some chance to have privacy and alone time to recharge my batteries, but that's just beyond the realm of consideration. Basically, I don't like to go visit people unless they live somewhere I haven't been before (visiting new places gives me energy, which balances out the energy I lose from the social interactions) or I think I might want to have sex with them (like London Calling). I consider email contact and the occasional phone call to be sufficient friendship maintenance.

My departing friend disagrees. She clearly enjoys spending time in the company of others. I think she's clingy, but that is probably just an introvert's bias toward solitude talking. (I envy extroverts for their ability to be perked up by social situations, but I am glad that I can enjoy being alone.) I'm going to try to have lunch with her when I go to the Bean on Wednesday because I have no intention of trying to make it up there any other time in the few weeks before she moves.

I'm put out about the situation though. I understand that it's fine for me to be an introvert but if I want to have any friends, I need to make an effort to spend time with them, even if it wears me out. I think that they should meet me halfway and be a little understanding about the fact that I'm unlikely to make big trips to see them on short notice or to want to hang out as much as they might want to. It doesn't seem right to me that I'm rewarding her annoying behavior by spending time with her when I'm not even telling my best friend Teeny that I'm going to be in town. It's my choice to do it, obviously, but I feel like the choice is between rewarding the bad behavior and losing the friend entirely. (Based on how much I'm complaining about her, it may sound like I don't care about losing her as a friend, but she actually is a nice person and I'd like to keep her in my life even though she's aggravating me at present.)

I Want to Love You, Pretty Young Thing

There's a new employee at work. He's actually not new in general since he worked there about a year ago, but I wasn't there then, so he is new to me. He's incredibly good-looking, smart, and he seems interested in me. We have tentative plans to grab coffee next week.

He's also 19 years old. He just finished his freshman year of college, and he's back at my office working in the mail room (his high school job) before he starts a prestigious summer internship.

I told two of my friends (one who works with me, one who doesn't) that I'm having coffee with this person, and both of them responded almost the exact same way. They both said, "Girl, you a ho." I took it as a compliment. I had the following conversation with my work colleague:

Me: I'm going out to coffee next week with [Pretty Young Thing].

Him: Oh, you are not.

Me: We talked about it today.

Him: You a ho.

Me: I am a mentor of young people.

Him: Very attractive young people.

Me: He knows how old I am. He probably thinks I'm a nice old lady.

Him: He wants some 30-year-old tail.

I admit that I struggled over whether it was morally right to pursue something with a man eleven years my junior, but I decided it was fine after about five minutes of consideration. First of all, it's not clear at all that he's interested in having romantical sexy time with me. He's an extrovert, and what I (as an introvert) see as flirtatious may just be him being himself. I'm okay with that, because it's still delightful. Second, even if he is interested in me, he's an adult (barely) and it's not like I'm trying to have some big, serious relationship with him.

The most significant reason I decided just to give spending some time with this man a shot is because I think it will be fun. There is a serious shortage of fun in my life right now. I have a micro-managing supervisor, no permanent job, daddy issues, and a string of spectacular relationship catastrophes. The most likely relationship possibility in my current orbit is Mango, which is, as we already know, a terrible idea. This is not to say I have nothing good in my life -- I have many good things going for me (though I tend not to blog about them as much since I use the blog to work out issues, and I usually don't feel the need to work out issues related to positive things in my life). But I have a lot of stuff going on in my life right now, some of it pretty serious, and I have been through a lot of changes in the past year. I could use some fun. I could use some carefree fun with someone I like being around, and I like being around Pretty Young Thing. I don't know him very well yet, but he has good energy. I think I'd like to have coffee with him and get to know him some more, just as friends for the moment.

Of course, if what he wants is 30-year-old tail, I do know where he can get some.

Confusion Never Stops, Closing Walls and Ticking Clocks

I loathe my day job. I recognize that I am fortunate to have a job at all in this time of economic despair, and I am grateful not to be living off unemployment or worse. However, there comes a point when I stop being filled with gratitude just to be there and start expecting to be treated like a human being. My temporary status does not give my supervisor the right to treat me disrespectfully.

My supervisor used to be a temp and was hired as a permanent employee based on a groundswell of support. Like many people who climbed out of a lesser status into a greater one, he clearly holds those of us who still hold his former status in contempt. I'm not even sure he knows he's doing it. On top of that, I get the impression that he doesn't like me personally for some reason. In general, I can put up with both his general and specific scorn, but sometimes, he pushes it too far.

Today, he sent me two emails reminding me to keep track of my time and what time I'm spending on what matter. In one of the emails, he suggested I could use the time on the email as a guide for when I switched from one matter to another. I have been a practicing attorney for five years, and I was a summer associate before that. Learning how to keep track of time is Lesson #1 at most legal employers since time is the product they're selling. Time is, as one HR manager explained to me, their inventory. I've been keeping track of my time at this particular employer for going on six months now. If there was a problem with the way I do it, I would have heard about it tout de suite from the accounting department.

I was seriously contemplating giving my notice today. I'm going on vacation in two weeks, and I thought I would just tell them that I'm not coming back afterward. However, I decided that would be a foolish thing to do. I saw this supervisor in person later in the day, and he wisely refrained from bringing up the time issue yet a third time, which is why I didn't sharpen my claws on his face.

You know, it is degrading enough to lose my job and be relegated to temp work. But it is just insupportable to be treated like a child or a moron by someone who isn't as smart as I am and who went to a much, much lower-ranked law school.

Daddy, What'dja Leave Behind for Me? All in All, It Was Just a Brick in the Wall.

The last time I spoke to my father was August 2002. Since I made the decision to stop speaking to him, all manner of people have pressured me to resume contact with him. The most common reason given is "he's your father," which I do not consider valid. (When my mother offers that reason, I respond by saying, "Who's fault is that? Yours." It's a wonder she hasn't slapped the taste out of my mouth yet.)

My mom and I recently discussed my real reasons for severing contact with my father. He's done a lot of shitty things to me over the years, such as spending my entire childhood berating me about my non-existent weight problems until I developed bulimia, but I can get past most of them because I can see them as his issues. My father grew up in a deeply dysfunctional family with an alcoholic, obese father and a mother with obsessive-compulsive disorder that manifested itself as hoarding (classic Southern story). He inherited his mother's mental health issues. I can excuse a lot of his selfishness and critical behavior as manifestations of his own issues that did not have anything to do with me, although they were hurtful and damaging to me as a child. But there are two things he did that I cannot get past.

First, he lied to me about something important. My father worked a lot when I was a child -- every day, usually twelve to fourteen hours per day. I used to ask him why he wasn't home more often, and he snappishly told me that he was putting food on the table and a roof over my head. Since his own father contributed little to the family's financial support, my mother tried to help me understand that it was important to my father to provide for us, but he made me feel like it was my fault that he had to work so much and never had time for us or himself. However, he managed to have an entire affair with the woman who is now my stepmother. Affairs like that are dangerous and hurtful, not just because my father betrayed his wife (my mother) but because he betrayed his children as well. He said he didn't have time for us, but he had time for his mistress. I can't forgive him for making me feel like it was my fault he had to be at work when, in fact, he wasn't at work all the time that he said he was. He was choosing to spend his time with someone more important.

Second, he took a situation that was emphatically and unequivocally about me and made it about him. In 2002, I threatened to kill myself. (It wasn't as bad as it sounds. I was taking some medication that had an unanticipated side effect of making me depressed. I went off of it shortly thereafter and felt much better.) My mother threatened to have me committed, and she took the unusual step of involving my father. My father called me at work and asked me to have lunch with him, but I declined. He left a letter on my windshield in which he droned on for page after page about how ungrateful I am and how awful I am to him and my stepmother (the aforementioned co-affairant). I said I was going to kill myself, and his response was to list my faults.

My father has made various attempts over the years, typically around major holidays, to reestablish some kind of contact. I have always rebuffed those attempts with the exception of the fact that I write him a note of thanks if he sends me a gift (Southern through and through, that's me). My mother did not fully understand my reasons before for avoiding a relationship with my father, and now that she does, she still feels mostly the same way. She thinks my father hurt me very deeply (correct) and that I have built a wall around myself to protect myself from being hurt like that again (correct). However, she thinks that once a wall has been created, I can't decide who it keeps out (my response: "Of course I can. I built it."), and this wall is keeping out too many people (i.e., dudes who aren't loons or duplicitous sleazebags). She urged me to remain open to the possibility of having some kind of relationship with Dad.

What would my relationship with my father look like if I hadn't decided to stop talking to him in 2002? Chances are, it would be perfunctory. My brother and my father talk, but my brother clearly does not treat my father as someone he can rely on emotionally. My mother and I are his primary emotional support network. I imagine my father and I would interact similarly, but probably even less frequently since my brother lives one hour away from our father and I live in another part of the country entirely. Could I handle having even such minimal contact with someone with whom I am so angry? I don't know.

I also don't know whether it is better to build a wall to keep my father out or whether it is better not to have a wall and let him have continued opportunities to hurt me. Much of the pain he inflicted happened when I was much younger (...necessarily, as I stopped talking to him at age 22), and perhaps I would find it easier to stand up to him now. It just seems so exhausting that I would have to do it.

Right now, I'm in sort of a murky middle place on my feelings about it. This represents a dramatic change to how I felt about the situation even a few weeks ago, when I was intractable in my desire to remain estranged from my father. Maybe I just need to stay in this place for a little while to let the pain that he inflicted, the pain that I walled off because it hurt too much, sink in. Maybe I just need to feel raw about things for a little while.

War and Pieces

Yesterday, I read Ethan Brown's non-fiction book Shake the Devil Off, which tells the story of a man named Zackery Bowen who murdered his girlfriend, Addie Hall.

Bowen was a veteran, a military policeman who served in Kosovo and Iraq. He also remained in New Orleans with Hall during Hurricane Katrina. He suffered from self-esteem issues that well pre-dated his military career, and he also had, at the very least, an evolving relationship with his sexuality (despite having been married and having Hall as a girlfriend, he was having affairs with men toward the end of his life). Brown does not make much of the self-esteem or sexuality issues in analyzing Bowen's actions.

Not only did Bowen murder Hall, but he did so in a gruesome fashion. He strangled her in their apartment in the French Quarter (located above a popular voodoo priestess's temple, which I visited on my own trip to New Orleans though I did not know anything about Bowen and Hall at that time). He then butchered her body and attempted to cook parts of her. He went on a bender involving much drinking and snorting of cocaine, spent princely sums at strip clubs, saw his closest friends and then killed himself jumping off the roof of a hotel.

I first heard about this book reading Dave Walker's excellent column in New Orleans's Times-Picayune devoted to the new HBO show Treme. I don't have cable at the moment, let alone HBO, so I'm forced to soak up information about Treme on the internet. Since the show delves so deeply into New Orleans's rich and unique culture, Walker courteously directs readers toward additional resources to find out about topics like Mardi Gras Indians or experiences of Hurricane Katrina.

What struck me most about Shake the Devil Off was not its descriptions of Hurricane Katrina but rather its descriptions of Bowen, both while he served in Kosovo and Iraq and after he returned home. Reprints of emails and letters he sent sounded eerily similar to correspondence I received from The New Guy while he was serving in a war zone in the same role Bowen had. Bowen's behavior when he returned was also chillingly familiar to me. With The New Guy, I experienced the same kind of explosive outbursts and inexplicable anger. During the relationship, my brother counseled me to get away from The New Guy and never have any further contact with him because he was abusive and dangerous. I took his comments to heart, but now I see how my life could conceivably have turned out.

It's not really for me to say whether the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan are just or whether we should have gotten into them in the first place or how we should extricate ourselves. What is clear to me though is that people are going off to these conflicts and coming back broken. Post-traumatic stress disorder, a subject on which I am no expert, seems to make it extremely difficult for even well-adjusted people to transition from combat back to civilian life. If you take someone like Bowen or, I suspect strongly, The New Guy who already has some mental health issues and add PTSD on top of that, you get a broken person. My heart goes out to The New Guy (as it would go out to Bowen, if he were still with us), but I am more convinced now than ever that I made the right decision to cut him out of my life completely. Just because I regret what happened to him and hope that he one day recovers does not mean I want to place myself in harm's way.

She Only Knows If Someone Wants Her

"I'm not a concept. Too many guys think I'm a concept or I complete them or I'm going to make them alive, but I'm just a fucked-up girl who is looking for my own peace of mind. Don't assign me yours." -- Clementine Kruczynski, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

I miss Goose. Missing Goose is like having a bruise that never heals. Most of the time, it's just a dull ache, but sometimes, something pokes it into a sharp pain that cannot be ignored.

I haven't had any contact with him in almost three months, since I declined his invitation to meet up with him in Las Vegas. I have used tremendous willpower to resist checking his Facebook page (since this will only lead to further heartache, I am sure) or emailing him. Even so, I find myself trying to come up with any flimsy pretext to email him. No matter how much I churn the problem around in my mind, I can't come up with anything. Given how much I've considered it, even as I hate myself for doing so, I must conclude that there is no pretext for emailing him other than because I want to, which is not so much pretext as...text.

In my mind, Goose is the one who needs to email me first if there is to be any resumption of contact. He may believe the opposite, since I'm the one who refused to go to Las Vegas after he invited me twice, or he may not care. One thing I learned from my recent revelation that Doug Funny got married is that I am capable of thinking that a man has deep, though perhaps complicated, feelings for me when he in fact probably doesn't even remember my last name. That realization feels like shit. When Goose and I were together last summer, there was an intense connection between us. When we parted at the airport and I saw his face for the last time, he was looking at the ground, heartbroken, not wanting to let go of my hand. When we hugged each other good-bye, I let go first, and he pulled me to him a second time, when I again let go first so he wouldn't miss his flight. But now, it seems like he just wanted me for a warm place to park his junk while he was on vacation and I imagined these tempestuous feelings.

When does this get better? I think there are two answers, both equally true: eventually and never. I loved Doug Funny so much that it took me years to get over him, and yet I never really did, as evidenced by the fact that I was just recently looking him up online to see what he's up to. If I keep on keeping on with my plan not to contact Goose, I see no reason why the recovery process will not unfold the same way. And yet, I don't remember still hurting this much over Doug Funny this long after the last time I saw him. Perhaps that's just my mind playing tricks on me, since I met Doug Funny almost six years ago and it is hard to recall the exact color of my emotions. Or perhaps it's because Doug Funny and I had very little contact with each other after we separated in July 2004. In fact, I don't think I spoke with him at all between October 2004 and December 2007, and I communicated with him only three or four times between July and October 2004. Goose and I spoke much more frequently, and there was the invitation to meet him in Las Vegas. Perhaps it's because I love Goose more than I loved Doug Funny.

I'm sure there is also something to the fact that I met Goose at a time when my professional life was in a shambles. This may prolong my grief at our relationship's non-starter status, much as my professional woes compounded with the loss of Doug Funny to make for an exponentially worse time of things. When I find a permanent job, maybe that will lessen the hurt. (I would sure like to test that theory by finding a permanent job.)

Everything about this situation seems to pile on everything else to make it worse and worse. I miss him, but it's made worse by my perception (based on his silence) that he doesn't miss me. I love him, which is made sadder and more poignant by my perception (again, based on his silence as well as his unwillingness to break up with his girlfriend) that he doesn't love me. It all leaves me with the sour feeling that I am not lovable but rather only desirable, that these men want me for what I represent (in my Serena van der Woodsen fashion) and then get tired of me and never think about me again.

This Wheel's On Fire

The Ghost of Christmas Future called me out a week or two ago on liking Mango, not that I admitted to liking him as anything more than a friend. Let's not forget that this dude has a girlfriend, which The Ghost of Christmas Future well knows because she has met the girlfriend. (Maybe she has also heard Mango's heartwarming and romantic tale of how he and his girlfriend ended up moving in together and concluded that Mango's girlfriend is a figurehead that could be easily cast aside in favor of, let's say, me. For the record, I maintain that Mango's relationship will eventually end but probably in a thermonuclear explosion of which I want no part.)

Hilariously, every time Mango comes over to my desk to talk to me, The Ghost of Christmas Future makes herself incredibly scarce. Literally, she will be there one minute and have vanished the next. I'm starting to think there is a trapdoor under her desk or a bookcase that spins around, like we are in Clue. On Friday, Mango entreated us to accompany him to a get-together at work in which we were all forced to eat cake together to honor a colleague leaving to take the bar exam. The Ghost of Christmas Future somehow disappeared from the very hallway we had to take to the conference room where the cake was served. How does she do this?

I assume that The Ghost of Christmas Future wants to avoid being a third wheel. Truly, there are few things more annoying when you are trying to advance your romantic agenda with someone. But I am not trying to set or advance a romantic agenda with Mango. In fact, quite the contrary. A third wheel might be a convenient chaperone to keep things at an appropriately friendly level. Oy.