Day Seventy-eight - Bullet

So, if memory serves me well, before we started working in the supermarket - which, when we were hired, was still being built, and we ended up having to do a lot of the assemblying of shelves and whatnot ourselves - we had to like a month of training. My mind wants to tell me that it might've been less, but I do think it was a month. Now, all this was 'training' really was just sitting in a room listening to a couple of different people feeding us info from nine to five... it really was a struggle not to fall asleep some days, as all that talking ended up being really, really dull. Sometime during that period, one day I was wearing my Dragonball Z tee, and I might have also been carrying with me that month's issue of Previews, which is Diamond's monthly catalogue of upcoming comic books, graphic novels and assorted merchandise. And oout of the blue, one of the guys who I was doing training with, approached me and we started talking about comics. Turns out he was an avid reader as well, a collector just like me, a fellow geek. And that, really, was enough for us to start getting along - but moreso than getting along, I really felt that there was a budding friendship between us, and I was not wrong, not by a longshot. The more I talked to the guy - his name is Hugo, and from now on he'll be a very regular fixture here - the more I realized that he was someone truly special. Just like S., I felt that Hugo was the kind of guy I aspired to be, and moreover, the kind of guy I could have been had I might the right choices. See, unlike me, Hugom had his head on straight, and he knew full well where his priorities lie. He stayed in school, went to university, graduated, and then got his own Master's degree. Life rewarded him for his hard work, and I am proud to have been by his side all these years. And that sense of kinship led me to do something that someone else might've found strange. I'd found out that Hugo's birthday was two days after my own, which makes me two whole days his senior, something I've never left him forget, and I decided to give him a birthday gift - in fact, it was bit of an extravagance on my part, but I gave him Peter Kuper's 'Give It Up!0, a collection of his illustrated adaptations of some short stories by Franz Kafka. I know he appreciated the gesture, and that friendshipo quickly moved from just workplace acquaintance to out of work shenanigans. Frankly, it made the seven months I spent at that job bearable I really don't think I would've stayed there that long had I not met Hugo. I did work with some really nice people, but other than him, I didn't keep in touch with anyone. I left that job in early '98 - and so did Hugo, just like he wasn't reupped - and that year would prove to be life-changing indeed.