Damn it all, anyway--I just finished painting my nails, and there is a huge scrape straight through the center of my right index finger. The nail polish, I mean, a fresh coat of OPI "Cheyenne Pepper," a hideous color, incidentally. In the bottle it appears to be a pleasant, subtly metallic orangey-gold, but when applied to my nails, it appears to be a rather flat terra cotta. The smudge isn't helping. This is what I get for doing my nails at work. Stupid work.

Anyway, I should not be doing my nails, I should be editing the most dismal report ever written--so poorly drafted that I can barely tell what information is meant to be conveyed. So, to give myself a break from the random constellation of punctuation and phrases like, "the appellant's were not at that time required to be notified of the addition of a outdoor Retention wall," I will tell you a story instead.

I'm telling this story only to rid myself of the phantom shame it engendered in me.

Yesterday, following a chain of minor, insignificant events, I Googled an old high school crush, a RIDICULOUS crush that was all-consuming when I was a freshman, and he was a senior. It was thoroughly humiliating at the time because owing to the obviousness and futility of my devotion, coupled with my fervent denial that the crush existed, my family teased me about it relentlessly, and for several years after its expiration. Were they reminded of it today, I imagine they would attempt to reactivate some of the humiliation, as punishment for my showing any hint of vulnerability.

I'll nickname my crush-ee Corky Corkelson, just to underscore the ridiculousness of it. Of course nothing ever happened between us--Corky was a lot older than I was, and the only contact we had was during rehearsals for a deeply dismal production of "Anything Goes" in which he had the lead and I was a "chorus member."

Halfway through my crush, he acquired a girlfriend in the form of another cast member his own age--I recognized her as thoroughly common, but my assessment was unvoiced and ultimately meaningless. I was marginally heartbroken--all of us freshman girls were; we all loved Corky. And then he graduated, and life moved on, and eventually, the family teasing faded slightly.

Corky was shuffled to the back of the mental filing cabinet until a couple of years after I'd been graduated from high school. I was invited to participate in a musical revue--kind of a reunion of all the dorks who'd ever graced the stage there at Union High. Naturally, my dorkiness in full bloom, I accepted the invitation and, to my amusement, encountered Corky again.

He was very sweet and still really cute, and somehow I glommed onto him during rehearsal, in my manipulative and dorky way. At the [cringe] cast party afterward, we sat together, drinking heavily from the open bar, and he admitted surprise at remembering me so well, given our limited contact and the span of years since our last meeting. (My thought: Yay! My hours of staring fixedly at him and hovering around his locker paid off!) The details following that are hazy, but suffice it to say that we ended up making out in his car. (Psych!) And I haven't seen him since.

I don't even know why I thought of him yesterday, but I did, and although I should know better, Googled him. I figured he'd be, like, a woodworker in New England, or perhaps running a small bait shop. Neither of those options appeared in the Google results, but I did see a listing for some Licensed Social Worker guy with the same name. I clicked on it, and a picture of a slightly startled-looking, balding middle-aged guy came up, and I went, "Awwwwwwwwwww, that's just some slightly startled-looking guy with the same name!" Except that something about the eyes caught my attention, and I realized, Oh, my God, that could totally be him. And then: Oh, my God, that is definitely him.

And all of a sudden, even though I made out with him YEARS ago, when he was cute and charming and did NOT look like a startled middle-aged social worker, I felt seriously skeeved, like I had made out with a priest, or someone's dad. He was wearing, like, this dark green shirt with a cheerful tie and everything.

And anyway, he's probably still cute in real life, and charming and all that, but the whole "licensed social worker" angle is a little unsettling, although I can't put my finger on why that might be. I'll have to ask him at our next great high school musical dork-o-rama.

At any rate, tune in next time, when I tell you about Googling an ex-boyfriend who turned out to be accessory to a series of murders.

Not really, but on some level, I think that might bother me less. It's a bit of a maze, my internal monologue.

Star of the day. . .Sue B