Echo

I flat out stay away from Brits.

This half-black half-filipino guy talks to me and tells me he’s a Raiders fan, a Lakers fan and a USC fan. I accuse him of being an incarnation of the devil. I tell him my dad is open to me dating any ethnicity or type except he says no Raider fans. And I can’t stand Lakers and USC fans. What’s your name?, I ask him.

Aristotle, he says.

Some trick, I think.

Birthday 1/27/78. He shows me his license but he thinks I must be born in 82. His friend Ray Solomon, a delicate olive-skinned guy with exotic eyes is his sidekick. He offers his birthday. 4/28/74. I tell him two of my friends have the  same birthday and they’re the same year.

He says he wants to play basketball with me. Or just shoot around and he could give me some pointers. Naive dipshit. What part of that would I find enjoyable. I told him that offer was patronizing. But he has a sweet smile so I’m not rude to him.

They say I’m really tough when I won’t give them my number but are still polite enough to say it was nice meeting me.

I flip through time zones on my watch seeing what time it is around the world.

Sometimes I feel like a panther in a world of geese. Sometimes I don’t know anymore.

Here comes the passion of the julia.

I think the underlying reason when I assume an arrogant dismissive tone in regards to people I meet is because I appreciate experiences and meetings for what they are, but I feel guilty knowing they want to attach to me and I’m never gonna let them. They tell me meeting me is such a unique connection, they’ve never experienced it before. The guy who proposed to bring me in as a partner to run his company yesterday said in his whole life, he’s only met one person with his level of passion…me. I’m flattered, but am so aware of disparity.

To them, this connection feels so powerful and unique, it has to mean something. But to me, these connections happen fairly often and I’m no longer so naive to think they all mean something or try to make more out of it than there is. And that’s where I feel guilty. I know they are making more out of it than it is, and it makes me feel like an instrument of extreme inspiration followed by perpetual disappointment.

Ready to leave Denver.

Lots of exciting developments. New partnerships. I seduced an entire company.

2 job offers, two offers to introduce me to my future husband, one man who almost got his heart broken by following his gut.

I went off on one woman who dared to power play me.

I was a juggernaut of charisma.

Plus I coulda sworn he had a wedding ring on the first day we met…

When a man, in mixed company and under duress, blurts out apropos of nothing that he has a big dick, you can bet on two things:

His male ego is agitated.

He has a big dick.

What I think it is is some kind of gravitational force.

I had two dream synchronicities too, where I found myself in a situation that I’d already experienced in a dream.

The first, so I was sitting across from Dave’s former manufacturer, and it’s like nemeses who have been fighting in the dark for so long, then finally see each other in the light. When I saw him, I thought about how I’d just dreamed of Dave. I wanted to ask Dave if this guy was the salesperson he said he hated, but didn’t really want to contact him. I try to be as uninterested in him as possible on principle. I tried to watch Desperate Housewives on my phone but the picture quality was so bad it was blurry like an old TV. My mind would drift off into really wanting to tell someone what that guy did. I sat on it for a day, then as I was getting lunch on the promenade the next day, I decided to text him. I was sitting on a bench with a group of drugged up bohemian kids hanging out nearby, eating a chicken pad thai I bought from a cute Asian woman in a little food cart. I texted him asking if his former rep was named Shawn. While I waited and ate, I realized I had the perfect comeback. I was so excited about what I wanted to zing him with, finally a way to balance out everything in our karmic circle. I was both anxious that he wouldn’t write back and anxious if what I wanted to say was inappropriate, then irritated I was giving it so much thought. At the same time, I was picking through my food and said in my head, “Is this chicken?This is not chicken,” and bam. Lightning went through me. I looked around. This scene was what my dream had Picasso’d.

Epilogue. I got to say to Dave: If your ex-lovers are as jilted as your ex-manufacturers, I’m glad I dodged that bullet.

It feels good to have said it.

Second synch. The night before I left for Denver, I had a dream I was playing basketball but didn’t have my basketball shoes, only my new running shoes which I do not trust at all for basketball. I decided to go ahead and play, but I was playing poorly because I was not stable and couldn’t cut in my shoes and didn’t want to get hurt.

When I went to play basketball with the guys from the conference, it was a mini half court gym where the three point line just curved into walls on each side. Small space and I was wearing those running shoes which I packed at the last minute but I couldn’t really cut in them and was worried I would get hurt so I only played at 40% aggressiveness. I beat two guys at one on one and then our team won about 7 games of two on two in a row except the last one. I didn’t play poorly but I felt bad about my performance because I knew I wasn’t playing at my usual speed. That night I tosses and turned, thinking about basketball that day when I suddenly realized the images I was seeing now and the feelings were the same as from my dream two nights earlier. But this time my mind was running through them as memories.

How bizarre. I think some people have a thinner partition between the present and the future. Sometimes in our dreams, we encounter bits of the future.

Magneticism. It’s next level shit. I am owning it and owning it and owning it well in Denver.

My mind fucking has reached sublimation. And it’s so good because I put all of myself into it.

I didn’t even have an idea how I ended up on this trip except Jodie said, “Do you want to go to Denver next week?” and I said sure. The company I was supposed to meet, Emulex, was flying me in for a conference, and I thought the name sounded like a childrens’ medication. Didn’t have time to look into it because it was busy and then I went to Tahiti. Was back for one day, had asked some passing people what Emulex did, and not knowing at all what I was going into, I figured I would figure it out when I got there.

I wanted to get in the night before because I wasn’t sure how bad the jet lag would be. My flight got delayed so I ended up getting in at 2am. Discovered they have a Mary Jane’s Pizza and they deliver until 4:20.

First day was an afternoon seminar then dinner, then drinks. Don’t know if it was the altitude compounding the full moon or what, but I was glowingly magnetic. I could feel people drawn, faces opening as if touched by light. I got into a deep conversation with one guy and he ended up telling me how in college a frat brother thought it would be funny to put an ad in the paper for a male escort service, and people actually called. And they ended up actually making some money. I had to know about his first client (a woman in her 60s and he had a hard time getting hard. It was awkward as he’ll and he kept picturing someone else just to get it done). His last time (he was sitting in the woman’s bed in his underwear and her husband came in with a shotgun. He cut his arm jumping out the window). That story was one of the best and most surprising conversations I’ve had with someone I’d just met in a long time. He says his wife kind of found out about it and doesn’t want to know and I think that’s amazing.

Day 2 is brutal having to get up 3am Tahiti time. We break up into round tables and who’s sitting across from me but this guy who’s a competitor. I’ve never met him before. Long story short, his biggest customer is now my biggest customer, and that customer is Dave.

So I see him and he sees me. His name tag is blaring at me as he scrunches up his face and gives me the evil eye. As only someone who now owns someone else’s favorite toy can, I smirked back. Made him real nervous. While other people introduced themselves and a little bit about their company, he just barked out his name and company real abruptly and just clamped up. There was an awkward silence, then the girl next to him said, “uh…where are you based out of?” when it was my turn to introduce, I looked at him and said, “I’m Julia S* from Amax…” then giving him my best I’m so close to fucking you I’ve got the taste of your skin on my tongue look…I say, snarkily, “That would be based in Fremont, which is located in Silicon Valley.

Later that night, I was in the hall talking to a rep when he walked up, made a cross at me like I was a vampire and hissed, then talked to the girl. I was smiling so hard on the inside and outside. I was finally getting the pleasure of meeting a dirty little man I had beaten. He was showing me in every way I owned him.

I wrangled some guys into playing basketball at a nearby gym. Remember how I always say you can tell a lot about a person by how they play basketball? I played with 3 guys and schooled them all. And I’m convinced what resulted was because of the experience–one guy promised me thousands in marketing funds, one guy asked me to come onto his business as a partner and when he found out I’m single, asked me if I would wait for his son. I asked him how old his son was and he said 16. I said the bigger question is how his son feels about arranged marriages.

The third who got the brunt of my jumpers in his face flatly
stated, “You should come work for me,” and was in great danger of chasing me out of the elevator at the end of the evening.

Lot of random synchronicities. Things I read coming up in different places. While I was in Tahiti, the only news I got from the states was a one xeroxed sheet of paper with all the news someone had deemed important. The first day of the seminar, I was small talking with the guy who sat next to me who had mentioned he had been at a hackers conference last week. I asked him if it was the show that gave a Pwnie to Sony for “Most Epic Fail” and he lit up and said he couldn’t believe I knew about that. And I told him about that one sheet of news, and for some reason, out of all the news coming out of the states, someone had deemed that important. And here we were, talking about it. And he’d been one of the voters.