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Sunday, October 03, 2004

here i am again... 

...in the mood to write, with ideas about which to write, but unable to seize an idea, wrestle it to the ground and pin it down until it cries "Uncle!" and brings to fore a witty discourse upon the merits of marscapone over cream cheese in the Stuffing of French Toast.

(Please excuse any misspellings - the spell check on my blog editor is a little wonky when combined with my home computer.)

I could wax rapsodic about some link found in my travels about the internet, this great, big, beautiful World Wide Web upon which I spend far too much time. I've done that so often in the last few months, less inclined to reveal my thoughts and feelings since the events that unfurled the last two weeks of July. After so much spilling of my emotional guts and separating myself - albeit temporarily - from the source of such tumultuous emotions, I needed to step away from my feelings in this humble record as well. But I'm tired of old school blogging. It bores me tonight.

So let's see what been going on in my weekend thus far, shall we?

After a Friday evening of hanging out with Sarriah - in which we spent yet another block of hours trying to Figure Out People We Know of the Testosterone Persuasion (quite the past-time, truth to tell) - I dozed upon her sofa. My previous Saturday plans were canceled due to illness (over which I experienced bummage), so instead the day was spent with Sarriah and I spending yet more hours together, having breakfast and moving my old sofa from the garage to the curb and rearranging a few things to make room for boxes of hers I'll be storing, with a few more hours spent looking for a particular coffee shop in Altadena and drinking coffee and and sharing apple pie a la mode and writing and playing I Don't Get It, Do You? By 9pm she was on her way back home and I leapt online to futz and read journals and blogs and give into my newly acquired MSN Games addiction, with the thought of, "I should really write something," lurking in the back of my mind.

But the ideas which parade through my head are ones that don't want to be expanded upon. Instead I find myself entertaining memories of being the subject of bullies and youthful derision in my chilldhood, never knowing why I was targeted but mostly ignoring the perpetrators. Except for the one time in San Diego, at the end of ninth grade, when the bully d'année pushed and kicked at my back whilst walking down to the football field until finally--

An entire school year of being picked upon and denigrated in front of the entire P.E. class boiled over and I snapped, spinning around and swinging blindly. No technique, no finesse, barely any hits landed from my quarter, though my opponent - outweighing me by thirty pounds or more - had none of my fighting inexperience. Remarkably, when the teacher pulled us apart a five minute eternity later, I had few bruises, except the massive purple and black and blue bruise decorating my ego as I struggled to keep from sobbing, my closest friend of the time with her arm around my shoulder and leading me down to the field.

By any objective judging I was the loser in that fight, the only real fight I had ever gotten into. The next year my bully ended up in my English class, which caused me to inwardly cringe on the first day. She sat nearby and, at one point, turned to me. I mentally braced myself against her oncoming verbal assault. She opened her hated mouth and uttered words I will never forget:

"Do you have a pencil I can borrow?"

Stunned, I nodded and lent her my extra pencil, for which she thanked me. And which she returned at the end of the class. She was smiling and pleasant to me the remanider of my time at that school.

Stranger still, her friends - the same cruel-faced girls that cheered on their leader as she taunted and jeered and hit the previous year - made overtures of friendship to me. Though it puzzled me, I realized that by standing up for myself at last - by swinging fists with all the grace and experience of a six foot four fourteen year old white boy at a school dance - I had gained their respect.

Somewhat bemused, I allowed them to make their overtures. I was pleasantly civil, but I never accepted their friendship. And just before the holidays my father retired from the Navy and got one of those aerospace jobs so prevalent in the very early 80s (this one in Santa Monica), we packed up the scads of stuff that only a family of seven can accumulate and moved north to the environs of the western San Fernando Valley, whereupon I would attend a nearby high school in which I was rarely picked on and where I acquired the best friend I have ever had, who continues to be an incredible best friend. Also on my high school dance card of cool people are three gentle souls whom I lost track of and reconnected over varying years later to achieve stronger friendships. Okay, so one of these gentle souls has been driving me crazy for over a year now and was the catalyst for the shards of emotions that exploded in July, some twenty-one years or so after our initial meeting, but hey, he's still okay in my book. Deserving of the occasional bop upside the head when I really start thinking about everything again, perhaps, but still okay.

So, as I sit here and type up my days as bully-bait, I wonder how such experiences have imprinted themselves on my psyche. I did learn the value of standing up for one's self, but it still took far too many years before I employed that lesson in everyday life. And there still are times when I don't employ it, but that's often in the realm of family, wherein I'm sometimes no longer a vibrant 38 year old woman but a little seven year old girl with thick glasses still sucking my middle two fingers whilst holding onto my Krissy doll.

I also learned to beware of fickle, inconsistent people who try to force their ways into my heart. On the surface I appear to be a completely trusting sort (or I think I do), but the truth is I don't trust very easily. Childhood betrayals of a significant nature and an innate introversion cured me of such a thing early on in life. As a consequence I view people who try to instantly insinuate themselves into my life with internal suspicion. My thinking is, what is this person lacking and what does he/she want of me that I am, after only a few days, considered in her/his mind to be a really good friend? I don't deal well with people who latch. Life has proven my initial instincts to be correct - such people have, for the most part, turned out to be clingy or needy or frankly crazy (the college girl who honestly believed that she was part elvan princess and that someday she would meet Sting, they'd fall madly in love and end up dying in one anothers' arms leaps to mind). Only those who have allowed acquaintenceship to develop into a rich full friendship are the ones that have stayed close to me.

This isn't to say that I've never experienced that immediate clicking that sometimes happens between two souls that have never met but still recognize each other. Of course I have and those friends are also very dear to me. But those are the exceptions that prove the rule.

And--

And this is where I run out of steam. Where I think I should have some sort of grand finishing observation that ties together all the threads and participles dangled in the preceeding paragraphs. Instead I realize that I am suddenly very tired and my thoughts have clouded and oh geez I have a wedding to go to in the early Sunday evening hours, so sleep must be had.

Well, maybe I didn't wrestle that idea until it cried, "Uncle!", but I think I at least annoyed it long enough to sit still as it gave me an exasperated glance.

That's something, isn't it?



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Carol/Female/36-40. Lives in United States/California/Los Angeles/San Fernando Valley, speaks English. Spends 40% of daytime online. Uses a Normal (56k) connection.
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