This Is Not Our Destiny

I’ve been seeing Marcus a lot recently. We’re going through a lot of the same stuff. He’s got a couple grad school prospects for next fall, all of which involve leaving his serious girlfriend Becky. All of my job and grad school prospects for next fall involve leaving Stick.

Meanwhile, Marcus works on-campus at Parking Services and hates his job (Obviously. You caught the part about “parking services”, right?). The entity of UMass makes regulations that sound great in theory, and change these rules on a schedule known only to themselves. And Marcus’ job is to deal with unhappy, confused students everyday. It’s quite a lot like my job, only he has to explain why your car’s gone missing and I only have to explain why we don’t carry every product known to man.

Marcus is a writer and a Stoic and when we talk about our sucky jobs in comparison to our brilliant futures in the field of classical scholarship, he says “This is not our destiny”. Which sounds kind of screwy, especially since he’s otherwise a cut-out-your-heart Stoic, but go with it.

Anyway, I just called Parking Services and said “This is not our destiny.”

But the boy who’d picked up wasn’t Marcus.

There really is no suave way to recover from that. “Uh, hey, sorry, could you leave Marcus a message from Meg that says ‘This is not our destiny?’ Thanks!”