#169 October
October. Saturday afternoon in the Wharf. Well, the sprawl of affordable housing just outside of it. I was sat on my bed playing Worms Armageddon. Between turns, I flicked through Tinder.
"She looks cute" I thought to myself. Katie was a 24 year old Kiwi marketing manager for a lage tech company. Her profile read that she was travelling around Europe for work. "Too bad you're not here longer ;)" I told her. "Ha and why's that?" she wrote " you don't like short term fun?" "You're pushing all the right buttons" I wrote back "but I'm a little under the weather this weekend".
I'd been feeling crap since about Thursday. How does a person even tell their boss that they kind of feel like they can't get as much done as normal but are still well enough to be at work? Actually that may well be exactly what I should have said but there's always the risk that if I said I was struggling to get it all done, they'd just suggest that I should have started it sooner. Or prioritised better. Or that I wasn't working fast enough. So I hadn't said anything. I'd made it to the weekend too. Alive. Sort of.
"Well I'm here 'til Wednesday" she said "and I made great bedside company when you're sick". "You'd honestly spend time with someone who isn't feeling a hundred percent when there must be thousands of healthy guys just waiting to be messaged?" I asked. "I don't know about thousands" she said. Maybe she hadn't had Tinder that long. "I would though" . "It's a flattering offer" I replied "but I'd feel too self-conscious, plus it'd be a shame if you caught this". She said she understood.
After the game of Worms, I headed over to Instagram for a browse. Fortunately, most of my favourite pasttimes can be done in bed with my laptop so being ill isn't exactly a handicap. The more I used Instagram, the more I liked it. I'd had it about a month. One of my tactics was to make comments on some of the most popular profiles so that lots of people would see them and might start following me. It was working ok. In fact I was somewhat surprised to be getting new followers every day. I only had like twenty pictures and until that point hadn't used a single hashtag. Maybe this is what people do in October now. Sit around on their phones looking for something they like the look of.