Tom is a 41 year-old man who has been married to Linda for 20 years. They met in college where they both studied philosophy. They have a 16 year-old daughter, Lee. Tom can be quiet, but when he argues he gets very intense and he can seem angry. He’s an excellent logical debater. If you get into a debate with him you need to have your facts ready.
He’s thick in the middle and it makes him seem short. He has great deep bronze skin and a reddish-brown beard and mustache. Maybe he’s Latino. He’s balding and I think that the raspberry beret looks okay on him, but he hates it. He hangs around in the break room and reads as much as any of us, he drinks as much coffee, likes sweet stuff, and when he eats a salad he looks sad. Tom and Gina and Dirk are hanging out after work lately, having beers at the taquaria.
He has trouble dealing with Lee and Linda. He says they’re angry at him all the time. It’s the usual teenage stuff, but sometimes he leaves the office and comes back an hour later without saying anything. He says that Lee is hopelessly texted and Facebooked. I think she might be mean. I came in the office one day and he was standing there, not moving, and his hands looked like he’d dipped them in sour cream. Lee had given Tom hand lotion because his knuckles were cracked, but she didn’t tell him how much to use, so he kept pouring it on.
As far as work goes he’s “philosophical,” in the common use of the term, and says that in all of life we wait to “see what happens,” but at least here we were told it's part of the job. He can sit at the line of monitors like a Terminator, staring back and forth without going crazy. He does the image captures for the web cams exactly on time. The images are almost always the same but he still pays close attention. On the monitor he sits in front of most often (the Being Cam-2) he has a post-it that says “Who the hell is Sartre and what has he ever done for me?”
Sometimes it’s hard to tell if he’s kidding or not. He says things that sound funny, like that it’s just a matter of time until something alive comes up through the hole in the office floor again. He wants to print and sell bumper stickers that say “Choose Helpless.”
He says that the most dangerous phrase in the English language is “It’s self-explanatory.”
Now that I'm a habitual reader/participant of your daily blog, you've disappeared --it's Sunday and no posting since Wednesday.
ReplyDeleteWhat gives, did you take a vacation already?
I mean, do you think you deserve a vacation after only a couple of months of writing?
Underground animals must be tearing the place apart by now with no supervision.
What do you see on the being and nothingness cams?