Not wearing my thick-skin suit today

A colleague and friend of the past ten years has just done a really shitty thing to me. I do not want to go into too much detail, but he basically stole a proposal idea of mine and acted like he thought I would not mind and proposed it to the place to which I was going to propose it, albeit in a slightly modified way. This is someone I have gone out of my way on several occasions to include in my projects, just because he is my friend and not because it would benefit me in any way whatsoever. This is someone for whom I was directly responsible for getting two different adjuncting positions to help him get through graduate school after funding ran out. This is someone who has just stabbed me in the back and not in a clueless way but I am pretty damn sure in a "I know this is kind of sleazy but I have to do what I have to do" way.


I can take assholery of all kinds. I can take my frat-boy conservative asshole downstairs neighbor, Hamilton Fuckwit, who as I have mentioned before likes to make jokes about how I must be a stripper and not really a professor and who quotes "films" like The Shawshank Redemption to tell me to "get busy living or get busy dying" when I do not want to pay for an $1000 non-freezing dehumidifier for the garage he owns so that mold will not grow underneath the trash cans that he leaves in the garage. I can take the petty control-freak asshole at Foggy C. who made my year last year a living hell. I can take the everyday assholes I encounter on a daily basis as I navigate through the infamously unfriendly city in which I live. (In fact in certain circumstances I am one of those infamously unfriendly assholes.) But sometimes it gets to be too much, you know? Especially when the asshole in question is someone who is close to you.

Ugh. I am sounding put-upon and victimized and even like I might have a persecution complex. I really don't. And most of the time I am what you might call a tough cookie. But I think this tough cookie is going to take to her bed, at least for the afternoon. I have several new magazines, including the September issue of Marie Claire with none other than my favorite actress, Ms. Maggie Gyllenhaal, on the cover; the massive September Elle recommended by Dr. Crazy for its hilarious interview of this month's cover girl, the gloriously bratty La Lohan; and last but never least, this week's New York magazine, which just arrived in the mail. Yes, I could rally on and seek out my friend and try to resolve this dispute. Or I could use this angry energy to get my original proposal ready to send, which I am still going to do and which unfortunately is going to compete directly with his.

But, no, sometimes a girl has to take to her bed to read magazines all afternoon. I might report back on the many valuable tidbits I am certain I will find. And then I am likely to rise for an evening snack and perhaps a bottle of red wine. Yes. Sounds like a plan.

(This post may self-destruct, by the way, because I feel creepy posting like this about a friend regardless of the circumstances. As long as I am feeling this pissed, though, it stays. And can I really call him a friend at this point? Gaah. . .feels like higher-stakes high school. OK, enough--off to bed with Lindsay and Maggie.)