Author and Columnist
I've checked the math, which shows that it will take me five days less than forever if I only respond to one of your entries at a time. You often write three in a week, and I write three in a month -- I have less to write about, but I do so with better depth. As such, I will respond to several of your entries at a time unless one is meaty or important.
Last weekend, Emily and I went to the Tae Kwon Do qualifiers for the World Cup. Were she to win, she would be given a trip to Germany, I believe.
What you think you know about how taekwondo works and how it does are vastly different creatures.
Emily's weight class had never gone to the Olympics. This is partly because it only became an Olympic sport a year before you wrote this. Yes, there have been competitions and medals. I cannot promise that means there would ever have been a German trip in her future if she managed to win at the qualifiers. It is unlikely she would be given anything; it would be another cost.
I situated myself in the front row of the bleachers with all the sundry Tae Kwon Do items from the car.
You were always supportive in this way, giving weekends and evenings to cheerlead for the women in your bed.
Emily needed that support. Taekwondo was (and is) an inextricable part of her life in a way nothing else could be, at least before her having two children. She needed someone -- even one who was too ignorant of the mores of the sport and its competitions -- to affirm her decision to prostrate herself before its altar.
She informed me that it might take a little while. I figured by noon she might. I could wait that long. [...] So, Emily did not get to doing her form until 4:30.
One might think "breaking boards/faces" would be exciting, but no. The point is to score points without bloodshed and perform restrained dances that could only fight off balloons. Emily is one of hundreds of people at this competition, each of whom has paid a generous entrance fee and dragged along people who did the same; expediency is not worthwhile for the organizers.
I thought, after her forms, she would soon be given the chance to spar. Never let it be said that I cannot be naive. Emily did not get a chance to spar until nearly 9.
Yet this did not teach you the crucial lesson never to trust these things to be brief?
When finally she got in the ring, she was kicking ass for the first minute... until the lass threw a head kick and her leg got stuck on Emily's shoulder, shoving her knee into Emily's nose.
Taekwondo will never be kind to her. It twists her nose, blackens her eyes, dislocates her jaw, tears her tendons, and robs her sleep.
It eventually gives her a husband and, by proxy of him, two kids, so she might consider the balance worthwhile, even if she limps.
She spent the night, because we saw a movie with scary images and a lame ending, so she had to recover from the idea that the ghost of Chris Kattan saves the vapid interracial couple.
Emily leans a little on being so spooked that she must spend the night with you. She doesn't appreciate talk of ghosts or the like -- anything she cannot punch in the face if it annoys her -- but she is braver than she lets on.
I hauled a goodly amount of my Witchcraft books to school, including some very occult oriented antiques. I had a very intense sort of spell in mind, and knew that I would be unable to find it in any of my Llewlynn published books, as they tended toward the basic and innocuous.
I admire your pretense, if not your devotion, to your witchcraft. I admit to using most of this knowledge to bolster my fiction and entertain people at conventions. I have an enviable altar above my bookcase, but it mainly displays objects I find pretty or spooky.
(TV will make you believe there are ancient grimoires of unspeakable power uploaded to the Internet).
I am pleased to inform you that many arcane texts have been scanned and are available easily and without cost on the Internet. I could even buy a sufficient facsimile of the Voynich Manuscript, which is otherwise kept under the Yale Library.
For however benighted I find much of my era, It's a privileged one in a few crucial ways.
We also decided that lunch was in order and decided to endeavor a meal at the new Mexican place in New Paltz.
I excerpted this only because it is one of those odd shells one finds on the beach of memory. We were accidentally given far too much food for a small price, which felt like a blessing. Finding such magic in the mundane is endearing (though I love getting free food).
When she was entering Old Main Building, she said a wall appeared not to exist, like it was a hologram. This occurred later, when she was driving my car home and my side view mirror winked out of existence for her for a moment.
The funny thing about perceptions, especially another person's, is that they can say something, and there is no way to verify.
In my more paranormal research, this is all but a tenet. "I felt something eerie and was sure there was something out the corner of my eye that did not show up on any equipment" is rarely a disqualifying admission.
Emily complained/remarked that she recently had an immense craving to bite into meat. Given that she is a very guilty ex-vegetarian who still only allows herself fish and some chicken to survive, this came as a bit of a wry shock.
And because restricting the circles of food she is willing to eat makes it easier to avoid eating.
On the walk home, Emily said that she saw, in great detail, the vision of people being burned during the Black Death in the nocturnal waters of the creek by my house. I did not witness any such visions, though she looked to me for substantiation that the burning of whole villages did, indeed, occur owing to the plague.
It did occur during the plague. As you live in the Hudson Valley, which is in New York, which is in the United States of America where the bubonic plague did not visit, it did not occur in the creek.
When we arrived home, we divvied up the candy in a very equitable way. I got all the peanut butter stuff (which I adore and which gives her allergic reactions) and she got all the chewy, licorice, and sour stuff (which I don't greatly enjoy and which she loves).
Emily is not allergic to peanut butter. Not even a little bit.
Let's return to her ex-vegetarianism.
Over all, it was a wonderful night. Emily is great to work magick with, which I suppose makes sense because she makes my life so fantastic.
Whenever you say such things, I do not sense you believe them, bolstered by what you wrote in these other entries. You posted this to convince yourself or convince those people in your life who bother reading this.
She makes your life complicated because you want different things. She is adorable in many ways -- and you do adore her, though not in as many ways as she is adorable -- but you are uncomfortable with this relationship and will not be enough for the better part of a decade.
When I first experienced this meditation when I was 15 or so, I had amazing results. The members of PSU? Less so. When I asked of orange, as I did of most colors, "What does it feel like? What does it smell like?" two shmedricks felt the need to say "Oranges!" as Emily reported to me. The fact that they couldn't even relax and be calm during a soothing meditation should speak volumes to you of what I have to deal with.
You don't have to deal with this. You choose to, and then you opt to feel put upon about it.
I don't suppose you are a Discordian yet, though perhaps you are. There is divinity in silliness and far less in self-seriousness. They are college kids, heavy on the kids. They are not being tested. Let them have fun, even if their lack of devotion irritates you because you don't like what you see in the mirror.
I further told Reagan that I thought he should be in a larger role beyond the president's gofer, as he seemed reasonable and was certainly doing more for the club than she does. He told me that he had been, but the new president basically deposed him before the semester really began.
I have yet to encounter a group, let alone join one, not stymied by power dynamics; this is not Pagan-specific.
Last night I was supposed to go to a party at Kate's. As far as I could tell, this was a drunken punk sort of affair. I had full intention of wearing the dangerous pleather pants of overwhelming sexuality (or so Emily seems to believe).
Those pants are an embarrassment but forgivable enough for a twenty-year-old. Kate's friends would have laughed at you.
So, Kate skipped one of your parties, and you skipped one of hers. There isn't a balance here. I don't think either of you felt comfortable around the other's people. Alone -- which is like cozying up to the demon core -- you can understand one another near to how you once did. With anything like an audience or influence, you are, at best, frenemies. Neither of you can break from the pattern.
I suspect you feared being at her party with her people and turf. If she cuddled up to another boy in front of you -- and I bet she would have just to do it, no matter how she otherwise felt about the guy -- you would have been incensed and self-righteous for weeks.
I think that, in the past several months (or perhaps just after the Kate debacle), I gave up believing in soul mates [...] I feel too naive and unrealistic in thinking there is the pull of fate uniting two people.
I will not tell you to believe in soulmates or maintain that I do. Instead, I will tell you about your wife, as far in my past as they are in your future.
I was emotionally tortured by my relationship with a lesbian who needed to move on to that stage in her life. I meant to be at the Samhain ritual at the Unitarian Church on time but showed up late because getting out of my apartment was too much of an emotional struggle. I couldn't fathom knocking on the door for entrance, and the invitation was clear: I would not be permitted after the ritual began. I peeked in the window, dropped the canned goods I had brought, and left.
My wife was there, feet and months away. I stayed with the young lesbian until May, when she told me it was killing her not being who she needed to be.
I felt very right in my relationship with Katie and muse innocently about always being with her. Despite the fact that you were not around for Jen, I likely felt and mused the same. What conclusion can an educated being make?
You invest yourself in imperfect relationships because you are unsteady not being someone's boyfriend -- but not enough that you do the work to make the relationships closer to perfect. You romanticize how these were afterward to make their end more tragic rather than inevitable.
Remember how Jen mocked you in front of others? How she wouldn't come over on Valentine's Day even though she knew you had made dinner for her? How she seemed interested in getting you into bed and being your friend, but she was explicit that she didn't love you, even after losing your virginities? That you said you wanted to love a soul into her? When you were at Summer Scholars, and she had moved on to Nick without alerting you, you were barely avoiding cheating on her with at least three girls who urged you to relent. You thought you would be with Jen because you had cared for her for so long and did more sexually than with any other girl. If you had gone no further than some hand stuff, you would not have pretended she was wife material.
Did you think you would always be with Kate? I don't think you did when you were in the relationship. You loved her better than Jen, but I cannot imagine you logically wanting to be with her in a decade. Even when you were together, you both had phases where you didn't want to be -- for mostly adolescent reasons, well covered here.
Emily? The only time you thought you had a future with her was the year after you proposed, which was also the year before your presumptive wedding, when she will be unfaithful (I do not know the extent). Aside from that, the right stiff breeze might have been enough to break you up. It's strange in a way. She is hilarious and intelligent. You find her pretty. She is mostly in love and devoted to you, though sometimes she isn't. There was a sunk cost in loving you. Once, reading this in her behavior, you will ask her, "I know you love me, but are you still in love with me?" She tells you not to ask that, which is a firm answer. But you will be renting an apartment together by then so she could have her greyhound. You could not leave her. She would have no way to survive without you, so you stuck around even though she was not in love with you -- maybe Emily was beginning to fall in love with someone else by then -- and you both will pretend you forgot she said this. It is easier to go on than face what that means.
I have never not been in love with my wife. I have never not loved them. I have not always known why I felt as strongly as I did, as though some higher version of myself told me to get my act together, but we have not had these moments. My eyes never wandered. I never thought I might want to be with someone more than I wanted to be with them.
So, my conclusion is that you are a young, romantic coward who will suffer years-long torture rather than admit that something isn't working, and you must do the arduous task of fixing it.
"Fixing it" in this circumstance means being single, but you know this.
Now, I know the question that is on you mind, "Well, what about Emily? Do you think she is your soul mate, you poor confused bastard?" And the answer is no. Do not doubt for a moment that I love her, for I do.
You do love her. You never think she is your soulmate. She is your best friend whom you desperately want to dump you so you can move on with a clear conscience. Otherwise, you internalize that your leaving will cripple her, though it rarely would.
It would not now when her investment is still mild.
She and I had a long talk Thursday concerning the future and the fact that I cannot say for certain that I will always be her romantic partner. There are very clear situation even now that would result in my dissolving our union. If I felt that I was holding her back from a path that would ultimately result in her happiness and fulfillment, I would step aside. If I knew that she loved another more than me, I, again, would leave her.
You want her to dump you cold, my friend. You try to break up with her once -- we will get to that -- and are too much of a milksop to let it stick. You like the story better than honoring your truth.
In seven years, she leaves you for someone else so she can focus on taekwondo and have babies, as noted above. So, there you go. She gets her happiness and fulfillment. She finds someone she loves more than you, who I do not know has his doubts.
You get to have an intense and unlikely relationship with a college student who teaches you how to love with reservation, who then leaves you to explore her path (as she should have). Then you get your wife.
Overall, that turned out well, but I wish it could have turned out sooner. Without this, I do not know how to draw a path to your wife. Could you have loved a series of women who still had you single and ready for your future wife?
I would never return to Kate, were anything to happen to end the relationship between Emily and me. Miss Katherine and I have drifted so inexorably away from one another into quite different beings.
I am stifling an uncomfortable laugh here.
Your absolutes are not accurate, but you go on making them.
Think not that I do not love her, for all the pain we have shared, I must confess I always will.
You know you can write less like you are trying to sound Elizabethan, correct?
Yeah, Kate is a wonderful person. I am glad she is on this earth. I like her better than many people, but we barely speak. I wonder how you rank that as love.
However, I cannot find myself attracted to her. She is so very different from whom she once was with me.
Yet you find her attractive. If you met her without any prior context, you wouldn't. However, your ability to resist her exists only because she stopped testing it for a few more months.
I currently find it difficult to be attracted to anyone. I am not experiencing a stage in my life where I can enjoy attraction, enjoy sexualizing and being sexualized in turn.
You would have benefitted enormously from therapy. You are twenty. You should be (and are) attracted to other people, but doing so brings strife into your life and requires your bravery, so you maintain asexuality.
If you are not attracted to anyone, it is less of a sin that you do not want to be attracted to Emily or anyone who might currently draw you.
In the spring, you will meet a young woman, Lauren, to whom you are instantly infatuated, who flips all the right switches in your brain. You will recently have begun dating Emily again, and I am sure Lauren had a girlfriend. If you did the difficult things when it came to Emily, I suspect you would have had a delightful affair with Lauren. Instead, you both fawn without saying it aloud -- more on your side than hers, I think -- and then you mostly lose contact with her. She remains one of the possibilities I think of a few times a year. Most of the situations I remember you almost in wouldn't be worth the ink to explore unless it was to warn you far away.
Lauren, even if it lasted a few months? She would have been worth it.
Sometimes, however, touches lack their spark. They do not hurt, merely hold disinterest. As such, there arrive occasions when I am unable to see Emily as more than a dear friend. I feel that this is immensely unfair to her, as I think she deserves a constant boyfriend. She does not leave me, even knowing that I cannot show her the kind of affection she warrants.
She should want to leave you. You are a miserable boyfriend and not what she needs, no matter what she thinks.
It would have been a marvelous friendship if you could have just let Emily be a dear friend without regret or lingering feelings. You wouldn't have had the experiences you did, many of which were remarkable, but there would have been others with other people. Or with just yourself.
I cannot justify how I feel, nor do I see reason.
You have no business being with anyone until you are healed enough and find someone for whom you holster your wandering eye.
There, I did it for you.
I am not certain as to what I wish to do. Likely wait and let the world unfurl. I want M to be content and I am not sure I am making her so.
You know what you wish to do. You lack the fortitude to do it.
I seek intellectual, spiritual, and emotional stimulation. It pleases me to be so, even if it means I act as a eunuch. The world has desensitized me and I am driven to find my joy in different matters than corporeal.
Writing succinctly and honestly fosters more beauty than what you are doing here.
You narrow your window to the world because opening it requires more strength than you have. It is glorious out if only you would look.
The word choice of an anonymous conversation can give me goose bumps, the timbre of the sirenous Sarah's voice when she seeks to corrupt me makes me glow, the reverberations of Emily's laughter like chimes, the lush burning floral scent that surrounds Kate when she is happy, the feeling of desiccated autumnal leaves insinuating dervishes around me, night.
And these are tiny pleasures meant to imply much more, yet less. More because you mean, "I want to sleep with these people (including the anonymous one)." Less because your deeper pleasures cannot be dependent on other people.
For my part, every set of lips that touched mine altered the course of my life to some degree. Good and bad are unnecessary, subjective terms, gradations of the same theme. I was different to some extent.
Oh, that you would have touched fewer lips and been better directed.
"Good and bad are unnecessary, subjective terms, gradations of the same theme" is such a first-year philosophy. Damn it, man, you are a junior!
I obtained an experience I may not have otherwise had. Had I not fallen in love with Jen and eventually given my virginity to her, I would not have been in any way equipped to fall in love with Kate. Kate and my love was one of the most glorious feelings I had experienced at that time.
Yes, actually. You would not have been able to handle Kate if Jen had not broken your heart. You would have steered clear of Emily if Kate didn't keep torturing you with "maybe" after she left -- you would have been dating one of the women who tried to entice you or one you failed to meet because you were in Kate's dorm. Without Emily, you would not have been in the right place geographically for the young woman who helps you learn what it is to love (though I do not think Emily instilled anything emotional in you that compels that relationship unless dealing with her trauma with someone who loves you and believed you could handle healing counts). Without this lesson, without feeling utter love, you might have never had the epiphanic crisis that let you be the partner your wife deserves.
I have regrets for you, but I need you to end up with the college student so you can love her -- and I love her still -- and so that love can make you ready to be someone's true partner.
My theory, which I can no more accept credit for than Kurt Vonnegut Jr. can (though I don't doubt accurate parallels can be drawn, I am quite a fan), is essential that there are certain people that are supposed to be in your life, that are preordained to become entangled with your life by the choices you have made in the past.
Emily did become entangled -- enmeshed, really -- but meeting her was an accident of going to the wrong orientation session.
In eight years, you will meet a woman and a man. You spoke to her first online, then she stopped responding, and you didn't pursue. There was nothing romantic there, and it was on a dating site.
You later found him in the same place, completely unaware they knew one another (let alone were exes who lived together).
They are supposed to be in your life. They are both people you will love utterly, well beyond friendship. He will be the best man at your wedding, though she will have moved onto a life that touches on yours once every year or so.
Let me give you an easy example: Kate. Year and years ago, when I was only fifteen, Kate and I started writing to one another online. The original reason as that I had AOL for a month and Tina, Kate's then best friend, had asked Kate to IM me.
I can give you that. You dated several girls at her school -- more than you did at any other school in the area -- and would have found Kate eventually.
So Kate and I began writing to one another. She would send me news stories with her own snarky commentary. I have to admit I was fond of her in a vague way even then.
Yet, until you met her in person, it did not occur to you to desire her as more than words on a screen. That honestly made her a much better option. You liked and respected her mind well before you realized how cute the rest of her was.
On my sixteenth birthday, just after I had stolen Sky away from her [...] Tina and Kate were going to give me quite a treat and attend. Unfortunately, Tina's parents would not drive them so our meeting was put off again. [...] I like to imagine that, had Kate come to the party, she and I would have fallen instantly in love.
You were keen on Kate the second you saw her in person. I can't say she would have been equally keen on you or if you would have had so significant a relationship -- likely not -- but you would have crushed in earnest.
I remember that I was trying to have us all take our pictures in the photo booth so I could have a picture of Kate, when Jen showed up. She was sweet and girlfriend-y. I think she knew that I had an odd interest in Kate, because she chittered on to the two of them to the extent that Kate didn't understand why an interesting guy like me would be with a sort of vapid girl like Jen.
This is a testament to the degree to which you have a wandering eye. I do not recall Jen often feeling jealous or proprietary over you -- she gave you hickeys so you would dump Coley, but I cannot name a time beyond this surprise meeting in the mall.
I cannot precisely fault Jen for overcompensating and not making a good showing when she suspected you might have an interest in someone with whom you would be more compatible.
After Jen left me for Nick, we began chatting on AIM. About a month later, we asked one another out and eventually fell in love.
I remember a couple of extracts of that conversation. Kate discussed her job as a lifeguard and joked how she would steal away a husband who kept checking her out. After you both had been flirtily planning this, you said, "Kate, do we like one another?" and asked her on a date.
This, to me, represents a person that I could not resist. I could not get away from her because she and I were destined to have a significant interaction that would change us both. I do not doubt for a moment that the two years I spent with her have shaped who I am more than I can ever describe and I think she would say the same (perhaps less positively).
You went to New Paltz because she was there. You might have anyway, but there isn't a guarantee. You might just as well have ended up at SUNY Purchase, at which point you would have spent time with Coley and met an entirely separate set of people. Or you might have enrolled in another college -- though less likely.
I feel the need to inform you just how M and I officially made up. We kick boxed. In the coffee house on campus. For a good five minutes.
In high school, you prided yourself on being a good boyfriend because you tried to be open and devoted. You just tended to abridge this devotion to a few weeks, though sometimes months. High school students do not often need to make lifelong commitments before fifth period.
This is not too far from your collegiate issue. In the first years of your relationship with Emily, you rarely stop looking at other women and are not shy about writing as much here for anyone to read. That is a perfectly awful thing to do. A good boyfriend would leave Emily, as counterintuitive as that is. A good friend wouldn't put her through this, but you do. You make the woman in your bed seem third or fourth best to people you have not seen in years -- ones you would not want if you could have them in anything but fantasy. You want Emily less because you have not had years to mythologize her. You want her less because she wants you, and these other women do not.
You cannot think of yourself objectively. You start with the conclusion that you are an excellent boyfriend -- an action more than a role -- and only reconsider when you realize how much your behavior isn't matching that, but you are not putting the effort into improving. Is this because you worry that being a better boyfriend to Emily means you are leading her on? You love her -- I am not contradicting that at this point -- but you are a passive-aggressive bastard by emotionally cheating with women who are not even aware they are in a love triangle. You make the tangible woman you kiss into ghosts' inferior.
When Emily and I first began dating... well, a bit after, as we were bedding together... she and I began hearing a flute playing when we were lying in her bed.
I don't know if it means anything or whether odd instances of woodwinds connect, but I can verify they did happen, as mundane but weird as they possibly are.
We primarily heard it in her house, though it was heard a few times after I moved into my new room. Once we heard it clearly when we were visiting Glenham field (just before we heard the screaming). Is it an aural hallucination? Possibly.
Yet you do not talk about the screaming, which is the better story.
Bearing that I lightly disparaged Emily's objectivity above vis-a-vis disappearing mirrors, I am willing to submit this to doubt.
You used to hang out at the field of your former elementary school late at night for reasons that are unclear to me now. There had to be a better place, but it was a short walk on the train tracks, and it made you feel transgressive. You would walk there alone, stay close to the woods, sit, and take in the night a bit, then walk home. You implied witchcraft, but it rarely amounted to more than having a witchcraft paperback, crystal, and essential oil in my backpack, taking none of them out, and looking at the moon.
The night of the first screaming was distinguished in no other way I recall. You didn't do anything differently. You were there no earlier or later (though you fled as quickly as you could after).
You stood thirty feet from the woods and over a hundred from the gym wall up a small hill. If the moon were not full, it was still too bright for what came.
Something screamed. It was not a person. I do not have a solitary doubt there. A human throat could not make that sound and surely not that volume, sustained or even in a burst. It was no wolf, fox, coyote, or dog. The tone was all wrong. It varied in pitch in a way that seemed meant to communicate something -- not speaking or real intelligence, but something. In recollecting this to someone later, they suggested it was a deer giving birth. As deer are prey animals, I do not think they care to announce to every predator in a half mile that they could have an easy meal.
I cannot say it wasn't an animal, but I can affirm that it was no animal you had encountered then or have since.
You froze. You were beyond exposed in the field, with nothing to hide behind except the woods from which it erupted--time slowed as it does in these moments, as you considered if it could see you, if it did. If you had run, it might chase, and you had no confidence you could outrun anything that could sound like that.
These moments are confined to the F's: fight, flight, freeze, or friend. You did not know how much longer you could remain frozen. You had discounted flight for the moment. You wouldn't know how to fight it -- or most things. So, when there was a lull in the cacophony, you tried to talk to it, telling it that you did not have any ill intentions and only wanted to leave -- and not through the small break in the woods that was your hidden entrance.
It screamed something gurgling, which you took to mean it had heard me.
You asked if you could leave.
It repeated its call.
I may be abbreviating this. It was so long ago now and felt longer than it was. You may have had a few more rounds of call and response before you backed away up the hill. When you hit pavement, you bolted as best you could until surrounded by the protection of houses far from those woods.
You returned there other nights, remembering the screaming, but did not hear it again.
You did not hear it again until, in bringing Emily to the field one night, you related the story. It had been at least a year, if not a few, and the terror of it was less.
From the woods came the same impossible screaming, the sound Hollywood creates for demons fresh from Hell.
If Emily or you tried to speak to it this time, I do not recall. I'm sure you both fled up to the road more quickly than you had the last time.
I have not heard it since, though I listened to a catalog of animal screams, none of which came close.
Ah, and what of the lightning bug resurrection, that I do not believe I ever told you about it. [...] Finally, it began to curl up, the arthropodic version of rigor mortis. I readied myself to reassure M of the place of death in existence, when our Mr. Samsa flipps flips onto its legs, crawls to my ring finger tip, and take[s] a calm flight. Somehow it returned to life in my hand. [...] The lightning bug, though... that was very real. I do not know how to explain how a very squished bug makes a full recovery and flies away.
I am expurgating in my response a lot of nonsense you wrote about your having psychic/magical powers because I doubt you (for reasons I applied to Emily above), and I find your talk of them embarrassing now.
Zack later said you had killed the bug, but they can be surprisingly motivated to fly away even when crushed. This seems specious, but I once ran into a living cicada with only a head and wings. Insects don't need much to go about for a bit longer.
However else that night seems like children playing pretend, that lightning bug ostensibly returned from the dead, and that should have been all the magic you needed.
The waiter who seated us kept referring to the four in the party as "ladies." I may have long hair, but I most certainly do not look like a lady. While I was in the bathroom, Emily ordered a drink for me by saying, "he'll have a coke." "He?" the waiter inquired. "Yes, he, the man in the bathroom, will have a coke." When I returned and she related this story, I began blushing out of embarrassment and refused to look up at the waiter when I ordered.
Yes, because you utterly hate being mistaken for a woman in any way.
You never wrote a psych paper in high school titled "Why I Flirt Like a Girl." You were not amused when people in the mall were homophobic when you kissed Virginia, as they assumed two long-haired blonds were girls. You don't smile harder when someone calls you pretty instead of handsome.
Surely, there is no reason you related this story to us. Anyone meeting you for the first time says, "That right there is the pinnacle of masculinity, and his gender in no way leans toward androgyny. That he has dated more queer women than seems probably is just a statistical error."
Melissa wished to visit her friend Evan at work. Evan, evidently, thinks that I am very intelligent and applauds my attempt to start my own school.
Evan currently lives in Argentina with Tom H, doing sketch comedy.
None of those facts may be accurate as I write this, but parts were, at some point, true.
So, I met with my advisor (who told me that I mustn't self advise, ever). I showed her the class schedule I had made out for myself. She nodded and gave me my number.
And she does it wrong! She lets you sign up for a class you have already taken, simply with a different professor, so you do not realize at first (it is the difference between English Literature II and III).
has to make amends if one can), an acquaintance of mine, Cindy (I'm thinking she will not mind my using her name) approached M and I.
I am 95% sure this is a reptile-loving woman I call Lily and who is on my social media. So, for once, you used a name and I retained a connection with the person.
Congratulations!
In the past week, I have found two more random quartz crystals on campus. [...] But it still does not make much sense and it wouldn't be cheap. In any case, it was good to know that I am not alone in finding them.
Quartz crystals, especially of that size and quality, would have been inexpensive enough at the Awareness Shop for someone to scatter for the fun of it. They did not know they were perplexing you, but I am sure they expected to be weirding someone's day.
It's mildly charming you treat this as such a mystery. What pot of gold did you expect at the end of this rainbow?
