A Day in the Life

This post was totally going to be a huge and sweeping essay about Robocop but then the thesis fell apart and felt half baked. Don’t you hate when that happens? After McWriter’s masterful post last night, the last thing I wanted to do was present anything but my best. So much pressure, indeed.

Unfortunately, sometimes we cannot tap into our best, no matter how hard we try. Though I scrapped the Robocop essay, I cannot promise that this will be much better. I’m more excited to write it though.

Robocop will not be entirely absent from this post though. Instead I will present the moment and back story that inspired the aborted post.

As usually happens, I sauntered into work 10-15 minutes after my work day was to begin. I get good naturedly grilled by my manager and fellow co-worker (not the depressed one), about it. Then who should walk into my manager’s office, but none other than Huey. Quick back ground on Huey. He’s the library’s janitor and wears all white when he’s not working. He’s also one of the most kind and generous people I’ve ever met. Not to start three straight sentences the same way but he’s just an all around top notch person (see what I did there? I was totally going to start the sentence with “he’s” again). We talk about sports mainly, today’s no different, but as he’s on his way out for the day, the conversation will be brief and about the Lakers (as it normally is from October through June).

“So Sergei,” Huey says, “we’re going to talk about nicknames today. Laker nicknames.”

We run through a few: Trevor Ariza is “The Assassin”, Sasha Vujacic is “The Machine,” and Jordan Farmar is…well, no one really knows, but it probably has something to do with him being half Jewish. Then we get to the only Laker most people care about, Kobe Bryant.*

“And Kobe, do you know what his new nickname is?” Huey asks.

“The Black Mamba,” I offer up.

“Not anymore. Now they're calling him Robocop.”

Huey chuckles, as he is awesomely prone to do, and as I’m about raise objection to this obviously silly nickname, my co-worker jumps in.

“No way! Kobe Bryant is no Robocop,” she says before storming out of the office, obviously gravely insulted that anyone would even contemplate equating the Lakers on court leader to the robotic hero.

And that was that. Huey left for the apartment complex he manages in south central Los Angeles, I headed for my desk to turn on my computer, and my manager went back to eating her lunch. But the story doesn’t end there. Well it does, as far as that incident is concerned, but there’s still stuff to cover. And it has to do with my co-workers, disgust at Kobe being called Robocop. Obviously the nickname is a bit odd and kind of stupid—really what do the two even have to do with one another—but was my co-worker’s reaction warranted? Completely, if you know how she feels about Robocop.

You see my co-worker is in love with Robocop. I don’t just mean that she thinks he’s cool (like me and countless others the world over). Robocop is her ideal man.

Sometime last year, Nick and I got into a conversation with her about what kind of men she like’s. “I like them big,” she said. “Really built, huge muscles and everything.”

“Like Robocop,” Nick or I facetiously chimed in.

“Exactly. Like Robocop. Now there’s a man,” she said with the utmost honesty upon her face.

“But he’s a robot!!!” we wailed.

To my co-worker that doesn’t matter, because to her Robocop is the epitome of masculinity. Not just superficially either. As I’ve learned through conversations in the months since the initial disclosure, she loves everything about him; what he stands for, his inability—no refusal—to let go of his humanity, and, well, that body. There’s just no way around it, my co-worker is in love with Robocop.

And I think that is sort of amazing.

*I say most people only really care about Kobe because it's the truth. But me? My heart's with Lamar.