WEEHU3 - Day 1, which really starts two days before the actual first day of WEEHU, was bright and clear and very Oregon-in-October; that is to say, still summertime. I spent the first part of it at work, then convinced them to let me leave for reasons of personal safety. "Won't you feel responsible if I die driving all night to San Francisco?" I asked them, and, mostly because it was really slow and I was really superfluous, they let me go. Which turned out to be quite necessary, because my co-driver backed out on me. Solo all-night drive! Woo fucking hoo!
I actually really like to drive at night, and I'm a commuter by nature, so it wasn't that much of a hardship. Except for the no-sleeping part. But more of that in a moment.
Because I was driving, I had planned on taking slightly more stuff with me to WEEHU than I would have had I been flying; with the loss of a second person's stuff in the car, I had no choice but to bring more stuff. So in the car on the way home from work I planned what I would be packing. (It turned out to be one rolling luggage rack worth of stuff. And I am not ashamed.)
My Packing List
One large suitcase (softside) - CLOTHES
One small suitcase (softside) - half MAKE-UP/JEWELRY, half STUFF*
One carry-on size suitcase (hardside) - CLOTHES/SHOES for the Calico
One Army regulation-size duffle bag (not actually from the Army) - SHOES/BOOTS
One carry-on size bag (softside) - extra blankets (which I completely forgot I'd brought.)
One large shopping bag - COOKIES. More on the cookies shortly.
One official Coca-Cola delivery flat - 9 litre size bottles of Coke Zero, 1 bottle of booze**.
One leather briefcase - my laptop and the important external hard drive, plus notebooks...
One large handbag - EVERYTHING ELSE NECESSARY FOR ME TO LIVE MY LIFE.
It's really not that much...
Oh, yeah, right.
One Electric Piano (which never got played, but we could have if we'd gotten around to it...)
One Electric Piano Stand & Bench
It's still really not that much. I mean, I could still see out all the windows.
Anyway. I get home, I do laundry, I make the first batch of cookie dough. Then I make the second batch of cookie dough. Then I make the third batch of cookie dough. Then I make the fourth batch of cookie dough. This is a shit ton of cookie dough, and my life would be easier if I could get my hands on 3 or 4 extra kitchen maid mixer bowls, but I do what I can. What I'm going to do when my mixer finally dies I really don't know. It's the one my Mom bought new when I was 9, which makes it spring of 1981. I inherited it when she got a shiny new one, and she's regretted that ever since. The new ones just aren't the same...but I digress.
The Four Cookies
Chocolate Chip. No, you cannot have the recipe. The only person who has it other than me is my sister-in-law, and it was part of her Christmas present last year. You have to really work at impressing me to get that recipe...or be family and have a love of baking that approaches my own.
No, you also cannot know the secret ingredient. Work out your own special recipe!
Earl Grey Chocolate Chip. So good! And even better if the lid is put back on the airtight container properly by the people in the con-suite. (They were good crispy too, I suppose, but they weren't...quite...right...after that.)
No, earl grey tea is not the secret ingredient in recipe one.
Dark Chocolate Oregon Hazelnut Stout Crinkles. The High Ruler over all other cookies. The One Ring of cookies if you will. The best fucking cookies I have ever made. (And more on these cookies later.)
Molasses Crinkles. My family's favorite cookie. The attendees' of WEEHU least favorite cookie. There's no accounting for taste. Whatever. That just means that I got to eat more of them than I thought I would.
Now everyone should understand that baking is the thing I do to deflect attention off of myself in new social situations, which technically wasn't a necessary thing at WEEHU because I'm an old pro at WEEHU-ing now. But (and this is one of the only things in the entire world about which I will be unabashedly arrogant) I am a fucking marvelous cookie baker. My cookies are phenomenal. People should pay me to bake them cookies. (And they have.) People should throw themselves at my feet and beg for the honor of eating my cookies...wait...why didn't I do that?! (Note to self, at the next EEHU, make people beg at my feet for cookies...)
In this case, the cookies served a greater purpose. I needed something to occupy myself while I stayed up all damn night. Mixing, chilling, and baking something around 24 dozen cookies used up the time nicely. When they were done I made sure the "food" portion of my packing was ready to go, then went and sorted clothing. And jewelry. And Stuff*. And then went to bed for 3 hours or so.
Which brings us to Wednesday morning. I got up, messed around online, as you do, (well, as I do), organized make-up and toiletries, then went back to bed for another 6.5 hours. I was trying for a full 8, with the idea being that then I'd have no trouble staying up during the drive, but 6.5 was probably more than I should have expected. I woke up around 7; this gave me ample time to get everything officially packed, get myself properly prepared (because shaving in a hotel shower = not fun) and the car loaded, with time to spare for more messing around online.
In support of messing around online: a certain person was coming to WEEHU from destinations far, far away, and it would have been down-right rude of me to not talk with them as they were trying to stay up all of their respective night, right? Right.
At 12:30am I set off for a weekend of trance, adventure, and smut. Just the kind of vacation that suits me best!
Highlights of the drive include: never getting lost despite unexpected road closures/accidents along my route (thanks, Salem, Oregon and middle-of-nowhere California,) chatting with the cashier at the gas station in Yreka, and the orgasmic crescendo in "Pines of the Appian Way" happening just as the sun was rising over Mt. Shasta. (Note to anyone who might care - "Pines of Rome" is my favorite piece of classical music, and "Pines of the Appian Way" is my favorite part of it. It was written by Ottorino Respighi, whose works were a major influence on the style of John Williams, which you can hear quite clearly in this piece, especially in the use of woodwinds. But again, I digress.)
I arrived in beautiful Belmont, CA around 11am, and met up with Felix Krull for our traditional first-day-of-WEEHU brunch. (We've done it twice. Therefore it is now a tradition.) While I awaited him, I chatted with the Calico via Skype, and was informed that, somewhere in the hotel, a Bannable Offense lingered. After an exhaustive search (I walked over to the one person using a hotel provided computer to surf tumblr and asked the air "Is there a Bannable Offense within the sound of my voice? Turns out, there was) I located Banny and Felix and I dragged her to brunch with us. Let me tell you, there is nothing more entertaining after a 10-ish hour drive than watching two highly educated people discuss the failings of our public educational system (as well as the negative impact of a societal expectation that college degree = smarter/better/etc has on some people) over omelettes. Eventually, we used up all of Felix's lunch hour, and Banny and I went back and hung out in the foyer of the hotel some more. If I recall correctly, that is when we encountered Dancecode, Unsunng, and W, two out of three whom I'd met the previous July at MEEHU. Others who trickled in while we sat around were Flower (who I'd met at MEEHU) and KnowingSmile, Max and Lily (who I met in September in Seattle), and Orchid-Girl (with whom I'd only chatted online) and AndSleep (who I'd met at WEEHU1.) And of course Carneggy and Kat. Who I know because Reasons.
I'm taking the time to point out how I know all these people because as recently as 6 months ago if you'd told me that I'd be attending an event and not only know a lot of people but call them my friends I would have scoffed at you. It's kind of a big deal for me.
Anyhow, once Carneggy and Kat arrived we got to go up to our room. I'm pretty sure people were impressed with the amount of stuff that I'd brought - that look on Carneggy's face was totally "I'm impressed" and not "I'm resigned". I'm totally sure. Yes.
Banny wasn't going to have a room until after 5, so she hung out with us, and got to see the grand unveiling of all the shoes, the clothes for Calico, the jewelry, and the Stuff*. For some reason, she was really impressed with the high-test fishing line, although it sadly never got used for anything. Did I take advantage of this time to nap? OF COURSE NOT. You are talking the crazy talk right now. (I had been up for only 22 hours or so by this time. Piece of cake!) Somewhere in all of this, ZanyM and MrDream's plane arrived, and we texted back and forth about the wonders of air travel and rental cars (and also whether or not Zany was going to make it to the hotel in time to ride with me back to the airport to pick up more people. She did not.) So, right around 4:45 Banny and I went back to the airport to pick up Lee Allure and Lizzidoll. I am not too proud to admit that I am a much better driver when there is no one else in the car. I get distracted. But we eventually made it to the airport, picked up our two lovely passengers, and after running a Very Important Errand involving blindfolds***, made it back to the hotel unscathed. We collected Carneggy and Kat from where they had been resting and went back to hang out in Lee's rooms to chat until dinner time. A bunch of us went to dinner at a local Afghan restaurant (which was fantastic) and I got to catch up with even more people who I'd met at previous events, including HypnoMaestro and Mephki. I somehow ended up sitting next to Lizzidoll rather than Carneggy, Kat, and Heidi (a new friend from Seattle) - mostly because I blindly followed Liz left when I should have turned right, and thus got to have the fun of seeing her totally fangirl when she found out she was sitting across from HypnoMasterD. I was definitely feeling the fatigue at this point; there were so many different conversations going on around me that I nearly drifted off into trance to compensate. But only nearly. After dinner we made it back to the hotel just in time for Lee, Lizzidoll, Zany, and I to practice our Sekrit Projekt before DJ Pynchon arrived. That lasted all of 15 minutes before Pynch arrived, with the Calico in tow. There were hugs all around, then I ended up spending quite a bit of time in the adjoining room so that I was out of sight of the main room, for reasons that I shall go into in my Day 2 post. I will say that Pynchon also had to use an entire luggage cart for all of his stuff...but I fancy mine was more full. I spent part of that time frozen like a statue, because why not, right? But most of it in watching a mindless Lizzidoll make endless circuits between the two rooms.
Which brings us to the Highlight of the Evening.
The Highlight of the Evening
You, Gentle Reader, are hereby invited to imagine first-hand the delightful spectacle of a somewhat absent-minded DJ Pynchon realizing that the dazzling and entranced English Rose his unconscious mind had been preventing him from noticing was in fact the lovely Lizzidoll, come all the way from England for WEEHU. It was the Best.Surprise.Ever. They had a marvelous little meeting of minds, which I will admit I got a little spacey watching, and also a little turned on. (You'd have to be dead to not have been a little turned on.) And that's all I'll say about that.****
Carneggy and Kat were getting over being sick, and I had been up for something like 28 hours at that point, so we toddled off to bed, so that we could be well-rested (for certain definitions of "rest") the next morning.
*the STUFF aka the things I collected that I thought would be useful in some way or another at an erotic hypnosis gathering.
the STUFF
items for goody bags for my Subjects Safe-Space talk
high-test fishing line
electrical tape
standard tape measure
bell (the kind you ring for service at a shop counter, not the kind you ring for service from your servants.)
a leash
plastic covered clips (five for a dollar at the Dollar Tree)
magic markers
curling ribbon
compressed air canister
**what I call Lemon Flavored Paint Thinner. If properly aged, it would have been Limoncello. And I have two other bottles of it that will be marvelous in two months or so. But this stuff...definitely still paint thinner.
***the BLINDFOLDS, a necessary object for anyone participating in a certain brain-washing class later on...
****There will be a participant's version of the Hightlight of the Evening available if there is enough interest. Well, participants? Did you read the footnotes?
A note about footnotes: I am perfectly well aware that I do not organize my footnotes "properly". I don't care. Thank you, and have a nice day.
Showing posts with label friends. Show all posts
Showing posts with label friends. Show all posts
Sunday, October 25, 2015
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Retracing My Steps
One of the side effects of my February hypnotist disaster has been the tainting of my hypnosis fetish. I had only been exploring hypnosis for a little under 3 months when I started working with him, and a ton of what I learned that I liked and what worked well for me I learned with him. Not everything, thanks goodness, but enough that for the last month it has been really hard to be in trance without his specter sort of lurking in the back of my mind. Mind you, this is after the other person with whom I work helped root all the left-over suggestions etc that had been left behind out of my head. I decided that I needed to re-write the program, as it were, so that is my new adventure. Same as the old adventure, just from a different direction and, unfortunately, without as much trust in myself or for new people as I had. I miss the kind of innocent enjoyment I was able to bring to things before, and I may never forgive him for the loss of that, but I know that I will be better off this way.
So, I went back to the beginning. Which for me, was YouTube (you can all stop cringing, there are worthwhile videos to be found there.) I'm re-learning how to go into trance trusting myself, and I am trying to do the same with my other friend/hypnotist, who has stuck by me through all of this and has been a rock and a pillow all at the same time.
The hardest part has been having the sheer joy I found in the erotic aspects of hypnosis be diminished. When I lost my trust in people that was the first thing that was affected, and has proven to be extremely difficult to work through. I was never interested in being the person who tranced alone from a file to get my rocks off, I relished the human connection that I had found and even more the friend that I thought I had found through it, and losing that broke my heart. It also slammed home just how lonely I had been before I started my hypnosis adventure, and made me enormously grateful for the friends I have made who didn't disappear on me, even though I have been weepy and whiny, selfish and scared, and more than a little bit over-sensitive. (Or, as one person put it, complicated.) I am a very, very complicated person. Yes.
The other major thing that has been bothering me is that (because I am insecure) in my imagination my ex-hypnotist tells other people to stay away from me, that I am bad news, that I am crazy, that I am the kind of person you don't want to get mixed up with (which is how he made me feel about myself when he left.) There are a couple of people who, before I met him, I had been interested in getting to know, in being friends with, and because I know he is friends with them/associates with them I feel like I can never pursue that avenue. I feel like I have my own version of the scarlet letter floating ahead of me everywhere I go, and that this herald of my presence will color every interaction I try to have in the future.
But I do understand that I feel this way because I lack self-confidence. I do understand that I am insecure and that most of the time no one will care what has happened to me in the past or about with whom it happened. It's the one person who will care that I think about.
My friend last night told me something amazingly and agonizingly important: feeling this way, feeling in general, IS COMPLETELY NORMAL AND ACCEPTABLE. (I had to capitalize that for myself, to help it sink in a little more.) Feeling how I have felt over the last month, and the way I felt through the 5 weeks before that--all completely normal and acceptable. And it's not my fault if other people can't deal with it. The only things within my control are how I feel and how I choose to react to those feelings, and I have handled that in the most honest and ethical way that I know.
And for now, that is enough.
So, I went back to the beginning. Which for me, was YouTube (you can all stop cringing, there are worthwhile videos to be found there.) I'm re-learning how to go into trance trusting myself, and I am trying to do the same with my other friend/hypnotist, who has stuck by me through all of this and has been a rock and a pillow all at the same time.
The hardest part has been having the sheer joy I found in the erotic aspects of hypnosis be diminished. When I lost my trust in people that was the first thing that was affected, and has proven to be extremely difficult to work through. I was never interested in being the person who tranced alone from a file to get my rocks off, I relished the human connection that I had found and even more the friend that I thought I had found through it, and losing that broke my heart. It also slammed home just how lonely I had been before I started my hypnosis adventure, and made me enormously grateful for the friends I have made who didn't disappear on me, even though I have been weepy and whiny, selfish and scared, and more than a little bit over-sensitive. (Or, as one person put it, complicated.) I am a very, very complicated person. Yes.
The other major thing that has been bothering me is that (because I am insecure) in my imagination my ex-hypnotist tells other people to stay away from me, that I am bad news, that I am crazy, that I am the kind of person you don't want to get mixed up with (which is how he made me feel about myself when he left.) There are a couple of people who, before I met him, I had been interested in getting to know, in being friends with, and because I know he is friends with them/associates with them I feel like I can never pursue that avenue. I feel like I have my own version of the scarlet letter floating ahead of me everywhere I go, and that this herald of my presence will color every interaction I try to have in the future.
But I do understand that I feel this way because I lack self-confidence. I do understand that I am insecure and that most of the time no one will care what has happened to me in the past or about with whom it happened. It's the one person who will care that I think about.
My friend last night told me something amazingly and agonizingly important: feeling this way, feeling in general, IS COMPLETELY NORMAL AND ACCEPTABLE. (I had to capitalize that for myself, to help it sink in a little more.) Feeling how I have felt over the last month, and the way I felt through the 5 weeks before that--all completely normal and acceptable. And it's not my fault if other people can't deal with it. The only things within my control are how I feel and how I choose to react to those feelings, and I have handled that in the most honest and ethical way that I know.
And for now, that is enough.
Thursday, February 7, 2013
Extraordinary Things
I have had an extraordinary day (that has stretched into an exraordinary night) and like many extraordinary things is proving very difficult to write about. Exraordinary things have been happening to me daily ever since I discovered hypnosis; I am constantly surprised by the next thing that comes along. Just like I can always go deeper so can I always find new territories to explore.
So, an update on the life of Noelle. I am no longer seeking out new trance partners. (This doesn't mean that I won't trance with someone new, but it does mean that if you chat me up with the sole intention of trying to entrance me that you will be sadly disappointed.) I have found two wonderful friends with whom I can play with total trust and respect and that is sufficient. They are very similar in some ways, but also dramatically different in others. It keeps it interesting for me, interacting with these two points of view. Keeps me on my toes, as it were.
The novelty of being a science project has worn off, especially as I've discovered something that I am not good at at all. Turns out I'm lousy at being blank--that complete mindless state that some people seem to achieve without effort. I want to be able to experience it quite a lot; someone saying "freeze" and me being frozen and mindlessly unaware of the passage of time before someone says "unfreeze." I'm having a lot trouble with the 'mindlessly unaware' aspect. We're working on it and I know that someday we'll manage it, but until then I am being childishly impatient and not a little bit demanding of myself.
I've rediscovered some things about myself that I should have already known from my 'real' life but hadn't really expected to deal with in my hypnotic life. Stupidity annoys me, as does neediness and unfounded arrogance. (And by 'annoys' I really mean 'angers'.) I seem to attract men with the mentality of little boys who are looking for a Mom, or arrogant jerks who think they are god's gift to any woman with a Skype account. Strangely enough, in a community that practices an art to which listening is integral I have encountered very few people who actually bother to listen. Maybe it's because so many people rely on scripts posted online and read blindly by someone with no connection to the original hypnotist. It's a mystery to me.
But as I said, extraordinary experiences.
Having all my senses heightened to unbelievable levels and then orgasming like something supernatural.
Being taken so deeply into trance that all I remember is the sensation of water and some pretty lights.
And feeling a connection so strongly with someone that I would have sworn he was in the room with me, so close that I should have been able to just...reach...out...
Asking myself again how it is that I have this mighty rapport with two people whom I've never met? (When I crack that mystery I'll have the keys to the universe.)
It's already tomorrow, so I suppose I'll have to look forward to today for any answers. Or more likely, more questions.
p.s.
*licks from the base of your skull to the bottom of your spine*
So, an update on the life of Noelle. I am no longer seeking out new trance partners. (This doesn't mean that I won't trance with someone new, but it does mean that if you chat me up with the sole intention of trying to entrance me that you will be sadly disappointed.) I have found two wonderful friends with whom I can play with total trust and respect and that is sufficient. They are very similar in some ways, but also dramatically different in others. It keeps it interesting for me, interacting with these two points of view. Keeps me on my toes, as it were.
The novelty of being a science project has worn off, especially as I've discovered something that I am not good at at all. Turns out I'm lousy at being blank--that complete mindless state that some people seem to achieve without effort. I want to be able to experience it quite a lot; someone saying "freeze" and me being frozen and mindlessly unaware of the passage of time before someone says "unfreeze." I'm having a lot trouble with the 'mindlessly unaware' aspect. We're working on it and I know that someday we'll manage it, but until then I am being childishly impatient and not a little bit demanding of myself.
I've rediscovered some things about myself that I should have already known from my 'real' life but hadn't really expected to deal with in my hypnotic life. Stupidity annoys me, as does neediness and unfounded arrogance. (And by 'annoys' I really mean 'angers'.) I seem to attract men with the mentality of little boys who are looking for a Mom, or arrogant jerks who think they are god's gift to any woman with a Skype account. Strangely enough, in a community that practices an art to which listening is integral I have encountered very few people who actually bother to listen. Maybe it's because so many people rely on scripts posted online and read blindly by someone with no connection to the original hypnotist. It's a mystery to me.
But as I said, extraordinary experiences.
Having all my senses heightened to unbelievable levels and then orgasming like something supernatural.
Being taken so deeply into trance that all I remember is the sensation of water and some pretty lights.
And feeling a connection so strongly with someone that I would have sworn he was in the room with me, so close that I should have been able to just...reach...out...
Asking myself again how it is that I have this mighty rapport with two people whom I've never met? (When I crack that mystery I'll have the keys to the universe.)
It's already tomorrow, so I suppose I'll have to look forward to today for any answers. Or more likely, more questions.
p.s.
*licks from the base of your skull to the bottom of your spine*
Wednesday, January 2, 2013
Tangent - Girls - Part 1
I'm having trouble deciding how many parts this sequence should have, and in what order they should be posted. So I'm going to treat it a little like stream of consciousness rather than in the more measured, rhythmic way I try to normally write. It may turn into that at some point; we shall see. I will, however, still overuse the word "so," especially at the start of paragraphs.
So. The first thing that comes into my head isn't about me. It's about a friend I knew as a child, with whom I re-connected in adulthood. We first met each other when I was 10 years old, she would have been 11. At first, she was mean to me, taunting me in the playground with the words most perfect for tormenting me completely. That didn't last though. We got to know each other better; we liked the same books, we liked to play the same games, she played piano, I played piano, and most importantly, the private school we attended had very few students, so since know one else shared our interests we naturally gravitated towards each other.
During sleep-overs, I thought she was very modest. We'd get ready for bed and I'd change into my pajamas without even thinking about it but she'd do it where I couldn't see, often in her large closet. We'd both developed early, and I remember she used to leave her bra on under her pjs until the lights were out. I thought it was odd, but never asked about it, it seemed too private of a thing to question. Her parents were more devout than mine, I think I just assumed that they had taught her that gettting undressed in front of people was wrong.
Three years later my family moved to a different state. My friend and I got to see each other several times a year, but 'out-of-sight, out-of-mind' definitely held true for us and our friendship lagged. When I graduated high school and ran away to college, it was to the same one she attended, but she had a crowd of friends that I didn't feel included by and we kept to our own circles.
One of the reasons that I had let us drift apart was that some of her behavior while in high school really bothered me. I knew she was rebelling, I thought it was against her parents and their strict religiousness. I remember her proudly explaining to me how to rip off an ATM by pretending to make a deposit, then going to several different sites to withdraw the funds before the bank had caught up with the transaction. (This was the 80's, for those of you accustomed to instantaneous transactions at the bank, take it from me, it tweren't always so.) On another occasion, through clever manipulation of a receipt, she received a full refund for a garment that she never actually returned. She also taught me how to steal expensive items from public lost and founds; her example was Disneyland. She and her friends shop-lifted, drank what they shop-lifted, and basically ran wild. All of this behavior was perplexing to me, but it never occured to me to say anything to any adults. And because I would never act that way, I judged her rather than feeling concerned for her, and let us drift apart.
Before I started college, I went to visit and slept on the floor of her dorm room while I was there. Her room mate was gone one night for some reason, and after we'd turned the lights out that night, she confessed to me that all through high school she'd been extremely promiscuous and had in fact had two abortions about which her family and most of her friends new nothing. I didn't know what to say. I'm afraid I probably said next to nothing out of shock. I hope that I thought to ask her if she was okay, but at 17 I was incredibly clueless so I'm sure that I did not. I thought about that night often, though, and some time in the next five years or so quietly decided that something terrible must have happened to her when she was a kid that had hurt her badly enough that she needed to resort to that behavior. Maybe she was trying to get her folks' attention? Maybe she was screaming out for help? I didn't ask then, and I can't ask now, so I'll never know.
Over the last 15 years or so we've had sporadic contact. We were always living in different states and never saw each other. I got a call from her one year, begging me to come home for the reunion of our little private school, but my marriage was floundering and I basically brushed her off and forgot about it. When my marriage finally ended for good several years after that and I came back home to Oregon I made an effort to put a note in her parents' mailbox and shortly thereafter I got a call from her, and she and her fiance came to visit one afternoon. I was shocked that she was getting married, I was even more shocked that she was getting married to a man old enough to be her father. Even though we hadn't been in touch and I couldn't claim to know her well anymore, her getting married to this older man felt really odd and out of character. I was invited to the upcoming wedding, but already had a commitment, and we lost touch again.
In 2009 or thereabouts I got on Facebook, my intention being to keep in touch with friends who were out of state and my family. One day I got a friend request from my friend and now we are friends on Facebook. We don't talk or hang out or see each other any more than we used to, but we are at least keeping up with each other's lives and interests through posts and likes and comments.
But something interesting happened in between 1999 and 2009--my friend came out of the closet, and by the time we reconnected on Facebook, was in a committed, long-term, and most importantly, healthy relationship. I wasn't surprised. In point of fact, my first thought was "Oooooohhhhh, maybe that explains it all." Because as I said in my "Some Women" post, sometimes all the mistakes you make and dangerous behavior you undertake happens because you have to trek through a wilderness in order to get to the person you really are. And maybe it really explains everything, all the way back to two little girls in a bedroom, one of whom was too shy to undress in front of the other. Maybe the way she teased me at first was her way of dealing with the fact that she liked me in a different way. That's what we always got told by our Moms when the boys were mean, after all. I'll never know, because I'll never ask, but I'm mightily curious about how things might have turned out if she hadn't had to slog through that wilderness for so long.
So. The first thing that comes into my head isn't about me. It's about a friend I knew as a child, with whom I re-connected in adulthood. We first met each other when I was 10 years old, she would have been 11. At first, she was mean to me, taunting me in the playground with the words most perfect for tormenting me completely. That didn't last though. We got to know each other better; we liked the same books, we liked to play the same games, she played piano, I played piano, and most importantly, the private school we attended had very few students, so since know one else shared our interests we naturally gravitated towards each other.
During sleep-overs, I thought she was very modest. We'd get ready for bed and I'd change into my pajamas without even thinking about it but she'd do it where I couldn't see, often in her large closet. We'd both developed early, and I remember she used to leave her bra on under her pjs until the lights were out. I thought it was odd, but never asked about it, it seemed too private of a thing to question. Her parents were more devout than mine, I think I just assumed that they had taught her that gettting undressed in front of people was wrong.
Three years later my family moved to a different state. My friend and I got to see each other several times a year, but 'out-of-sight, out-of-mind' definitely held true for us and our friendship lagged. When I graduated high school and ran away to college, it was to the same one she attended, but she had a crowd of friends that I didn't feel included by and we kept to our own circles.
One of the reasons that I had let us drift apart was that some of her behavior while in high school really bothered me. I knew she was rebelling, I thought it was against her parents and their strict religiousness. I remember her proudly explaining to me how to rip off an ATM by pretending to make a deposit, then going to several different sites to withdraw the funds before the bank had caught up with the transaction. (This was the 80's, for those of you accustomed to instantaneous transactions at the bank, take it from me, it tweren't always so.) On another occasion, through clever manipulation of a receipt, she received a full refund for a garment that she never actually returned. She also taught me how to steal expensive items from public lost and founds; her example was Disneyland. She and her friends shop-lifted, drank what they shop-lifted, and basically ran wild. All of this behavior was perplexing to me, but it never occured to me to say anything to any adults. And because I would never act that way, I judged her rather than feeling concerned for her, and let us drift apart.
Before I started college, I went to visit and slept on the floor of her dorm room while I was there. Her room mate was gone one night for some reason, and after we'd turned the lights out that night, she confessed to me that all through high school she'd been extremely promiscuous and had in fact had two abortions about which her family and most of her friends new nothing. I didn't know what to say. I'm afraid I probably said next to nothing out of shock. I hope that I thought to ask her if she was okay, but at 17 I was incredibly clueless so I'm sure that I did not. I thought about that night often, though, and some time in the next five years or so quietly decided that something terrible must have happened to her when she was a kid that had hurt her badly enough that she needed to resort to that behavior. Maybe she was trying to get her folks' attention? Maybe she was screaming out for help? I didn't ask then, and I can't ask now, so I'll never know.
Over the last 15 years or so we've had sporadic contact. We were always living in different states and never saw each other. I got a call from her one year, begging me to come home for the reunion of our little private school, but my marriage was floundering and I basically brushed her off and forgot about it. When my marriage finally ended for good several years after that and I came back home to Oregon I made an effort to put a note in her parents' mailbox and shortly thereafter I got a call from her, and she and her fiance came to visit one afternoon. I was shocked that she was getting married, I was even more shocked that she was getting married to a man old enough to be her father. Even though we hadn't been in touch and I couldn't claim to know her well anymore, her getting married to this older man felt really odd and out of character. I was invited to the upcoming wedding, but already had a commitment, and we lost touch again.
In 2009 or thereabouts I got on Facebook, my intention being to keep in touch with friends who were out of state and my family. One day I got a friend request from my friend and now we are friends on Facebook. We don't talk or hang out or see each other any more than we used to, but we are at least keeping up with each other's lives and interests through posts and likes and comments.
But something interesting happened in between 1999 and 2009--my friend came out of the closet, and by the time we reconnected on Facebook, was in a committed, long-term, and most importantly, healthy relationship. I wasn't surprised. In point of fact, my first thought was "Oooooohhhhh, maybe that explains it all." Because as I said in my "Some Women" post, sometimes all the mistakes you make and dangerous behavior you undertake happens because you have to trek through a wilderness in order to get to the person you really are. And maybe it really explains everything, all the way back to two little girls in a bedroom, one of whom was too shy to undress in front of the other. Maybe the way she teased me at first was her way of dealing with the fact that she liked me in a different way. That's what we always got told by our Moms when the boys were mean, after all. I'll never know, because I'll never ask, but I'm mightily curious about how things might have turned out if she hadn't had to slog through that wilderness for so long.
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