journal: the glass terrarium
there are so many people floating around in this office building. but you can’t talk to any of them. we’re all going through the same bullshit but you’re not allowed to meet new people anymore. friendship and romance were outlawed in 2007 and we are still feeling those repercussions today. you’re desperate for someone to reach out to you but you can’t make the first move. but: maybe everyone else feels the same way. this is the only thing you take solace in.
there are probably some girls here you might hit it off with. but how would you make that work. you wonder if anyone here has fucked another person in this building. or even in the same office. what if the number is actually zero? that would be astounding. throw a bunch of men and women in close quarters for 40-plus hours a week…and they DON’T eventually start mating with each other. it defies biology. well, hell if you know. the corporate culture makes everyone so damn sexless. there’s plenty of people around here who have kids but there is no way in hell you could ever imagine them in the throes of passion. what you have here is a real chicken-or-the-egg question. do the repressed among us gravitate towards these shit, soulless office gigs or do the shit, soulless office gigs force us into repressing our true personalities and desires.
once you talked to your mother about relationships and she asked “have you approached anyone at work?” being a Boomer she is completely unaware of the liability this carries in 2019. that she thought this was even a possibility is so charmingly out of touch, like your grandpa calling Titanfall 2 on your souped-up gaming rig “The Nintendo.” like every HR policy doesn’t have a 20-page section of corporate-speak that basically translates to “do not solicit your colleagues for sex or you’ll never work in this state again.”
jesus, listen to you. it’s so god damn sad. like this sterile cluster of professional suites is a fucking singles bar. (you desperately wish they allowed alcohol at work.)
it’s not all bad, though. you’ve been going out more lately and even found a new group of people to hang with semi-regularly. that has helped a lot. but life is largely a glass terrarium that you’re not allowed to tap on. you crawl through the habitrails with the other specimens, passing them like ships in the night. are they truly fulfilled or are they just like you, only better at faking it?
they told us to do this, this, and this and we’d have a fulfilling life. but your life is full of holes, and all your time is spent looking for a way to fill those holes.
they never told us you’d stop making friends after a certain age. once you reach it, those are your people and that’s it until you die or they die. despite what Facebook tells you there’s only room for a finite amount of people and if someone you meet has already met their quota, there’s no space for you. if you’re not in their MySpace Top 8 you don’t exist.
there is no worse hell than being together apart.
