Time Will Come Someday

I went a little crazy last week, I have to admit.

A couple blogs ago, I told you that I found out Glenn went on a date and was on a dating site (OK Cupid if you're curious). The date I didn't really care about--the dating site I did, but probably not for the reason you think. The dating site I cared about not because of the possibility of it facilitating his going on a date--if you saw his profile, you'd know there's no danger of that--but because for months he'd been accusing me of doing shady things, which I absolutely was not, and meanwhile, there he was, on a dating website.

Hypocritical much?

You know how a couple paragraphs ago I said I didn't care about Glenn having gone on a date? Remember that?

I kind of lied, and by kind of, I mean I absolutely, positively, one-hundred percent lied.

But if it makes you feel any less lied to, it was the truth at first.

At first, when I was snooping around Glenn's Facebook messages and saw that he went to meet some girl--Randy Cocks, people--

Randy fucking Cocks!

(all right, the spelling of her name may be a little different, but phonetically, it seriously is Randy Cocks. Have you ever?)--

I wasn't very worried. I saw that she has kids, which is totally not Glenn's cup of tea, and after reading their messages, it didn't seem like Glenn was terribly interested. And even if he was, even if something did happen, would it really have been the end of the world? He wouldn't have been doing anything I hadn't done in the past.

For a few days, that was my attitude. Seriously!

But then, a few days later, I went on his Facebook again, and there she was, Ms. Horny Organ, leaving comments and liking things all over the place, and even worse, friends of his were liking the comments she was leaving. And we all know what that means.

So last week, Griffin and Keifer were out of town on a field trip from Monday to Friday. Monday and Tuesday were pretty uneventful but on Wednesday and Thursday, things were...not.

I don't remember what started our fight on Wednesday, only that it was me. Same thing on Thursday. (Seriously, I'd be shocked if any fight you ever hear about involving me and Glenn is started by him. If it were up to him, we'd talk never.)

We fought for hours on Thursday--hours--and by the time I went to bed at 2, a picture had been pulled off the wall and beaten on the floor repeatedly, a lint brush thrown at the tile floor, my bike violently turned over and hurled at the floor hard enough to crack the wood, and in a fit of madness, screams were screamed so loudly they terrified Jazzy into having diarrhea. (I don't want to point any fingers, but Glenn was the perpetrator of none of these things.)

I guess if you want to get technical, you might be able to say I kind of had a breakdown.

But that's not important. That's not what this is about. This is about Glenn, Frisky Love Shaft, and their (non) date.

What started out as me not caring had become almost total paranoia in the week since I'd found out about their meeting, and I kept bringing her up. Glenn, who kept insisting it wasn't a date, told me that if he did go on a date, it certainly wouldn't be with  Lascivious Member who has three kids from different guys, and I knew he was telling the truth; after all, that had been my instinct in the first place.

As soon as he said that sentence, I felt better. Less tense.

And that lasted about a minute. Maybe two.

I may be safe where Hot Prick is concerned, but I think an exclamatory whew! uttered while exaggeratedly wiping off my furrowed brow might be a little bit premature.

It might not be Lustful Penis.

But it's coming.

Me Gotta Go Now

The weekend I turned seventeen, my friend Chris, her boyfriend, Fra, my then-boyfriend, Louie, and I went for fondue at St. Gregory's. While we were switching through the radio stations on our way to the restaurant, we heard the song "Louie Louie." I love that song, so I'm sure we left it on, but I don't remember the exact circumstances surrounding our listening to it. We either got to the restaurant before the song ended or switched radio stations as soon it was over, and the reason I still know that now, more than 20 years later, is that it wasn't until later in the night that we realized "Louie Louie" was the only song being played on that radio station at all. After dinner as we drove in whatever direction we were headed (most likely toward the beach or down US-1), we heard it again.

Hey! "Louie Louie" is on again! I said.That was in 1992, back before the days of on-demand anything, and to hear a song twice in one night that I liked but barely ever heard demanded notice.

I think they're having some sort of "Louie Louie" celebration because I heard this song earlier today, too, Chris said. We definitely didn't change the radio station that time, and as a result, we heard "Louie Louie" over and over and over again.

It turned out that a new radio station had come to South Florida, and to mark its beginning, "Louie Louie" was played twenty-four hours a day, three days in a row.

ALL LOUIE ALL THE TIME, the DJs exclaimed for three days straight. Since my boyfriend's name was Louie and I was seventeen and a fucking idiot, I thought it was the neatest thing ever.

Did you know there are over 1,000 versions of that song?

Well, there are.

I didn't hear them all that weekend, but I heard plenty, among them The Kingsmen's original version, a big band version, a marching band version, a gospel version, a country version, and a metal version by Motorhead. (I know there were more, but  in my old age, those are all the versions I can remember.)

I remember Louie saying, I've never been so sick of hearing my own name because, as we all know, I'm a crazy person and being a crazy person, I refused to change the radio station.

After the first few hours of ALL LOUIE ALL THE TIME, of course the song got kind of tiresome, but no matter how tiresome it became, I just could not bring myself to turn it off. Maybe it was because the song playing over and over shared my boyfriend's name, maybe it was because the experience was just so surreal that I didn't dare interrupt it, or maybe it was because I have a tendency to get attached to certain things and can't bear for them to be away, but despite the protests of whomever happened to be around me that weekend (mostly poor Louie), I kept the Louie Louie station on around the clock.

For three days straight, I heard, in part, this:

Me catch a ship across the sea
Me sail the ship all alone
Me never think how I'll make it home

Funny how life works.

Just
fucking
hysterical.

Let Me Clear My Throat

"There was this man. He would never talk. He'd just sit there all night.
They say to him, 'What's the matter? Don't you say anything?'
He says, 'What am I going to say, that my wife two-times me?'
So she says, 'Shut up! You're always talking!'"
                                                -- Goodfellas

Today when I was leaving planning, a teacher a little bit down the hall waved and, like a civilized human being, said, "How are you doing?"

Well.

My husband, who went on a date last night, has a profile on OK Cupid soliciting long-term dating, short-term dating, and casual sex; I haven't slept more than twelve hours, total, in the past three nights; last night I learned that a woman who I thought was a friend, a woman who I had a great deal of respect and admiration for, who I believed to be one of the most genuine, most amiable people I'd ever met and who, in some ways, I aspired to be like, actually loathes me and has spent a good portion of the last few months writing back and forth to my husband talking up my flaws, offering to take pictures of him for his OK Cupid account, mentally cheering on people who belittle and insult me publicly, and basically saying things someone should never have to find out that a person--especially a person who's been posing as a friend--thinks about her (you're a gentleman and a scholar, Heather Baird, and even though I know you won't be reading this--you know, because I have to keep starting new blogs since once people read my blog for long enough, they catch on to how full of shit I am and can't stand me, forcing me to find new readers--thank you so much for reaffirming my faith in the goodness of people. Well done); as I learned that this woman pretty much has the same feelings for me that most people have for, say, Snooki or Anna Nicole Smith, I also learned that she and my husband came to the conclusion that I'm afflicted by Histrionic Personality Disorder, which pretty much means I'm nothing more than an attention-seeking, manipulative, shallow slut who's so provocative, she can't even keep female friends; I have to fill out financial papers and child-sharing papers and agree on things with a husband who doesn't think there's any reason to speak to me; I dropped my entire lunch on the linoleum floor in the 240 corridor, leaving myself not only lunchless but also in roasted-vegetable-tamale-splattered pants; and when a student tried to give me a hug, I started crying in the middle of class and couldn't stop.

"Fine," I answered. "And you?"

Pony Boy, Things Are Rough All Over

It's just… You never really know what's going on inside somebody--do you? You think if you care about them--you know. But you never really do."
                                                        -Scott Hope, "Beauty and the Beasts," BtVS


So I have this friend. 

(Yes, I know. But really. I do.)

This friend, who I've been friends with since I was 8, has easily been the best friend I've ever had. When I say that from the time we were twelve until she went away to college when we were seventeen, save for a rough patch here and there, we were as close as people can be, I say it with complete honesty and no exaggeration whatsoever. When I say that throughout her years in college and the subsequent years she's spent living half the country away, our friendship has remained as strong--though admittedly different--as it was in our younger years, I'm again speaking as literally as I can.

This friend of mine has been so constant in my life and been such an inspiration to me, I think of her as my north star.

(Let's call her that, k? It's a lot less clunky for me than repeatedly saying, "my friend.")

***

Maybe you've been reading my blog for a long time. Maybe this one is your first. If you're the former, you might remember reading I'm Okay (I Promise), the blog post I wrote when I found out that somebody--well, more than one somebody--was inspired by me. As a girl who's been given an extra-heaping helping of inferiority issues mixed with just the right amount of jealousy, finding out people were actually jealous of me was shocking. It was a possibility that had never remotely crossed my mind. 

***

The first thing you should know about North Star is that she's beautiful, one of those girls who doesn't need any makeup or primping to be beautiful, one of those girls who's beautiful in the eyes of everyone, and that she's been beautiful forever. In middle and high school when everyone was living in Awkwardsville, hiding their pimples underneath bangs that were fried to a frizzy crisp by too-hot curling irons and overly-aggressive blow drying, North Star had perfect (I-hate-to-say-it-because-it's-so-cliche, but yes, perfect) alabaster skin and flowing black hair . Also, North Star was thin.

The second thing you should know about North Star is that she's smart. People have this stupid notion that if a girl is beautiful, she probably isn't smart; I can assure you that for North Star, that's not the case at all. 

The third thing you should know about North Star is that when we were younger, I never met a boy who didn't have a thing for her. See, North Star wasn't (isn't) just pretty and smart, she was cool--raunchy and crude but not overly so, the furthest thing from a priss you'll ever meet. I guess she acted a lot like a guy, only she was hot while she was doing it. 

***

Just like I never imagined that people could be jealous of, or inspired by, me, there are certain people I would never imagine to be unhappy at all. I mean, yes, of course I know nobody is happy every single moment of every day, but I mean overall. But sometimes you learn the darndest things.

***

If people were to ask me about my relationship with North Star when we were growing up, I would tell them, like I told you in the beginning of this post, we were as close as two people could be. I would tell them that we spent Friday nights at my house and Saturday nights at her house, talked on the phone all day and night after school on weekday nights, and when we weren't having solo time with our boyfriends, were together. I would tell them that there was really nothing I didn't know about North Star, and there was nothing North  Star didn't know about me.

If people were to ask me about North Star's life back then, not from my perspective, but from the perspective of North Star, I'd say she'd say her life was wonderful. Not in those words, exactly, but wonderful is what it would boil down to. She was thin, she was pretty, she was cool, she was smart, she was funny; she was on the upper upper side of middle class; she was confident, she was self-assured, she was unselfconscious; and everybody liked her. I never, ever would have said that North Star wasn't happy. And I knew her as well as I knew me.

***

I was on the phone with North Star a few days ago, and we started talking about my shyness. When the subject came up, she asked me when I got to be this way. When I first moved to Miramar, she reminded me, I was outgoing and friends with everyone. What had happened to make me change?

At first I thought her question was ridiculous. When I moved to Miramar, I was eight. A person's personality changes a lot in thirty years. Why was my being so shy such a big deal? Why did something have to cause that?

But then I realized...

(what I realized is not important)

...and when I realized what I realized and told North Star what I'd realized, she said something akin to, Yes, and that was at a formative time. That year was really hard on me, too. But luckily I realized it early on and did some work to try to get  past it.

My reply to North Star was not nice. It was sarcastic, and it was hurtful. See, North Star was part of the problem, part of the hurt that I'd experienced and to which I was referring. It's a long story that I don't want to go into right now, but let's just say I underwent a great deal of pain, and the idea that anybody else, especially North Star, was experiencing pain at the same time was completely foreign to me.

She then told me some things. Some things that I knew in terms of events but not so much aftermath, at least not the extent to which they'd hurt her. She told me some other things that I really had no idea of at all. 

She talked about alienation, exclusion, desperation.

She talked about feelings that, in regards to North Star, I never would have dreamed.

***

You think you know someone. Maybe you don't know them at all. Maybe you know just a part, a small part, that part that the someone saves just for you.

***

You also think your life is worse than the lives of others. That girl is so pretty. That boy is so smart. That girl has the most beautiful voice. That boy drives such a nice car. Everybody loves X. Everybody wants to be Y.

***  

You think those teenage movies and books with their everybody-experiences-pain-and-sadness-and-has-problems-of-their-own, the-prom-queen's-life-isn't-perfect, and the-popular-jock-is-going-through-something-at-home messages are a bunch of bull. 

Or at least you did.

(And by you, I mean I. You get that, right?)

***     

I don't wish unhappiness on anybody else, but I'd be lying by omission if I didn't say it's nice to know that in my sadness, in my insecurity, in my questioning and doubt, I'm not alone.