Who is taking advantage of who?

I recently started a dead end job at a restaurant. It's not a terrible job (like others i've held) and it's not an amazing job like the wilderness therapy one i used to have; it's just some dumb college student job.

For the last two years i've gotten very little action, be it random play or potential girlfriends -- but prior to these two years you could say that i had maybe a bit more than my fair share of action. But that makes being single for this long just that much harder.

Well there is this girl at my job who is a couple years younger than me -- she is 19, so legality is not an issue here! For the most part she seems decently grown up for a girl under the age of twenty.. but there are the moments when her younger age is quite apparent.

A couple nights ago we were working together and she made some comment about how she had smoked in the cooler on several occasions. Without thinking too much about what i was saying, i congratulated her on accomplishing one of the two things that most people want to do at some point in their life: smoke in the walk-in cooler at some dead end job, and have sex in that same cooler. Thats pretty logical and normal to say, isn't it?

Since then i've noticed that every now and then she looks at me with these slightly dreamy "i want you" eyes -- but not all the time. Initially i disregarded it and thought it was a just a "i'm really high" look - but then i realized how inconsistent it was, which ruled out her just being high.

Basically i think it boils down to this: i think this girl -- who is 4 years younger than me and has been working at this job for several months more than i have -- wants to bone me in the walk-in cooler.

She is pretty attractive, and i do get the feeling that it would be a no-strings attached thing which is good too. But i do work with her, and i am frequently reminded by her that i'm much more into girls older than me instead of younger. So there is a good chance i'd feel bad about having sex with a girl who i'm not really all that in to, and there is the very real possibility that something bad would come of it either as a personality clash or misunderstanding, or something to do with work, etc... but then there is this:

I would love to get laid, especially in the cooler at work.

So if i have sex with this girl -- who i feel like is young enough to be, to some extent, influenced by the fact that i'm a couple years older than her and have seen a lot more shit in my life than she has -- who is taking advantage of who?

Would she be taking advantage of me because i'm horny and in need of action, or would i be taking advantage of her because i'm older than her and she may in a sense be influenced by my life & travel experiences that are above and beyond hers?

Searching Out Disappointment

Why is it that we put such small things on such big pedestals sometimes?

The inspiration for this post was a small thing that didn't really matter at all -- but it left me on my way home feeling really disappointed nonetheless. I think that whether or not we mean to, we often invest a lot more than we should in small things, and often find ourselves disappointed.

Everyone does it, whether they intend to or not. You hope -- and maybe in the back of your mind almost expect -- your favorite team to win. If you meet some girl or guy at the bar when you're out to "meet someone", you probably hope right away that they are "the right one" or whatever. Or when you turn a paper in for school.. all of these little things can leave you disappointed with your results. And those are just tiny snippets. If you put some real time into it, I'm sure that anyone could come up with a nearly endless list of possibilities for disappointment.

What i'm wondering is this: is it disappointing because you are a let down optimist, or is it disappointing simply because it didn't work out in the best possible way?