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Pitched

Last week, Preity sent me a series of e-mails that went from interesting to scary faster than anything I’ve experienced recently. If you’ll remember, I’ve known her for awhile — so long, in fact, that she was a main character in this story before we were what you’d call friends, and definitely before she received an officially sanctioned Stan Has Issues™ fake name — instead, she got the less impressive Stan Has Issues™ generic description. Observant readers will also note that yes, we know each other personally, although obviously we haven’t seen each other personally in a few years. In fact, the bulk of our contact has been through e-mail, for no other reason than its convenience. We exchanged phone numbers while I was in L.A., we exchanged phone numbers once again when we reconnected after I’d love, and we exchanged phone numbers a third time that I don’t remember. So the phone never seemed like a scary thing…

…until now.

In general, I’m not a big phone-talker. I end up talking on the phone a lot, for long periods of time, by virtue of the fact that I’ve befriended people who ramble as endlessly and incoherently as I do, and by virtue of the fact that most of those people have either moved out-of-state or are just as lazy as I am when it comes to making a 20- or 60-minute drive, and by virtue of the fact that they’re too lazy/incompetent to just type it up in an e-mail (and are too lazy to read it when I do that). I guess what I’m saying is, it’s a double-edged sword. I don’t have any problem with the phone, but if given the choice I’d rather talk in person or write an e-mail.

This has worked pretty well with Preity, the only person with whom I’m currently on speaking terms who enjoys my long, tedious e-mails. She sends equally long e-mails with the added challenge of never, ever using paragraphs to separate her ideas. It’s not hard to read, but it makes it very difficult to reply. I always feel like I miss something as I scan the original while writing a response.

E-mail became a problem last week, because she had a pitch meeting coming up on Friday that she was ready to shit her pants about. For some reason — I don’t know if I should feel good about this or not — she believes I’m really smart, so she wanted to bounce some ideas off me and get some feedback. She asked me to play “studio exec” and try to assess not if the ideas were good so much as whether or not they’d make money. I flashed on William Goldman’s classic “Nobody knows anything” bit and thought, Hey, I am nobody! So I agreed to her little game, with some mild reservations because I feared I’d hate all of her ideas — whether they seemed commercial or not — and it would diminish my respect for her.

She wrote back, asking if I wanted to do this through e-mail or over the phone, but something about the way she phrased it made me think the phone made her a little uncomfortable. Even though I’m lazy and just wanted her to type up all the ideas so I could think about them — I hate being put on the spot, especially if the ideas were terrible — I decided to keep the ball in her court. She wrote again, saying the phone would be easier because her fingers would explode before she could finish typing the thousands of ideas rattling around in her brain. But, she added, she “didn’t know if our relationship was ready for that step.”

I honestly still can’t tell whether or not she was being sarcastic. My immediate thought was, “But I’ve talked to you in person dozens of times,” followed immediately by, “What relationship? Are we dating and I just didn’t know?” I did the long-distance relationship thing before, but at that time I seemed to have a clearer idea of where things were headed. This came so far out of left field, it seemed to come out of right field (in actuality, it was so far left it had traveled the entire circumference of the planet).

So I tried to play it cool by completely ignoring the bit about the “relationship,” smoothly saying, “The phone’s fine with me,” and giving her my number for the fourth time in our relationship.

After some more awkward exchanges about when the best time for this conversation would be, I played the waiting game. Normally, waiting for a phone call would have made me more annoyed than nervous, but she tossed out the “R” word, so suddenly it felt like a first date — an excruciating, long-distance audition for some kind of future dating in the event that I move back to L.A. I sat in silence and tried to get into a relatively zen state so the stress didn’t cave in my skull, and when she called, I felt a strong urge to just not answer and make up some elaborate, far-fetched excuse as to why I had to miss her call and never, ever call her back.

Instead, I picked it up…

After an initial “I haven’t actually heard your voice in three years” moment of unease, we slipped back into our old routine. It’s amazing to think we even had an old routine, but I had forgotten how easy she is to listen to. You heard me right: she’s one of those people who can just talk, and I’ll just sit there listening and not giving a shit that I haven’t said anything for an hour. Compare that to Lucy, who frustrates me when she won’t give me a word in edgewise after five minutes. It’s just a difference in personality or articulation or something — or maybe I’m smitten. I don’t want to entertain that notion, because, like I said, I’ve done the long-distance relationship thing before, and I really, really, really don’t want to fall into that again. So we’ll just say she’s a great talker.

We didn’t have a one-sided conversation, though. We could have with no problem, but she forced me into an active role — she pitched these ideas and wanted to know how I felt. Her ideas… I don’t know if I want to say “to my surprise,” because I didn’t expect badness and I wanted them to be good, but I do tend to plan for the worst. Anyway, most of her ideas were…really fucking good. Commercial but not retarded, dense but cinematic, and a few of them really brought out some passion in her. In defense of my fawning all over her on account of that whole “smitten” thing, while many of her ideas impressed me, some of them were kinda “meh” and one of them was a total dog.

Meanwhile, if this was some kind of dry-run phone-date, I flopped big-time. I had a hard time forming any kind of cogent argument for or against these ideas — I tried my best to stammer through my vague notions. Without having any clue what she intended to pitch, I couldn’t do any preliminary research. I just had to go with my gut, which said, “Awesome,” but chose not to elaborate.

The second and third rounds — after an hour and a half, she did a “I’ll call you right back” thing, which gave me a merciful piss break (I feel really weird about telling someone, “I’ll call you back in two minutes while I urinate,” although now that I think about it, maybe she had done the same thing but was wise enough to not give a reason for hanging up), then she came back for another hour, by which time I was on. She called again the next morning for another hour, and again, I felt much more confident and less like a tool.

But when all was said and done, I don’t know where we’re at. She told me multiple times — enough times to make me suspicious — to call her “any time.” I don’t want to make a mountain out of a knob, but I do like her a lot. Why do you think I stayed in touch with her? I don’t want to miss out on a possible opportunity, but at the same time, I really, really don’t want to end up in another long-distance relationship. I guess I can just keep playing it cool and maybe give her a call once in awhile in addition to the e-mails… Maybe.

The downside is, neither of us have a clue how her pitches went. I can’t/don’t want to go into details on all that, but she described the meeting and one casual pitch session with an assistant she knows, and in both cases, things seem a little strange.

Posted by Stan on August 4, 2008 5:33 PM  | Permalink | Career-Based Rambling, Friends: Can’t Live with ‘Em, Fumbling Attempts at Relationships | Digg It