journalman's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Firing Mr. When, and Tuesday Dinner Shoutout MR. WHEN My friend Noah visited me at my office last night, and we ended up gabbing and being a bit reckless together til about 1 AM when I went home, took a half Ambient (for the first and probably my last time), and passed out til this morning. Which is all well and good because typically after a night of being reckless, I'm not exactly the most patient person. And this manifested itself today in me actually 'firing' a client for the first time. An investment banker-bigshot who owns a couple floors in Tribeca. One of those people who pays you a tiny sum for tiny work, and then believes he can hound you all day for advice. It felt good... really damned good... to tell this man to take his business elsewhere. I did it, too. As I told my father, "I don't want money if I don't get respect with it. I'm not a prostitute, I am a professional. I will not dissect the two." In other words, paying me doesn't give you license to walk all over me. Within minutes, he wrote me a long apology. Asked my forgiveness. More times than not, demanding respect yields positive results. I gave him a discount at first, out of respect for him being an I-banker and because I knew he'd appreciate it. But after today's little catfight between us, the little bitch is gonna pay through the nose.
Mags belongs to a clique of Fort Greene people who have a dinner party every Tuesday night. There are 2 principal demographics at this party: 1) Flamboyantly gay men who work in the field of Architecture. 2) The women who love them. The straight, single, often quite intriguing women who love them. Some who are actually quite chaste and pure by choice, interstingly enough, and others who are not so much. (hurray for 'the not so much' set!) As the chaste ones would say, it's as if the good lord himself put together a party for Journalman. At first, the gay man-centerpiece, Fred, was very wary of my presence. But now two or three parties in, three amazing things are happening: 1) As the gay men who all work at Arch firms open themselves up socially to me, they are just about dying to help me in a business-sense in some way. 2) The secular women see how I super-seamlessly get along with both the gay men and the chase women. And I think they want to fucking jump on me because of it. 3) Most importantly, Tuesday nights now mean a 2-mile bike ride each way, fantastic company, excellent cooking, plenty of wine, and a tight new group of friends. Pretty therapeutic, actually. 1:09 a.m. - 2006-10-25 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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