On first love and getting your heart eaten out of your chest with a spoon

I'm looking for a friend of mine. We have a complex relationship. I'm not writing about it anywhere else, so I'm writing about it here.
He was my first love.
We met in high school. He asked me out on graduation day, by chucking a note at me that said that I was a terrific person and he wanted to get to know me better. I had never gotten a phone number like that before, I was surprised. I had a lot of male followers, but too many of them were cocky-they tried to give me their numbers with a tacky pickup line and a grin. This guy was different. The night I called him, we talked for four hours. The better we knew each other, the longer it got. We topped at six. My mother was less than thrilled, but I was elated. Hell, it tingled. He was good looking, he had been a weight lifter in school and had big brown doe eyes. He also had good manners, the best I've seen in a teenaged boy to this day, and a faint Texas accent. He was sensitive-he had been sexually abused as a child and managed to turn that into a profound empathy. He was also hard working and very smart, even though his plans weren't for college like mine were. Both of us made a pact to, for once in our lives, love without reservation.
And we did. For a long time. Unfortunately his parents moved him back to Texas, he couldn't afford to stay alone. So we went long distance. Suddenly his voice was muffled and all of these other people started chiming in and telling me how to run my love life. Most of them thought that I should be dating a college boy, someone at "my level". My mother wanted me to marry my catch and bleed him dry financially (always the gold digger, my mom). A guy that liked me started showing up at random places that I frequented. Before I knew it I was spooked. I broke up with the big love and went after the guy that was actually on the scene. It didn't work out. I got back together with the big love, but it wasn't the same after that. He felt I'd cheated, and I suppose in a way he was right-at the very least I had betrayed him somehow. That snowballed-he was a nineteen year old boy with a case of hurt pride. Pretty soon he started dating women he met on the internet. Two weeks before we had scheduled a visit for him to come back to cali and shop for an engagement ring I got suspicious. He had given me his email password as a sign that I could trust him a very long time before, but I had laughed it off and never used it. Suddenly I felt the need to, and I found the emails from the other women in his inbox. Some of them talked about me-one woman talked about how she liked holding his hand at the movies and she wished that evil bad me would let him go free so that he could say he loved her. We broke it off. We tormented each other for a year in snippy phone calls, but eventually the tone of the calls changed. In spite of ourselves, we became friends. He briefly moved back to California, and we talked about getting back together. But I was seeing someone else and I couldn't do to them what I had done to him. It wasn't love that kept me in that relationship, but guilt. He later moved back to Texas. I dumped guilt boy and got together with mr. current. Last September I got mail addressed to him c/0 me from his ministorage. I called him, but his cell was dead and his mother flipped out because I had gotten the mail and neither of us knew why (he must have needed a second contact). I emailed him and never got a response. Then his email went dead. His myspace hasn't been touched since September. Even his parents number, which was in his name is now dead. I'm afraid for him. If something happened to him, no one would know to tell me. He insulated me and his life from his family.
I started looking for him in September. When I found his myspace and saw his picture, the oddest thing happened. I felt tingly and smiled involuntarily. I came to the sudden and shocking realization that after five years of thinking myself over him, I'm really still in love with him. The other night I went combing through old letters for addresses and other information and realized that this isn't just a temporary feeling or one that can be brushed away. My God, can I really be this illogical?

Blast from the past, or blasted past...either way

I just got a call from a friend of mine in Germany. Not just any friend, the only remaining friend of the darkest periods of my youth. In one of my earliest posts I talked about all of the friends I had that I couldn't save. He was part of the same group, though a fringe part. He was the only one that didn't need saving. Except that now he's all wrong. Where he used to be kind he sounded bitter. Where he used to be thoughtful he seemed self involved, all pulled inward and out of shape. I read his blog; he seemed miserable. His skin doesn't fit him right, I could feel him struggling against himself even in the short conversation we had. Something isn't right there.
I've changed too. He wanted to know if I was still as ruthless as ever. I realized that maybe he thinks that now I'm all wrong. Last that we saw each other very often I was a teenager. To elaborate, I was a seventeen year old militant feminist. When he met me in my first year of high school it was the day that some guy walked up to my boyfriend and told him that he thought I was hot and he was going to steal me. Right in front of me. Without a word I walked up to him and punched him hard in the diaphram, leaving him curled up on the ground. Then I laughed. Not because I cared so much about my boyfriend, but because you only steal objects and I didn't want to be objectified. Another time I was walking to the mall down the busiest street in town. More to the point I was doing this in overalls with smart alecked buttons on them, a faux leopard skin lined bodysuit, four necklaces that were cross cultural courage emblems, ten bangles on my right wrist, five rings on my left hand, and blood red lipstick. A car slows traffic. Some thirty something guy inside starts screaming at me to get in the car. Full if piss and vinegar and teenaged arrogance I turn lazily to see if he has a gun. No gun. So I tell him to go fuck himself-direct qoute. He starts to get out and I hop a fence in under five seconds, giving him the finger on my way over (a miraculous feat of athleticism given the jewelry).
It was in part under the influence of this guy's habitual kindness that I grew up and softened. Now I am disturbed to see that I may have had the opposite effect on him. Either that or life has made him its bitch.

On multiples

I was reading Dewy's blog, Dewy Knickers, and had some new thoughts I wanted to share about what I've learned about multiple personalities over the years. Dewy is a woman that lives inside of a man named Brian. Dewy keeps a blog of her own, and Brian keeps a blog of his own. In her last post Dewy wrote that she wasn't "some symptom out of a book" to be thrown in her face, or something to that effect. I then reread my last post about my sister, and I thought about how that might make a multiple feel. You see, I lumped having a second persona under my sister's various illnesses.
I shouldn't have. It really isn't an illness. Multiples have enough bad press, they really don't need more.
In general multiples develop when children within a specific age range are abused in ways that are beyond their means of coping. There are lots of different theories about how exactly this happens, but they read like psychobabble. It just does. Also in general, psychologically speaking, something is really only a problem if it keeps you from functioning. I've known enough multiples to know that "same great tv, 12 different channels" as one husband of a multiple put it, doesn't necessarily impede someone's functioning.
My sister is pretty uncommon as far as multiples go. It was never being a multiple that made her violent. It just complicated things. You see, from what I can tell, Savannah is a part of my sister that was frozen in place at about age nine. She is a hyper jealous bully who operates with the thought processes and moral code of a small child. Anybody who remembers the schoolyard can get the concept. From what I can tell, every persona of my sister's suffers from the basic chemical imbalance that she has, namely bipolar disorder. So basically, within my sister lived (and possibly still does) a small girl who is a bully, uses child bully logic, suffers from bipolar, and at the time was bigger and much more powerful than me in outward form. My sister has the only violent multiple that I have ever heard of, and I don't think that Savannah was inherently violent. For example, my sister at present quite healthy and happy, collects dolls, my little pony figures, and other toys. Whatever else I may feel about her, I like to think that this is Savannah, all settled down, presenting herself benignly. I haven't seen her openly present herself in years. I was thinking after reading about Dewy grappling with the issue of her existence that I hope this doesn't mean that she's gone. Savannah may have been the malicious bogeychild of my youth, and I may loathe her (she did try to kill me in all fairness), but she is still after all a child.

Forgiveness as the path of least resistance

I am not the world's most forgiving human being. I am obstinate, and sort of surly on occasion, and I yearn for incredibly simple problems that can be solved by hitting someone or something with a large stick enough times. When I was younger I was violently inclined. Aggression was part of my personal program from birth, and it was channeled counterproductively by life in general. In my old age I've moved towards a more thoughtful, restrained approach to life. I am so restrained that by the time I am thirty I plan on grappling my way to Nirvana (yes, that is a joke, and I do know that grappling is highly un Nirvanan like ) (hence the joke). But in general I am more Baodaccia than Ghandi, as far as icons go.
I also believe in the fine art of writing people off. There are some individuals, no matter how well intended, who wreak personal destruction and emotional chaos everywhere they go. They can't be reformed because they really don't see the problem. They believe in what's known as the "mememememe" centered model of the universe. They also do not buy into occham's razor, and will attribute all of their personal flaws to someone else no matter how complicated a scenario they have to build to support this idea. Hence if they do see the problem, clearly someone else created it.
That said, you would think that I would write off the person who beat and tried to kill me when I was a child. The person so insane that I was convinced at one point that I had better learn to defend myself because the day might come when I would have to kill her or be killed by her. You would think that I would wisely do that. And I demand credit for trying. It didn't work out. It is hard, after all, when one is under age, to get away from your sister.
Yes, my sister. My nearly a decade older than me sister, who my mother was convinced despite all evidence was good child care. My mentally ill sister who as it turns out was bipolar, suffering from pshychotic episodes, and had multiple personalities. All of the above, or just enough of a combo to mimic the symptoms of all of the above. I knew that there was something wrong with her before the real fur started to fly-I saw an episode of 6o minutes on bipolar disorder and tried to tell my Mother. I thought she just didn't believe me, so I pushed the issue. I figured out later that no amount of pushing would get her to help, because she just didn't want to believe me. The sad truth is that my Mother is a stupid person. She thinks that things really disappear if you just don't look at them.
I got to be the target because in my sister's eyes my life was "normal". Parts of her, hateful, spiteful, child parts of her wanted to kill me out of pure jealousy. I owe some inner bitch named Savannah a doorknob to the gut and some shredded toes. It was a wild era. She was institutionalized not long after I called my Mother at work (as I had done to fruitlessly beg for help many times before) and informed her in a voice dripping with purest hate that my sister had just strangled my until I passed out, and that I knew that she wasn't a parent but that she was all I had, so she was GOING to come home and act like one even if she had to fake it. I was fourteen. My sister moved out, left town, and came back to live next door. I avoided her. She hugged me and I remember thinking that her hair smelled rank to me. My mother had to force me to invite her to my 15th birthday party. I ended up babysitting her kids to buy necessities, like a coat, because it was the only way to survive my Mother's less than benign neglect. The weird thing was, my sister didn't remember. Not any of it. And eventually I didn't want to tell her, because in spite of myself I liked this new patched up version of my sister and I didn't want to set back her recovery. It caused me more pain to try to NOT forgive her than it did to love her, so I went with what was easiest. Sometimes forgiveness is the natural state of things and you just have to go with it.

My posts have been slow but I have been busy with school. Damn that school for always getting in the way of my hobbies.
Things have been pretty quiet around my place lately. Thanksgiving break was great. Food got eaten, and none of the truly annoying relatives showed up. I'd like to say that on a personal note I have evolved past all of my issues and concerns and am now a perfect student, good citizen, and social butterfly but I don't lie that well. I'm still wrestling with the unshakeable feeling that I do not belong in college. But since I already owe money I may as well make the best of it. I've got papers to write. Luckily semester ends in about two weeks. My best friend has temporarily forgotten that I don't want to cozy up to his new girlfriend, so that's been backburnered. My boyfriend apparently put a down payment on an engagement ring shortly before realizing that he only wanted to marry me out of a "strong sense of commitment" (how breathtakingly romantic...not love, but commitment, much like I am a new car). That is completely unresolved and can stay that way for all I care. My niece came to visit and has turned into a stunning young woman over night. We went to a bookstore and suddenly a couple of kids from the college who had to be sophomores started talking really loudly about all of the art that they knew (I remember doing idiotic things to impress guys and so kindly didn't point out that Primavera was NOT the Birth of Venus, and that they were by Botticcelli, NOT Rembrandt). I stood there, half tempted to lean over and whisper "jailbait" at them and half tempted to pat them on the heads and laugh. I did neither.
And thats life in a nutshell. Off to sleep.

My best friend is a 24 year old man who weighs 280 pounds and dresses like Mr Rogers. He is, in a word, geeky. To elaborate, hopelessly geeky. At least, on the outside. But he's happy that way, so it all sort of works. Where it really bites him in the ass is in the arena of dating.
You see, my hopelessly geeky manfriend is also a magnet for crazy women. I know everyone sometimes feels like a crazy magnet. However, until you have dated someone that you report seemed perfectly normal only to find out that they believe that the dragons of Pern live in your dorm bathroom and communicate telepathically only with you (which is how you know they're there because they are invisible) you really can't compete. Another one thought that she was a changeling (as in the rpg) in a previous life and that her ability to turn into a cat in that life left her with residual magical powers that evil people called "hunters" pursued (which he laughed at until he was telling his Mom the story and some guy claiming to be a hunter demanded with great intensity to know where this "changeling" was). Yet another one claimed that they had to break up because she and her 36 year old exboyfriend were two halves of an angel and the world would literally collapse if they didn't get back together; afterwards every time he went to the dorm food line she chewed him out for stalking her.
So when he started seeing a 42 year old polyamorous woman I was pretty concerned. But I got over it, because so far she's brought him the least misery of anybody else. My manfriend is weird, so it fits that he would be happiest in a relationship that is out of the norm. The problem is that she lies compulsively to me. At first there was this whole drama where he didn't want to tell me that they were involved, but they actually were. So she kept cornering me pretending to be disturbed by her feelings for him to gauge my reaction. I actually understand this, because she was deciding what they could tell me without me freaking out. If it had ended there I'd get it. But instead, after I said I didn't care, she kept pulling me aside with all the histrionics of a Barnum and Bailey circus, carrying the charade to the max until she persuaded him to tell me the truth. And then even after, she kept pulling me aside with massive histrionics to tell me that she was disturbed by the age difference. Another lie, according to my friend, who said that the issue was always thoroughly hashed out. It seems like she just did it to make me think better of her, little realizing that the fastest track to my shit list is manipulating me.I've been keeping my peace because it's not my love life, and if she brings him some joy I'm not going to do a thing to stop it. But the fact that I avoid her is grating on his nerves. We talked about it tonight, because he wants to go on a trip, the four of us (him, her, me, mine)-its the annual trip we used to take together and she sort of commandeered it. There's a hint of jealousy there but I'm keeping it to a dull buzz (mantra: she makes him happy, she makes him happy). Bottom line, I can't trust a single word that comes out of her mouth as 90% of them are lies, and he's pretty determined that we should bump into each other at all opportunities. I sooooooo hate dating drama.

Youtube addiction gone awry

Technically I am still supposed to be reading that damnable book on Mao. You can see how well that's working out. Instead I found myself surfing youtube for mvs of television shows that I like. I do this so often that I got hard up and ended up looking up mvs for the O.C.
Before I moved to the land with no cheap cable, I was watching season one on the sly, so that no one would know I had a guilty pleasure like the O.C. in all its teenaged drama splendor. Not having seen it in two years, I was learning some new things from the clips. Apparently the blonde that always made me want to feed her and slap a personality into her is dead. Okay, no big loss. Her poor bastard love interest needed more drama anyway because t.v. tortured souls are only appealing to audiences when they're good and tortured. Some guy fell off of a cliff. The Ryan character (token bad boy) beat the crap out of lots of people. Then he beat the crap out more people. Someone got shot. Someone didn't get shot. The annoying blonde had a trauma disorder. Then she didn't. She overdosed. Then she didn't. The slutty Mom slept with this guy; then with that one; then with another one off to the side of the first two.
And yet, in my two year absence, I really don't think I missed much.
Huh.
There's something about the pretty people with problems format that just draws you in, even if you cannot relate to the characters and are in fact from a seperate planet. For example, all of my friends when I was a teenager were Ryan Atwoods. Did we have a Summer? Nope. If we did we would have tormented her on principal. A Marissa? Heck no, a kid that nuerotic would have been in the county services nuthouse faster than you can say "eating disorder and borderline personality". And someone would have fed her, for God's sake. We would have shared a lunch or something.
I think that what really draws us to this type of programming isn't that we can relate, but that we can't. It's the sheer malicious joy of watching shows about people with lives more screwed up than our own. I would love to say that I am intellectually and maturationally above such sadistic rubbish, but that would be a dirty lie. I'm already putting it on my Netflix list. :)

THIS MUCH sick of being misunderstood

SI has come up a few times in conversations with my classmates-one woman recently suggested that it was all media based, that the media is giving people ideas. Someone else confused self injury with cutting and treated the issue as though all people who SI were hoping to leave scars so that someone would notice them. A few other near and dear issues have been mentioned as well; the failures of cps and long term effects of childhood abuse.
What do I do when this happens?
I pretend to have researched it merely for term paper purposes and explain as politely as possible why their info is bad.
It's annoying. Next time it happens I'm just coming out with something to the effect of, "really, I began to SI when I was about 11 and I never saw any media on it and I have no scars and I told no one." Damnit. It would serve them right for buying into a crapline and doing poor research.
I've actually began to consider moving towards advocacy when I find myself in those situations. At least it would be a productive means of shoveling emotional shit. And if it drove someone off they wouldn't be much worth hanging around with anyway.