Office hurts

Today I went into Office Max. I just love office supplies. I know that’s weird, but I just can’t get enough of them. I have things in my desk that I don’t even have a use for or even know what it is. I don’t think I need 4 different colors of Post-it notes, or a handy little pen-like dispenser for glue. That seems particularly useless seeing as though I haven’t glued anything since the third grade. I even like the smell of permanent markers and rubber cement.

Anyway, I’m a sucker for anything that is an office supply. I guess it makes me a cheap date when I’d probably be just as happy with a bouquet of mechanical pencils as I would be with flowers. It also makes me terribly geeky I think.

I think my love of all things office started when I was younger and my dad would take me with him to work. Every once in a while on a Saturday, my dad would have some work to finish so he’d drag my brother and I along with him. He’s an electrical engineer and this was back when computer monitors only used the color green. Every time we’d go he’d get us a sub from 7-11 and a Slurpee. So while he was working on something or tinkering around with prehistoric geek parts, I would play with the things in his desk. I could make a chain of paperclips 3 miles long, make a projectile weapon with erasers and rubber bands, or draw little pictures on the corner of his dry erase board.

The neat thing was that every time I went back to his office I would see that he still had the pictures that I drew up on his dry erase board. He never got rid of them, and every time I went there I would give him a new one to look at. He was, and still is, a very quiet man. So he never told me that he liked them, but I knew he did just by the fact that they were never removed. To me and at that age, he was everything. He had all the answers. He was my hero.

It wasn’t until I was older that I had to face the fact that he was anything but perfect. We couldn’t be more different. It’s always hard when the person that you place on a pedestal falls from your grace. I think my teen years were especially hard on our relationship just because we are both two very different people with very real faults.

However, it still hurt the other day when he mentioned that he would be for an amendment that would ban gay marriage. This isn’t going to be a blog entry with my political rants, rather one of my sheer disappointment over his thinking. I don’t understand it, and I never will. It saddens me that my once hero would think this way and not even understand how it affects his child. It’s almost like he doesn’t understand what he is saying. Yet he knows and somewhat supports my lifestyle now. Civil unions he’d be okay with, but that’s all I really know because I wasn’t up to talking with him about it.

We have been on a rollercoaster, and I’d thought we were on an upswing from the damage of my teenage years. I guess this will be a test of my tolerance as well. I never thought I’d have to forgive my father for his moral view, but I it looks like I will have to. The bottom line is I wont allow a philosophical difference destroy all the hard work we’ve done. He taught me better than that.

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” -- Eleanor Roosevelt