Things That Don't Happen to Me

I had to take my grandmother to the E.R. last night. (Don't worry, it turned out to be nothing.)

Apparently one of the E.R. doctors--the youngest, best-looking one--was trying to flirt with me. It didn't work, I'm too oblivious. I only found out later, after my mother (RIGHT? SUPER EMBARRASSMENT) showed up. She's the one who told me. My mother had to tell me a guy liked me. SOB.

I didn't think "cute doctor flirting" was a thing that happened to chicks who look like me. I'm fat and frumpy and had unstyled hair and no makeup and stubble-covered legs and this weird patch of dry hyperpigmentation next to my mouth and deep, dark creases under my eyes and a zit starting to form on my forehead. I am not a woman who routinely finds herself flirted with, these days. In fact, it's been so long since I WAS routinely flirted-with that I don't remember what flirting looks like; I just assumed the dude was being nice.

Afterward, after I found out, I felt kind of uncomfortable and weirdly ashamed. Like, did I trick him?! Was this all a misunderstanding?! I should clear it up! "Sorry, I must've misled you in some way! I'm not attractive at all! This is my fault, I didn't mean for you to get confused and think I was worth your interest!" Also, is there a way for me to clear this up without ever making any kind of contact with him again as long as I live? Because that's the method I'm going with, thanks.

Public Service Announcement

If you're going to stroll up to me with some ~*ironic*~ misogyny, just...don't. Don't waste your time or mine, and just go straight to the part where you go fuck yourself.

I'm not going to think it's witty or cute.

I'm not going to be offended.

I'm not going to "calm down" or "take a joke".

I'm not going to take myself less seriously.

I'm just going to be really tired, because you are not the first jackass to make that joke, or even the tenth. You're just another douchebag in a long, long, long line of them. You aren't different, you aren't special, you aren't an exception. You are just another douchebag.

Just. Another. Douchebag.

And I doubt that's your goal.

So just don't bother.

In which I am terrible

Every couple years or so, I get an itch to look up old schoolmates on social media--Facebook in particular, these days--and this urge kicked in a few days ago.

Specifically, I wanted to look up the subject of what is to this day the longest, most intense, most persistent crush of my life.

The fellow in question was the middle son of a friend of my mother, and one of my classmates from fourth through eighth grade. We weren't especially good friends or anything; I was far too shy for that. But I loved him. He could do no wrong in my bespectacled nine-year-old eyes. Even when he teased me by bringing his dead bug collection to school and putting them three inches from my face as I squealed in disgust. Even when he spent our junior high recess pretending to be Star Wars characters with his friends. Even when he stopped speaking to me outright because he thought my best friend was stupid and obnoxious. I never told her, but I silently agreed with him. Yeah, she's stupid and obnoxious and I won't be her friend anymore if you will just look at me and talk to me and smile at me again please like me please please please.

It was pathetic.

After junior high graduation, we never saw each other again, but I thought about him often. The crush lasted nearly five more years, but the realization that he'd almost certainly forgot I even existed hit some time around my 18th birthday, and my infatuation finally cooled.

I still look him up, though, just because I'm curious.

It had been several years since the last time I looked him up, an uninformative venture ("Oh, I see he's filled out some. Hmm, identifies as Liberal.") that was, as these things usually are for me, nonetheless satisfying. I didn't still have a crush on him or anything silly like that, but I felt warmly nostalgic for the days when I did. I searched for his name Sunday evening wanting another brief but comforting fix of nostalgia, the pale glimmer of saudade at the edges, as always.

I was instead greeted with his new picture, in which he is the spitting fucking image of Stan Rizzo.

WELP, SO MUCH FOR THAT CRUSH HAVING GONE AWAY.

This is the kind of thinking that makes me a genius

I started a really intense workout program today.

After my session, with my lungs burning and my throat dry with dehydration, I could only think of one thing:

I really wanted a cigarette.

Troubadours need not apply

For reasons that escape my understanding, I tend to attract creative types who wish to make me their muse.

I'm not cut out for being a muse. I'm neither beautiful nor tragic, and my personality is as sharp and craggy as a limestone cave. A crippling fremdscham kicks in the moment someone pulls out an acoustic guitar. God help you if you attempt to write lyrics--or, worse yet, sing to me.

Though there've been many, two in particular stand out. The first was in high school. I'm not even sure what made the fellow in question think I'd be interested; I was sort of distantly polite to him, the same way I would be with anyone, but that was apparently enough to convince him that the next appropriate step in Operation Get Into Sam's Pants was clearly showing up at my doorstep with a guitar.

Being that I had never so much as told him my zip code, this scared the shit out of me, so I had my stepfather handle it.

The next week, at school, he asked if I'd like to hear a song. I told him no. He pulled out the lyrics anyway. Now that I'm writing this down, the metaphor is becoming more obvious and disturbing.

Not as disturbing, however, as the content of the lyrics. The song, whose name I have long since cast out of my memory, described in great detail his desire (plan?) to murder his ex-girlfriend, dispose of her body, and move on with "someone better". Though admittedly, my initial instinct was to take a red pen and correct his poor writing, the impulse was short-lived in light of the much more important problem: this guy knew where I lived.

Thankfully, I had stepbrothers who enjoyed any excuse to threaten creeps with bodily harm, so the potentially horrific scenario that flashed through my mind as I read that crumpled, water-stained lyric sheet never came to pass. Still, I have never stopped associating "I wrote a song for you" with "...and I'm going to come to your house and sing it at your window while covered in the still-warm blood of the last girl who rejected me."

The second incident was only a couple years later, but far less terrifying. I'd become acquainted with a soft-spoken, pleasant young man I eventually discovered was The Annoying Guy At The Party.

Virtually every party has one. He's the guy who "just happened" to bring his acoustic guitar (why is it always an acoustic guitar?), and now everyone else has to listen to him play Nirvana covers over and over and over until the mere sight of flannel gives them hives. (Or maybe he's older, and he's going to play "Hotel California" or "Freebird" until you break the guitar over his stupid head.)

Kris, we'll call him, was fun to talk to and knew more about music than just about anyone else I knew. I enjoyed his company. Disarmed by his gentleness and tranquility, I'd told him about deeper and more personal things than I'd told just about anyone, and he was an excellent listener. It was only once I'd actually been to a party he attended that I came to know his terrible secret identity.

I tried not to judge him.

One evening, he sent me a message over AIM, as he sometimes did. "Can I send you something?" he'd asked. "I have something I want you to hear."

My heart sank. No, not Kris! I thought. Why?!

But Kris had never said anything creepy or violated any unspoken-but-bloody-fucking-obvious boundaries with me, so I sighed and accepted.
"You inspired this song," he wrote. "I hope that's not weird or anything, but...I dunno, I hope you like it."

I braced myself and hit play. It was...actually really nice, a lightly melancholy instrumental piece played on, of course, acoustic guitar. Though it's not really my thing, I didn't dislike it. It was even a little flattering. But unbearably awkward.

The song was the turning point of our friendship, the exact moment I realized I'd misread our interactions the whole time. It very quickly became clear that Kris saw in me not a friend or even casual acquaintance, but a muse. A muse isn't a person, you understand. A muse exists to stand on a pedestal and be inspiring and lovely. A Depressive Pixie Dream Girl, if you will.

We stopped speaking a few months after the song. I haven't seen or heard from Kris since.

And why is it always an acoustic guitar, anyway? I don't even like acoustic guitar music, generally. Why can't one of these wandering bards be a cellist or pianist or something? Or how about a drummer? A guy who wrote me a really kickass drum solo might actually have some success. I suppose it's harder to show up beneath a girl's window with a drum kit or a piano or something, but come on. Nothing about me screams "acoustic guitar", I don't think. I just don't get it.

Until I do, I'll just be waiting for my cool drum solo. Any day now.

My life is basically poop

I don't say this in a self-pitying way. I say this in a much more literal way than I ever imagined possible.

Allow me to explain.

Five years ago, my maternal grandmother, a then-84-year-old Japanese immigrant with only just passable command of English, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. I assume she'd had it for some time without being diagnosed, but she had what we'll generously call an "episode"--she forgot how doorknobs worked and demanded to know why we were going to hit her with a hammer, and I'm sure you don't need to be told that no one was going to hit her with anything, let alone a hammer--and thus our family's long journey into the poop-strewn hellscape that is this disease began.

I'm opting to just blame IE

I haven't done any kind of serious coding work in years, so making this layout was basically just a week of throwing things at the XML editor and seeing what stuck.

After approximately eighty nonillion tweaks and changes, I previewed the layout in my usual browser, Firefox, and was finally more or less satisfied. Everything looked to be properly positioned, nothing was mysteriously invisible, it was all good.

But I knew I had to check it in IE, just to be sure.

FUCKING SHIT.

So now I'm back to playing coding Whack-a-Mole trying to fix one thing only to have another go awry. And I'm too stubborn to ask anyone for help, so I have only my own meager experience and dubious logical reasoning skills to guide me.

Ultimately, though, it's IE's fault.