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Basically what Corridor said. Plus if I'd gone "Well I've never believed in this poo poo" she might take it as a "We didn't do any of this" and bring back all the loving awful poo poo for the others involved in Spirit-side. Yes there are others involved in her crazy batshit, although weirdly most of them seemed to already have some variation of it going on before they met her... But it's up to them as to whether they want to leave or not. (small side point, they're blocked too to avoid indirect attempts to get me to come back.) The temptation was there to go to town on her, don't get me wrong. But I don't enjoy hurting people so diplomacy and lies seemed the best and least painful route. Edit:  Chido
JohnOfOrdo3 fucked around with this message at 15:35 on Mar 5, 2013 |
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Mar 5, 2013 15:07
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Honestly, brofus, it might just be that I'm a whole lot meaner than most folks. Don't get me wrong, I don't like hurting people. Don't go out of my way to. Someone has to push me hard for me to turn on them, but once I get to that point, it's over. I'm done. Thanks for answering, though. I feel now, I must regale you with a tale of my own: His name was Bob Everyone in our college knew this Bob He was a big guy, shaped like a Hershey Kiss with legs. Literally. Like I said, everyone knew Bob, and had a Bob story. One day after class, a whole room of people just sat around sharing Bob stories, but this is irrelevant. See, Bob liked to lie, or at least, embellish the truth to make himself looks smarter. I think he might have had a complex or something because, honestly, he really wasn't that bright. One day, our group of friends were coming home from eating out, and Bob was with us. Myself and another female friend were in the lead, just chatting about different things, and the subject of gynecology came up (we were discussing different birth controls for mood stabilization, if you simply must know) and Bob spoke up: "Gynecologist? I've been to one of those!" Both of us stopped in the middle of the dorm hall, effectively stopping our party, and turned around. In unison, my girl friend and I replied, "No, Bob. No, you haven't." He got super flustered, turning red, "Yeah, I have. I been to one for my back!" "No, Bob, you haven't." I replied, trying to be gentle, because honestly, even if he lied sometimes, Bob wasn't a bad person, just... Different. I opened my mouth to continue to explain, but Bob stopped me. "I totally have! You guys never believe me! I'm not dumb!" I stared, and my buddy covered for me, lowering her voice, "No, a gynecologist is a lady doctor." He blinked, looking a bit like a dog does when you pretend to throw a stick instead of actually throwing it, "Wh-what does it matter if the doctor is a lady? I have lady doctors, and they're just fine." I tried not to laugh. In a way, what he said was really sweet, but he needed to be corrected before someone way crueler than we were got ahold of him. I cleared my throat, and lowered my own voice, "No, not a lady doctor, a lady doctor. A doctor for lady parts. You know... er..." Bob's eyes went round as understanding dawned on him, "Oh. Ooooooooh. I understand. I meant a... a..." "Orthopedic specialist?" one of the boys behind him supplied. "Yup, that." I just nodded and turned around, resuming our journey to our rooms. *** If you want to know why we were so reluctant to simply say "womb and vagina doctor", we were in the south, where you kind of get looked at funny if you say things like that in public. Yeah, yeah, I know, the south is backwards.
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Mar 5, 2013 19:09
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I'm glad you got out of that nonsense, JohnofOrdo3. Abusive relationships are sometimes pretty little traps we wander into, and stay there because we think it's not that bad, and it's our fault we walked into it in the first place. I was also on the "Don't say anything to her" side, but you handled it really well. Bobbie's Soulmate So, Gretchen. Gretchen, whose first boyfriend was Tuxedo Mask--apparently she thought I needed a boyfriend, too. Or, I needed to look stupid, who knows. All I know is that one day, Gretchen brought a comic on notebook paper to school that was drawn by her cousin, Tom. It was a silly little one-page thing about us and "Sailor Moon:" the two of us turned into Sailor Moon and Sailor Jupiter, and trapped Tom's soul in a jar to keep in the refrigerator. The art looked a bit like a simplified version of Gretchen's art, and the handwriting looked suspiciously similar to hers. But I liked it, took it, and told Gretchen to thank Tom for me. She then began to tell me about Tom. He was our age, and lived a few towns over (probably not far from Darien). During his last visit, he asked Gretchen to pull out the yearbook and show him who her friends were. Apparently, when he got to my picture, he simply had to know more! I just looked so... familiar. Like we had met before, in a dream or another life. The more Gretchen told him about me, the more he liked. There was some kind of connection, he just knew it! Now, this was during my "I'm a witch!" phase, so reincarnation, dream interpretation, astral travel, and all that stuff really appealed to me. Plus, all of that is rampant in "Sailor Moon," so it had that much more allure. And Tom wasn't a born-again Christian, like Gretchen and her mother--he was an outspoken quasi-pagan and vegetarian with no fear. And apparently, he was really cute [picture not available]! A little later, Gretchen gave me an envelope with a card and some "Far Side" cartoons, from Tom. The card was a blank card with a pair of anthropomorphic cats dressed as Spanish dancers on the front. Inside was a little note from Tom (which was in Gretchen's handwriting) about a dream he had about us. We were Gypsies, and married. Then we turned into cats, so whatevs. But, still--I was his dream-wife. The "Far Side" cartoons were from a calendar or photocopied out of a book, and had a little note scribbled on the back of each one. The one that stands out the most is the Christians vs. Lions comic (a view of two pits in a colosseum, one filled with people and another with lions, both sides with a sign-up sheet for the upcoming "Christians vs. Lions" match); on the back, he wrote "See the joys of being a Christian?" He kind of sounded like my kind of guy, right? Actually, he sounded like Gretchen, when I finally got to talk to him over the phone. It was exactly like Gretchen lowered her voice to sound like a guy, but you could still tell it was a girl speaking. We actually hit it off over the phone, but he refused to give me his phone number. He also wouldn't give me his address, so I could write to him. He wouldn't even tell me his last name. Neither would Gretchen, for that matter. She was just as insistent as Tom that she be the only go-between for us. At the time, I was slobbering over a boy who was in our class (and thus actually existed), so my attention was forcing him to love me back. Some jerk I never laid eyes on, who was purposely secretive and sounded suspiciously like a girl pretending to be a boy, wasn't worth the energy, dream husband or not. If he really liked me, he could tell me his last name. I talked to Tom a whole two times. The second time, Gretchen's friend Mary was over, too. When I asked her about Tom, she got weirdly evasive. All she said was that he was "weird." I couldn't get her to pin down a description of his appearance, not even his height. She kept avoiding eye contact, too, like she was really bothered by my questions. Either Tom was "weird" to the point of having a psychosis of some sort, or he didn't exist. Either way, I didn't bring Tom up in conversation with Gretchen again. Someone had already played the "Hey, this boy likes you! Not!" prank on me that school year, so I was really suspicious about boys and crushes in general. It's embarrassing enough to believe a boy in your shop class likes you, even for just half a day; falling for a boy when you haven't even seen his picture would be the ultimate in stupid.
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Mar 5, 2013 23:21
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Bobbie Wickham posted:I'm glad you got out of that nonsense, JohnofOrdo3. Abusive relationships are sometimes pretty little traps we wander into, and stay there because we think it's not that bad, and it's our fault we walked into it in the first place. I was also on the "Don't say anything to her" side, but you handled it really well. Thanks. I'm just happy that I thread I started looking at for funnies ended up helping me out so much. So what was Gretchen trying to do exactly? Play a prank on you? Try to become a "closer" friend by being your go between to your totally not imaginary boyfriend? I'm finding it a little hard to figure out her motive other then "Slightly less sane the the average cucumber" is this a thing teenage girls do often?  My only guess that isn't jumping to conclusions was that she was so lonely that she had to invent things and weave a complex web of lies to get people to be/stay her friends.
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Mar 6, 2013 01:56
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JohnOfOrdo3 posted:So what was Gretchen trying to do exactly? Play a prank on you? Try to become a "closer" friend by being your go between to your totally not imaginary boyfriend? I'm finding it a little hard to figure out her motive other then "Slightly less sane the the average cucumber" is this a thing teenage girls do often? The desire to be cool, to be one of those kids that other kids WANT to hang out with, is something that motivates people to do weird, weird things. Things where you're not really sure where they saw the connection between Action A and Result B, but they figured it was their shot at acceptance and Popular Kool Kid Friendship. I did dumb things in the hopes that other kids would like me. I didn't make anyone up a fake boyfriend though, I just pretended I was dumber than I was and swore so other kids would think I was cool.
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Mar 6, 2013 03:38
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Bobbie, how could you listen to another girl pretending to be your magic dream boyfriend on the phone with a fake deep voice, and not call her out on it?  You said you spoke to 'him' a few times? Also you talk about it like it was obvious from the get go that Tom wasn't real, but the way you describe yourself acting makes it sound like you kinda believed it. I'm not dissin' you, just trying to figure out story details.JohnOfOrdo3 posted:Thanks. I'm just happy that I thread I started looking at for funnies ended up helping me out so much. I think she just wanted to be in a magical romance story. And since no one had really paid much attention to her own magical romance story, she made it about someone else to draw them in. I used to do stuff like this when I was little, like "Hey best friend, fairies visited me and told me that we are secretly also fairies and princesses and stuff!  " There's a thrill in having someone else hanging onto your every word and asking you questions and being all "and what happened then?", and you then making stuff up about the awesome crystal palaces we will totally live in when we come of age and the beautiful fairy wings we will be growing any day now, and blah blah.Of course, I was like 8 at the time and I doubt my friend really believed all that fairy crap, so it was just for fun. But this thread is all about weirdos who held onto childish mindsets for waaaay too long, and then added a sexual element. So yeah. e: I guess the answer to your question is, "no this isn't really something teenaged girls do, but it is something that little girls do if they have an overactive imagination and which they may then continue to do into their teens if they are Gretchen and loving weird". Corridor fucked around with this message at 06:21 on Mar 6, 2013 |
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Mar 6, 2013 06:15
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Arashiofordo3 posted:Would that be Mumsie or have you suffered at the hands of some other crazy person as well? No, this was a high school boyfriend, who didn't have any headmates but did the same kind of emotionally manipulative tactics that we've seen JOO3 talk about. Mumsy was poo poo-crazy, but not in the way that Kry has been described. JohnOfOrdo3 posted:I should check this thread more often, wow that was a lot of responses. Good man. Keep it up.
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Mar 6, 2013 14:27
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What the hell is Safari Rules?
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Mar 6, 2013 21:52
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Wojtek posted:What the hell is Safari Rules? Safari Rules == "Don't touch the poop". Basically, in the days of the One Unified Mock Thread, and the days before that of the Old Mock Threads, SA Posters could point and laugh at whatever as long as they obeyed the Prime Directive: don't make "funny" poo poo happen, don't troll, don't touch. Just watch.
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Mar 6, 2013 21:55
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Why isn't there a "Safari Rule" entry in the SAclopedia? It seems like exactly the kind of knowledge that would be perfect for it.
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Mar 6, 2013 22:16
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That's the first place I looked. Someone PM'd me though. Thanks.
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Mar 6, 2013 22:22
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Corridor posted:Bobbie, how could you listen to another girl pretending to be your magic dream boyfriend on the phone with a fake deep voice, and not call her out on it? It was a combination of reasons. The biggest one is probably my curiosity; I wanted to see if Tom would actually materialize. If he was real and he thought I was the bee's knees, then--in my mind--he should have made the effort to meet me. If he was as close to Gretchen as she said they were, then the three of us could come up with some plan to meet up. Gretchen lived right down the road from a mall--they could have walked there during one of his visits, and met me there. I was also a little fascinated with this quasi-Gothic story: a troubled, idealistic young man shuttled from relative to relative, kept away from everyone but his family, reaching out to a  beautiful dream girl from another life . Why he was always in trouble and forced to stay isolated, I forgot; the stories were pretty flimsy. I remember one story was that, as a vegetarian, like I was (Gretchen and I became vegetarians at the same time, in eighth grade), he was outraged by people wearing fur, and tried to splash red paint on a woman in a fur coat. (Only the lid didn't come off the can all the way, so it didn't work, and he ended up somehow getting paint all over himself.) Apparently that was one of Tom's many offenses.Tom only came up a handful of times--a comic, a card, and two phone calls. I wrote a letter back, describing myself a little and saying that I was flattered to be in one of his dreams. I also asked for a picture of him, since I had no idea what he looked like, and his address so I could write directly to him. He disappeared for a while after that, then suddenly called me up a few months later. Anytime I pushed for something tangible, he was gone. After the whole Darien thing, my approach to Gretchen's imaginary boys was to play along with as little effort as possible. If I had invested anything into Tom besides a total of three or four hours over an entire year, it'd be different. It was so benign and silly, it wasn't worth a fight. I actually really liked Gretchen, and I was afraid that confronting her about Tom or Darien would've caused a huge rift in our friendship. Our views on religion were divisive enough. Gretchen was insecure, I think, and invented ways to make herself more captivating. She used to say she was part Cherokee (it's always Cherokee), and a mutual friend who knew her first told me that she used to claim she was descended from Scottish royalty. In fact, if the Scots still had a king, she'd be a princess. Her fibs were harmless, so I just nodded, pretended to agree, and didn't feed into them; it was one of those rare instances when "ignore it and it'll go away" actually worked. She was also a little upset, I think, when I drifted away from her and towards that aforementioned mutual friend, "Tina." Tina was also a born-again Christian, but she was respectful of my views. We had our little debates, but Tina never tried to trick me into going to a three-day Godfest at an amusement park. Next Time: Gretchen Saves Bobbie: The Musical Edit: hit "submit" instead of "preview." Bobbie Wickham fucked around with this message at 01:16 on Mar 7, 2013 |
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Mar 7, 2013 00:56
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This reminds me of my, like, third-grade best friend telling me that she had a really weird cousin "Anthony" who was a year older than us, and recently moved close by and that he wanted to talk to me on the phone. And she'd put him on and he was REALLY weird, like couldn't even finish a sentence without devolving into word salad, totally bizarre. And he sounded EXACTLY like her with a lowered voice. Even at age 10 or whatever I wasn't really falling for it, but at some level I just sort of chose to believe it because it was more fun that way. Eventually, I ended up talking to "Anthony" more than I talked to her and we grew apart and stopped hanging out when she transferred schools. I figured that it was somehow easier for her to pretend to be some weirdo dude and taper off than just stop being my friend, or whatever. Later, I ended up in the same highschool as her and we weren't super good friends, but we did hang out a few times. There was this guy named Tony in my psychology class who acted like a total weirdo and wore enormous sweatpants every day and I'm pretty sure ended up leaving after graduation and going to harvard or something, and writing this HUGE diatribe to his parents accusing them of overmedicating him for his whole life. He did something really weird in class one day and I mentioned it offhand to my former best friend and she looked at me like I was insane and said "Uh no poo poo, that's my cousin. Anthony." 
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Mar 9, 2013 10:58
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Rand Fan 420 posted:This reminds me of my, like, third-grade best friend telling me that she had a really weird cousin "Anthony" who was a year older than us, and recently moved close by and that he wanted to talk to me on the phone. And she'd put him on and he was REALLY weird, like couldn't even finish a sentence without devolving into word salad, totally bizarre. And he sounded EXACTLY like her with a lowered voice. Even at age 10 or whatever I wasn't really falling for it, but at some level I just sort of chose to believe it because it was more fun that way. Eventually, I ended up talking to "Anthony" more than I talked to her and we grew apart and stopped hanging out when she transferred schools. I figured that it was somehow easier for her to pretend to be some weirdo dude and taper off than just stop being my friend, or whatever.  Oh my god. It happened. They're breaking through into real life. We've reached the event horizon. Nothing will be the same again.
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Mar 9, 2013 11:50
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Wait, it might be okay! It probably was her on the phone that whole time. It might have just been easier for her to take the identity of a real person with many preestablished facts and facets (likes dogs, lives with one sister, plays football, picks nose, etc), instead of fabricating a whole new character. Plus she wouldn't have to worry about you mentioning him in front of parents and stuff. I mean if I was ever gonna pretend to be another person on the loving phone on a regular basis, I'd pick a real person similar to me in age, one that the phoned-up friend had no chance of meeting.
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Mar 9, 2013 12:36
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Corridor posted:Wait, it might be okay! Oh good loving god, if I start down that route then I'm never going to trust anyone again. It's somehow worse in my head if she was taking up the identity of a real person instead of just inventing some strange dude, especially since the guy in question undoubtedly had some kind of weird mental situation going on. Besides, if I've learned anything from this thread, 99% of the time people do something like that is to make it into a weird sex thing. This was never a weird sex thing, literally all that happened was that "Anthony" said the most nonsensical poo poo ever that didn't even scan half the time. Unless maybe she was a 10 year old performance artist. Just to keep this on topic, and SPEAKING of weird sex things, I just remembered my first pen pal. Growing up, my dad was a lawyer and he sometimes go to these ritzy-rear end Lawyer Conventions at spa resorts, where the lawyers' kids would get shuffled off to an arcade or a pool or whatever while the lawyers did official business things like get massages and reminisce about the Reagan administration. One year when I was probably eleven-ish and at the height of preteen nerd alienation, I met this girl who was a few years older and VERY enthusiastic about anime. I was the wrong kind of nerd, though - book nerd - and the only anime I knew about was Tenchi Muyo (because I saw it like twice on TV). Luckily it was her favorite anime, EVER. Of all time. She loved it enough to talk about it for the next three days. So at the end of the convention we exchanged addresses and she started sending me these elaborate handwritten letters with printed-out pictures glued on, roleplaying as one of the characters from Tenchi Muyo and asking me to join in. So I started writing back from the point of view of the little cat animal type thing, because cats and animals were cool and I didn't really understand that Tenchi Muyo was about this elaborate harem fantasy. But like three letters in it became clear that she wanted to do some handwritten sex roleplaying thing and so I quit answering her letters until she stopped writing. Since she's probably a goon, if you're reading this, I'm really sorry I didn't want to do your weird sex penpal thing. I hope you found someone to be your Tenchi. Rand Fan 420 fucked around with this message at 14:41 on Mar 9, 2013 |
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Mar 9, 2013 14:39
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I stumbled into this thread by accident, actually, but just couldn't stop reading. There's something immensely compelling about these utterly bizare and pathetic stories, and I honestly had no idea there were this many quality nutters running loose in middle schools all over the world. The only low-grade lunatics I ever spent time around were always adults, or at the least young adults in their late teens/early 20's. But now I feel like I should contribute, so here's a quick story about one (two, really, in hindsight) of the nutters I have known: As an undergrad, like many people I had a lovely retail job to support myself. One of my coworkers was a very sweet girl named Liz who was only a year or so older than I was, and we got along so well that we became good friends outside of work and hung out together a lot. We were also both in semi-longterm relationships, so at first we did a lot of couples' type activities with our then-boyfriends, like pooling our cash to rent a beach house or cabin in the mountains for long weekends, that kind of thing, that we considered ever so grown up and cosmopolitan at the time even though we were all constantly-broke college-age kids whose 'vacation condos' were always brokedown shitheaps and our idea of a genuinely 'nice restaurant' would have been some crappy chain like Friday's or whatever. (This is just to give you an idea of what our mindset was like at this point; we were definitely not worldly people well-placed to spot a bullshitter in our midst or cope effectively with wackos.) But then she broke up with the first guy and started dating Sam. And this was when our friendship more or less ended. Sam was 'dark', or at least, this was the only word he ever described himself with, and how Liz always described him to other people when they asked what he was like. Sam was one of those people with way too many facial piercings, all of which he'd done himself in a friend's bathroom with sewing needles and which he never took care of but was constantly playing with with dirty hands, so they were perpetually grody and infected. Because that's what 'dark' people do, to communicate their 'darkness' in a handily-recognizable manner, I suppose. Sam had one pair of pants that as far I knew were never washed at all ever, that when new would have been pale olive color JNCO puddles with twelve million dangling straps and buckles and pockets and all that other poo poo that was so fashionable at the time, and which were roughly a billion sizes too big for his scrawny frame. Over time they'd turned into a shiny, greasy-looking brown/gray color and loving reeked of general filth and cat piss. Sam had, about a year prior to when I first met him, been 'a junkie' - or so he claimed. His story was that he'd snorted heroin all of a whopping three times, but was so badly addicted that he had to 'lock himself in his bedroom for like a month to kick, just like in 'Trainspotting', only, like, way worse'. His 'addiction' had left him with a bizarre fetish for needles, that he would find some way to work into absolutely every conversation, and then he would steal any clean syringes he could find and hoard them away in a lockbox he carried everywhere in the trunk of his car. He got them off of older diabetic relatives, mostly, but also from people whose loving pets needed shots. He also repeatedly stole them from another friend of ours whose cat was diabetic. He claimed to be subject to these weird depressive/anxious 'fits', where the only thing that could calm him down - in fact, 'put him into a trance', as he termed it- was hiding himself somewhere with one of these needles filling and refilling it with tapwater and then squirting it all over the place. But in order to 'symbolize their love' and 'make her a part of him' or some poo poo, he was constantly pleading with Liz to let him draw out some of her blood and inject it into himself and vice versa. She admitted she'd actually let him do this once for an anniversary present. Or maybe it was on the 'anniversary of his getting clean' as opposed to their relationship, I'm not really sure now, but it was one of the two. Of course I knew this was a fantastically stupid, dangerous, and hosed up thing to be doing, because what the holy hell, and I argued with her repeatedly about all the many reasons she must never, ever do this again, and should be tested for everything under the sun right away, but somehow she just never really seemed to get it. This was just 'one of his quirks', and it 'meant so much to him'. Being a young person myself, and despite recognizing its potentially lethal not-rightness and outlandish creep factor, I also didn't really understand just *how* insane this was either, I don't think. It's hard to describe, really, especially at this remove in time when the very thought of it just makes me want to scream and go running for the nearest police station or women's shelter or psychiatrist or just anyone who could have helped, but somehow as a kid this fell into that bullshit 'I am super tolerant and enlightened!' moral relativism I was convinced was a-okay and an intelligent thing to believe back then: *I* would never do it, but *they* were 'rational adults' (!) and this was 'their choice'. (I still feel somewhat guilty about not doing more for her; looking back she was clearly pretty damaged herself to have gotten into- and then stayed in- this relationship, but since her own parents basically redefined the concept of neglect, and she herself dropped out of school shortly into the relationship, I didn't even know who I should contact to help her or if they'd do anything about it if I did.) Sam was also obsessed with Ouija boards, and had an endless supply of 'totally authentic!' melodramatic stories about his adventures with the supernatural 'starting from when he was a kid', including his own personal 'ghost friend/follower/pet/spirit guide' that he called Axemom. Axemom, he claimed, was the spirit of a 7-year-old boy whose mom had axe murdered him sometime in the 60's and then buried his body in the backyard of Sam's childhood home. (The mom was never caught for this, Sam said, although he swore you could 'totally see the grave right there in the yard'.) Sam claimed he'd contacted this ghost through the Ouija board one night and that it had been following him around ever since. He would constantly claim to be talking to Axemom, or whispering quietly and laughing with Axemom in this unbelievably stupid but also really creepy way, and swearing that every single puff of wind, rattle of windows, flicker of lights, etc. etc. etc. was not natural at all, but was definitely and for sure Axemom 'proving he was here'. This used to scare the poo poo out of Liz, but she tolerated it because, once again, 'it meant so much to Sam'. No one but her believed this, of course, and everyone who ever met Sam for more than 10 minutes would eventually turn to Liz and ask 'You believe this too?', and yet somehow - of course- she just never got this hint either. At one point I learned his story about being in school to become a pharmacist (!!!) was a complete lie; he'd only spent a semester in community college before dropping out, arguing with his parents, and then moving out of their comfortable middle-class suburban home and into the car they'd bought him. Which was always parked outside of Liz's house, or in the driveway of whichever one of his friends he was currently freeloading off of. He also schemed constantly on how to get rich by pulling off ridiculous crimes he'd ripped straight out of lovely indie films and which always required wearing masks/facepaint 'just like in Dead Presidents', while stealing CDs out of the unlocked cars he encountered parked along rural roads and then trying to sell them to younger kids for their lunch money in a local park - which he tried to convince my boyfriend to 'partner' with him for, but of course he always refused, because again, what the gently caress? Sam got caught very quickly, but was only given probation because this was a first offense, at which point he returned to scheming about complicated 'The Grifters' style confidence swindles that he kept a notebook full of 'plans' for in one of the gigantic pockets of his horrible JNCOs at all times. He did manage to sucker yet another friend of ours (despite numerous warnings from pretty much everyone) into buying him a ton of expensive DJ equipment 'on loan' so he could finally complete 'his album' (or just resell it himself) - but her parents flipped out when they discovered this and threatened to call the police again if he didn't return it all, so nothing came of that. In light of all this, you can imagine how, shortly after meeting this guy, I basically stopped hanging out with Liz as much as was feasible given that we still worked together, and was trying to get her to see that Sam just wasn't good for her- or anyone at all- for the few remaining months we worked together. She quit that job in the end though, to move into an honest-to-god flophouse of a weekly-rate motel out by the highway with Sam. And that was the last I heard of either of them - I myself left not too long afterward when I changed majors and schools. A bit anti-climactic, especially compared to some of the stories in here, but since I long ago lost contact with anyone who would have known them who might know how this story ends, it's a mystery to me as well. Over the years, I've wondered about this frequently, and hoped that Liz finally came to her senses and got the hell away from this obvious psycho without too many awful or ongterm consequences. The story's more sad and frightening than hilarious, so I hope I didn't bum the thread out too much, or make this too long, but there it is: one (or two) of my most memorable nutters.
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Mar 9, 2013 16:25
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Wow, LZEnglish, that's pretty sad. I think the worst thing about these stories is the level of neglect from parents that lets kids cultivate so much crazy, or fall victim to their peers' crazy. That's why, as much of a nutball my mother was at times, I'm glad she was on the ball most of the time. Gretchen Saves Bobbie: The Musical Act One: The Concert I have two older brothers, and I really looked up to the younger of the two, Moe. He was a vegetarian, skater, played in a couple of bands, went to concerts all the time--he was just the coolest when I was growing up. Since I was 12-14 years old through junior high, I was too young to go to local punk and hardcore shows with my brother or my friends. It was something I lamented about with my friends, Gretchen included. My best friend at the time, Sabrina, was into hip hop and rap, so Gretchen was my go-to music friend: we listened to a lot of the same bands, and sometimes traded albums to make copies for ourselves. She was as eager as I was for the day we could pile into a crappy car with our friends and drive to the city to see local bands for $5 at the door, with heavy black X's on our hands to mark us under-aged. One day, Gretchen told me that one of her favorite bands was coming to the city, and her mom was letting her go! Then she invited me to come with her--I could give her the money for my ticket before she went to buy them. Awesome! Except, what band was this? Oh, they're the Newsboys, an alternative band from Australia. This was pre-internet, so there was no way I could go look them up; thus, there was no way to know that when Gretchen played some of their songs for me, she was playing the non-religious ones (or least-religious, I don't know if God makes an appearance in every song). The music was okay--it didn't grab me, but it was good enough. Plus, the tickets were fairly cheap, and the venue was a concert hall, not a grungy club covered in graffiti and torn-out movie seats. My parents were cool with it, so it was all set. If I'd been paying attention, I would've noticed that Gretchen didn't play a single Newsboys album from start to finish when we hung out. She always skipped from track to track, one album to the next. She probably only played three songs off each album. I don't think I asked to borrow any of the albums, but she didn't offer to let me take one or two home. Either way, I really should have known better, but I was 12 or 13, so, you know. Anyway, the night of the show, I got dropped off at Gretchen's, and her mom drove us to the show. When we got into the lobby, Gretchen was immediately greeted by a bunch of kids she knew. From her youth group. And, boy, were they happy to see her and her Catholic friend! The opening act, I don't remember. Between bands, though, there was a speaker, a professional football player. He began to talk about the misguided people who believe in evolution, and what a travesty that it was being taught in public school. I sank into my seat, sliding lower and lower as he went on about I don't even remember. When he got to the part where everyone raised their hands in the air to rededicate themselves to Jesus, I slunk out of the concert hall and hid in the bathroom lounge. (Thankfully, our seats were right by the aisle, so it was an easy escape.) The bathrooms at the concert hall have speakers that pipe in whatever's playing on stage, so I could tell when Christian Football Player was finished. When I got back into the concert hall, I asked Gretchen if the Newsboys were a Christian band. "Well, kind of... they're not, like, overly religious." Oh, okay. I settled back into my seat, and rummaged in my purse for money. I figured that if things started getting too religious, I could duck out "real quick" for a snack, and then go back to the bathroom lounge. (It's a really nice lounge, with comfortable seats you can relax on with plenty of room.) Took about four songs, I think, before the hand-raising thing happened again. I felt really conspicuous as the only person sitting, hands firmly gripping the arms of my seat. In the end, I spent over half of the Newsboys' set in the bathroom lounge, snacking on M&M's and Pepsi. It was another awkward ride home. Act Two: Thy Kingdom It was summer, and Gretchen called one day out of the blue. Did I want to go on a motorcycle ride? Her cousin (not Tom) had shown up on his bike, and offered to take Gretchen out for a spin. I was invited, too! They were thinking of heading out to Darien Lake, a local amusement park. "Something" was going on there, some special promotion or event. Did I want to go? Hell's yeah, motorcycle ride! Mother Wickham, however, wanted more details. Who was this cousin? Did he have enough helmets for all three of us? Could he fit the two of us on a motorcycle with him? Where were we going? How long would we be there? What was going on at Darien Lake? A promotion? For what? Were we going to go into the park? Vague plans on a summer day is basically every 13 year old's MO, but not my mother's. Even with Gretchen on the phone, I couldn't give her any specifics, because Gretchen wouldn't give me any specifics. My mother told me no. My dad wasn't home to override her decision, so Bobbie stayed home. The next day, my mother greeted me with the front page of the newspaper: KINGDOM BOUND KICKS OFF. Kingdom Bound is a yearly event held at Darien Lake; it's a three-day Godfest. Christian bands, Christian speakers, Christian contests, Christian comedians, Christian Mexican wrestlers, Christian fried dough, and so on. It is the complete and utter opposite of anything I'd want to do, like jet around on a motorcycle. "Does Gretchen know you're Catholic?" my mother asked me. I glanced over the paper, and felt really stupid. My mother's lecture wasn't helping, especially since she was right: Gretchen was being sneaky and disrespectful. She went on and on, about how being Catholic was as much about our family and our heritages as it was about religion, and that if I wanted to explore other religions or other sects of Christianity, that's fine, but I should be open about it, but someone who keeps trying to shove religion down my throat isn't my friend, especially if she tries to abduct me for three days in order to convert me, and it's not just disrespectful to me that she keeps trying to "save" me, it's disrespectful to our family, which makes my mother wonder if I should even be hanging out with Gretchen in the first place, and so on. I made some lame argument back--not about the conversion thing, because that made me mad, too, but that Gretchen wasn't a bad influence or disrespectful (generally). My mom groused a little about maybe giving Gretchen's mother a call, but I don't think she did. She once had it out with the miserable art teacher in my elementary school, a nasty failed artist who insulted every child in that school at least once; the art teacher was suspiciously sweet to my sister and me for the last two years she had us Wickham kids in her class. If my mother had called Gretchen's mother and let her have it, I would never have seen Gretchen outside of school again. I think my on-going interest in auras and Tarot cards reassured my mother that I wasn't going to go down the Crazy Christian path, so she left it alone. It was the last time Gretchen tried to save me, anyway. Seventh grade, it seemed, was The Year of Conversion, and gave way to eighth grade: The Year of Imaginary Boys.
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Mar 11, 2013 23:19
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Silly over zealous Christians trying to shove religion down peoples throats. I know over here in the uk we've got a pretty sordid history of Protestant vs. Catholics (Which only gets worse if you go to Ireland) but I find it a little shocking that people have a problem with Catholics in America. Kinda sad really that we all can't just get along since one of the major messages is "Be nice to people you loving morons!" Well... as long as your a Christian yourself. I'll give Gretchen some props though, she was persistent and pretty sneaky. It's just a shame that it was for a terrible cause. She might have made a great charity collector. Did you ever manage to go see any bands with your brother Bobbie?
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Mar 11, 2013 23:46
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JohnOfOrdo3 posted:Silly over zealous Christians trying to shove religion down peoples throats. I know over here in the uk we've got a pretty sordid history of Protestant vs. Catholics (Which only gets worse if you go to Ireland) but I find it a little shocking that people have a problem with Catholics in America. Kinda sad really that we all can't just get along since one of the major messages is "Be nice to people you loving morons!" Ha, the whole Catholics vs Protestants thing is, in the US, mainly a one-sided fight between Catholics and specific sects of Crazy Protestants. Pentecostals, Evangelicals, Wesleyans, Southern Baptist, anyone using the phrase "born again," they have a problem with Catholics. I've never come across a Lutheran or Episcopalian with that attitude. As for us Catholics, well--like I said, I went to a fairly liberal parish, so I never heard a sermon about the evils of Protestantism. The official attitude of the Catholic Church towards other sects is, "That's nice. Are we on the same calendar?" My brother and I have been to a few concerts together, but not until I was in college. But, every now and then when I was in high school, people would recognize me at local shows as Moe Wickham's little sister.
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Mar 12, 2013 00:06
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I think my little brother got a lot of that. "Oh you're John and Arashi's brother" Weirdly now it's reversed and often times I'm "oh Your *Little brother's name here*'s brother" It's a funny old world.
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Mar 12, 2013 00:21
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Corridor posted:Wait, it might be okay! I think you hit the nail on the head here. I've had three or so friends over the years that are basically Walter Mitty types. I recommend everybody to watch the 1947 Danny Kaye film because it's great (I see they're doing a remake, which seems a bit redundant, but there you go). It's really hard being friends with people that make poo poo up all the time: sometimes my friends would completely fabricate things, sometimes they'd use other peoples' experiences and pass them off as their own. Most of the time I just let it slide, because it was largely harmless, but it did also sometimes create unneccessary drama: long term friendships ruined, people offended, other people thinking you're the one that's nuts because somebody had spoken so many lies about you before they met you they don't know who's lying and who isn't, plus if you can't work out whether somebody is lying about a situation it becomes REALLY hard to work out if they actually need help or if it's some fabricated thing that needs no further attention. I want to talk about my friend, Lana, who I've known for many years and still has a pretty robust fantasy life. It's kind of awkward purely because we're in our late 30s/early 40s now and we've know each other since high school so that's a lot of years of insanity interspersed with her actually being a really good friend at times. She also does have some completely true RL problems that I am very sympathetic to and try my best to help her with. Having said that, I feel like blowing off a little steam because her fantasy world has caused a few problems to me personally. I'll just stick this list here so I can try to organise things in my brain a bit better and try not to make things too confusing. Cue random capitalisation!: Lana's Audition for an Icecream Advert Being Shot in Hamburg Lana is Haunted by the Spirit of Michael Hutchence Lana is a Singer in a Band! Lana believes that her Friends are her Life except for some people who are now Assholes, which turns out to be Everyone She Knows. Lana Becomes Friends with a Lesbian Prostitute From Montana Lana is a Model and David Copperfield, Famous Illusionist, Falls in Love With Her. Lana is an Expert Fighter but Lana is Seriously Assaulted (this one is quite dark, just to warn you) Voodoo is a Porn Critic Lana's Projects, Hobbies, Fandoms and Obsessions For background As I said, I'm 40 now and have been friends with Lana since HS. She's about 3 years younger than me and was initially a good friend of my sister, Marie. We collectively had a large group of friends: my friends and Lana and my sister's other friends hung out together a lot and many of us remained friends into our 20s. For the most part we shared the same or similar interests, but more importantly we tended to back each other up a lot. High School can be hard, especially for us weirdos! We were a collection of metalheads, pagans, Satanists, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, artists, musicians, etc. who were into a bunch of wanky bullshit you're into when you're in your teens. Lana is not a crazy hambeast. Lana was, and still is, a beautiful girl/woman. Tall, slim, blonde. Sort of like a Hitchcock leading lady. She is intelligent, witty, friendly, non-judgmental and intermittently a really good friend. Though sometimes she takes the stereotypical Hitchcock Blonde thing a bit too far and can become aloof, spikey, snobbish and downright nuts. Okey dokey, I might as well start with the first one. Lana's Audition for an Icecream Advert Being Shot in Hamburg This was not my first foray into Lana's fantasy life, and my list is not chronological, but it was the first time I was certain about her telling lies. There are a whole ton of minute examples previous to this, but I think that this story is the best indicator of how much and how often she will lie about random poo poo. Anyway, I was about 22 at the time and Lana was about 19. We'd known each other for a few years at this point. I was sitting in my miserable student hovel one day when my friend Krishna called me from a bar in Soho to say there was an open audition for an advert shooting in Germany and paying £700 for 3 days' work, plus expenses. I'm not an actor and I actually hate being in front of the camera. Plus I also had a major breakout that week and didn't really want people taking pictures of me. It also sounded like a scam, but all it would cost me would be the price of a tube ticket and perhaps some of my dignity. I thought at least it would be an interesting experience and we could walk out if it turned out to be weird and Krishna and I could go to a club or something. It was a pretty minor event: a large cattle call in Soho with about a hundred and fifty club kids auditioning for this fictitious-or-not icecream ad. We danced like overdressed puppets for the camera, and gave fake names, heights and vital statistics for the company database (but gave our real phone numbers in case they did want to employ us). It was a fairly fun day, but I came away from it feeling really glad that I'm not an actor who may have to do that multiple times a week. A couple of days later I was at Lana's house telling her all about it. After an hour or so the phone rang and her boyfriend, Lance, was on the phone. She took the call and I got to hear her describe in great detail how she'd been to an audition for an ad the day before: "I had an audition yesterday..." "It was for an TV advert for icecream..." "A LOT of money was involved. A LOT." "Many people turned up, really gorgeous guy and girl models, but I GOT IT!" "It's for Haagen Dazs*... A LOT OF MONEY." "I fly out to Hamburg tomorrow and will be back in a couple of days." This was so utterly weird. I was just telling Lana about my cattle call fun-day and within my earshot she was describing it to her guy as though she had gone to it. I didn't even raise it with her when she got off the phone because I was so freaked out. This was just one incident in a long line of her passing off other peoples' experiences as her own. Both myself and all of our mutual friends joked about it sometimes, but none of us really knew how to address it. We figured we'd ignore it unless it actually had a detrimental affect on us. Plus Lana isn't and never has been good at confrontations of any sort, no matter how diplomatically raised they are. As Corridor said: there are people that will formulate their lies out of other people's lives and real life experiences. Lana slid under the radar for ages because of this - there were always elements of authenticity to her stories. It was only when our large group of friends started sharing similar anecdotes that we began to realise what was going on. E.g. something that happened to me or my sister or our friend Lisa or Kelly or whoever was being passed off by Lana as one of her tales. I'd bank on it that for ages we were all thinking each other nut jobs: why were we all pretending to be Lana? After a while we realised it was the other way round. poo poo, that was a lot of words. *I have no idea if it was for Haagen Dazs or not. The audition people didn't say. I didn't get the job either; at least in Lana's fantasy she did.
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Mar 12, 2013 13:09
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The moment where you all put it together must have felt weirdly invasive. It's one thing for a friend to steal possessions from you, but life experiences? That's all kinda of bizarre. I think she probably had self esteem issues with her own life, if she felt like she was wasting her life compared to all these cool things others did. Maybe she wanted to be living your lives. Which is why she said she was, since it was the closest she could get to it after the fact. I look forward to your other stories, are you just going down the list or can we make requests? I'm kinda intrigued by Lana believes that her Friends are her Life except for some people who are now Assholes, which turns out to be Everyone She Knows
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Mar 12, 2013 13:42
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VoodooSchmoodoo posted:Plus Lana isn't and never has been good at confrontations of any sort, no matter how diplomatically raised they are. This seems to be a theme with people who have good stories in this thread. Also, the guy I named "Bob" did the same thing as the girl in your story, trying to pass off other's experiences as his own. I have one particular memory of it, but it involves DnD and isn't really that exciting.
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Mar 13, 2013 04:23
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DicktheCat posted:This seems to be a theme with people who have good stories in this thread. I juuuust remembered that I had a friend who did this also. Anything remotely interesting, she'd pass off to other people as her own experiences. She also talked constantly about her super cute step-cousins and bragged about all the guys she knew. She used to be a really good artist too, but now all she draws is anime.
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Mar 13, 2013 08:11
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JohnOfOrdo3 posted:The moment where you all put it together must have felt weirdly invasive. It's one thing for a friend to steal possessions from you, but life experiences? That's all kinda of bizarre. Yes, it was invasive when I realised the full extent of her lies. Plus also really embarrassing (and I don't embarrass easily). Say she would introduce me to somebody new or perhaps I'd be catching up with a mutual friend who I haven't seen for a long time. I'm making small talk about what I've been up to recently and they get this weird look on their face and say, 'oh, so you were with Lana that day?'. The thing is she DID have interesting things going on in her life - she wasn't a shut in, she always dated upper middle class guys with their own businesses or in one case dated a guy who was an exec for Sony (this was actually true, I met him several times). So she was going out and doing all this cool stuff like meeting bands and going to industry parties. In retrospect, I was never invited to any of these glamorous events. That was OK by me - I was happy to just pay for the multiple gigs a week I was going to and also had my own small time industry connections at the time. Thinking about it again now - all of her cool stories revolved around who she was dating at the time. I feel kind of bad for her, because it seemed she ended up being a trophy girlfriend on account of her looks, but she could never compete in her mind with all of these glamorous people she was meeting so made up a bunch of stuff to make herself seem more interesting. I always thought she was interesting without her attaching a load of bullshit 'accomplishments' to them. As I say, she is beautiful, intelligent and witty. When she's in the mood to be your friend, she gives really great advice. Tactful, but always telling you what's what at the same time. All her boyfriends were emotionally abusive assholes who basically ended up bankrupt because they led priviledged lifestyles that exploded on them due to their poor business choices and rampant personality problems. Sony guy was made redundant, set up his own artiste management business and promptly ran it into the ground due to his ineptness (I wish I could say which successful band he managed in the 90s but it may well identify him). One got the sack and went into really low end porn production. One went gadding about in Spain for months and left his successful company in the care of a 'friend' with no business experience who ran it into the ground. One had a few internet start-ups going in the 90s and lived in a posh flat in Hampstead with a Bang Olufsen sound system. He ended up getting hosed over on all of his businesses and became an insane drug addict living in his van in the woods of Sussex (tbh, he could do with his own e/n posts. He was a nice guy, but a total nut in the end - he believes in Chemtrails and David Icke and all that crap). Basically, she had a lot of things going for her and ended up in a series of relationships with guys that turned out to be assholes. Also, I always felt it was unnecessary to just take other peoples' experiences. She had plenty to go on that were her own! Oh, I'll mostly go by the list. I'm still trying to work out the best order, but to contradict myself I'll continue with: ------- Lana's Projects, Hobbies, Fandoms and Obsessions I do apologise if it comes out as a boring list of stuff. I just wanted to illustrate the things she tells people to make herself sound more interesting yet never actually does, in the end. Singing - will be detailed later when I get to her 'singing in a band'. It's directly related to the whole 'friends' thing so I'll probably do them at the same time. I sang in a few bands at the time. This was the beginning of her copying my hobbies Modelling As I said, Lana is a beauty. She is still beautiful even though she's now pushing 40. Myself and a couple of my other friends (who were models) were often saying she should contact some agencies so she could try to get on their books. She just wanted to walk around Covent Garden and go to Night Clubs (she rarely went to clubs, just talked about it) in the hope that she would be Discovered, because actually going out to pursue it herself would be beneath her. Another friend of ours' dad was a quite prominent photographer in the 60s and photographed a ton of very famous people at that time. He offered to do her a portfolio for free, which she did take him up on, then promptly failed to submit it to any agencies. It was handed to her on a plate and all she needed to do was... send it off. She didn't. This wasn't something she copied off me. I'm not good looking enough to be a model and I hate having my photo taken - maybe she was too scared to 'compete' with our model friends, which was bullshit because they all had completely different looks. ART! One of my hobbies. Don't get me wrong, I suck at art. I'm a terrible painter. I have very poor visual memory which hampers my drawing ability horribly. I have motivational issues due to my depression and really only do it on occasion when I'm in the mood. For YEARS Lana insisted she was an artist, even though I never saw her lift a paintbrush in her life. When she took art courses, all the tutors were full of poo poo according to her. She never bothered to learn how to even draw a vase full of flowers, let alone the human form. I think I saw her attempt one single life drawing once and she declared it stupid because she wasn't immediately good at it after one attempt. All her work consisted of weird curlicues of black ink work. Now she could have run with that - go all arts and crafts movement and just do decorative stuff. Or with her semi-posh connections go with something more concept art wise. But for an artist, she never actually bothered to do anything. I rarely saw her draw or paint. Her portfolio after a year was worse than one of mine, and that's saying something. I can be very unproductive. gently caress, I've always had motivational problems when I painted. I just took to painting boiled eggs for something to do, just so that I would, ya know, actually be DOING something and not just sitting on my arse wondering why my non-existent work wasn't being lauded for it's non-existent awesomeness. I mean, fine, if art is not your forte or you don't actually enjoy it. Maybe you'd get on better with something else? But why pretend that you're a great artist when you never actually do anything art related? I used to go to tons of exhibitions and would always invite her along. She never came. She's never even been to the Tates as far as I know and they're free! Costuming Made a grand total of one Lobster outfit for fun. It was pretty cool, but insisted to people for ages that she was this huge fashion-forward seamstress and costumer. I don't know WTF. I put a competition her way a few years ago with a small cash prize involved. I knew she still had some fabric and £100 is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, right? She started it, then never finished it. I was starting into dressmaking at the time, but was crap at it and it was too expensive. I at least finished my entry for the competition. Bees! I promise this is completely genuine (considering SA's bee obsession), but a couple of years ago she decided she would get into bee keeping. I thought this may be a cheap and productive outlet for her so got her a couple of bee books (that she asked me to get), pointed her to the SA bee keeping thread and encouraged her to go on a cheap local bee keeping course. She did nothing. She insisted to people she was about to be a bee keeper for several months, then seemed to lose interest. On the plus side, I now often peruse the bee thread. I'm too scared of being stung to get my own hive, but I did get a solitary bee house for my garden. She didn't even do that. gently caress it, I have at least two mason bee nests and two leafcutter bee nests waiting to hatch, which is a ton more bees than she has. Bees are important! Solitary bee houses are super cheap and easy and good for your garden. They're also pretty safe for pets and children and I encourage you all to get one. Urb Ex This is a pretty daft one. A few years ago she decided to get into urban exploration. Now I know poo poo all about it, but have enjoyed several peoples' photo series, so she decided to rope me in on her urb-ex project. All I can say is this consisted of us NOT rocking up to deserted factories and hospitals, etc. but her proposing that we break into deserted residential properties with my fancy rear end camera. Now, I happen to like my fancy rear end cameras. They are fairly modest, but did cost a fair bit. I am also quite attached to my not-so-fancy rear end. It may be a bit broad, but it holds my legs on and it's handy for sitting on and stuff. She wanted us to break into deserted semi-detached houses with loving trees growing up through the floors, extreme vegan (ALF) slogans painted on the outside walls, and likely a big pile of rotted and incredibly dangerous floorboards and stairs. I did not want to break my rear end, my camera or get murdered. If she'd have warned me in advance that she wanted to do squats and residential properties rather than industrial, I might have been able to help her fix something safe and interesting up. I've known plenty of people in the past who've squatted and set up quite interesting art or eco collectives. gently caress, I've even met some nice but incredibly weird vegans. People with that communist thing going on. They're often very approachable. I even told her about a local eco-squat collective that were very open and friendly. I'm sad she never went down to talk to them either - they were nice people and had an interesting thing going on. I couldn't do it myself because of my job. She got annoyed because I refused to break into potential ALF squats unnannounced and she also got annoyed with random urb-ex people on the internet because they'd tell her to gently caress off - presumably because she plainly did not have a loving clue what she was doing and they may have thought she was a narc. She tried to invite herself on their expeditions. To this day, she's still obsessed with deserted properties and independent communities. She does nothing about it, except talk about it. Ghost Hunting It's kind of related to the above. I never get invited on her ghost hunting expeditions to cemetaries and stuff. Probably because of my refusal to go in on her urb-ex crap and also because she knows I don't believe in ghosts. Also because it seems like something that you'd do at the age of 17 with a bottle of cheap cider in tow. She doesn't even take a camera to record these jaunts. As far as I know, she doesn't even visit any 'known' haunted sites. I used to read Fortean Times, in spite of being a confirmed sceptic. She watches that Ghost Hunter show a lot and is obsessed with the Amityville story. She believes. Still, I have nice cameras and a couple of leads on forgotten 'haunted' sites in our immediate area. I thought it may interest her, but apparently not. She just prefers to go to even more random cemetaries miles away because dead bodies = Very Interesting Stuff. I guess they are, but not in the way she thinks. She seems to think shrouded ghoulies will jump out of their graves in front of her. Even if they did, she doesn't have a camera to take her ghost pictures. Stephen King She makes out she is his greatest fan. AFAIK, she has only read The Shining and possibly IT when she was 15. I guess that makes me half the King fan she is (and she is rabid about it) because I read The Gunslinger a couple of years ago. I don't dislike King at all, but I didn't really get into it. I get the feeling it's better to read a whole bunch of his books to get the full effect. She loves him so much she never read his book 'On Writing' that I got her to Xmas a few years ago. Why pretend to love an author you can't be arsed to read? Which leads me to... Her Magnum Opus For the past 20 years+ Lana has been writing her novel. I have offered my help to proof it for her a few times, but in those 20 years she has sent me a grand total of about 200 words to read. Those 200 words looked like they were written by monkeys on mind bending drugs. It's not just me being a snob - she sent stuff to some other friends and they had the same opinion. I was shocked that for somebody quite clever, she seems to be completely unable to put her ideas into any coherent form in the written word. I have no idea how she passed her degree. As I said, Lana IS intelligent and did a degree in philosophy (she did actually do this). At the very least, she should be used to churning out a couple of thousand words in a week or two. No. She writes nothing. She can't even write an email more than two sentences in length. Our relationship is so poor now, we communicate purely through Twitter. She insists and I hate it. gently caress, this one post is longer than everything she's ever sent me put together in terms of her 'work'. She hasn't replied to my emails in a few months. (tl:dr, I'm so sorry guys, I just need to blow off steam). For 10 years+ her novel was about vampires. In the past year it's switched to a haunted house. Everyone she ever meets gets told about her magnum opus that never gets written, even as a short story. 'I AM A NOVELIST. I WRITE VAMPIRES.' To give you clue about how bad she is: her writing is worse than Stephanie Meyer. Christ on a cracker, this really is tl;dr so I'll summarise with some of her other non-existent projects: photography, Twin Peaks related projects, fanstasy zombie apocalypse projects (no evidence of), makeup blogging (she never made a makeup blog, although I offered to help her set it up and do photography for it), sfx makeup (she pretended she was commissioned to work on some dude's film, along with the conventional makeup. BTW, she has no portfolio at all.), blogging about Death Metal on some fanzine site for a while (she never sent me links, I presume it was another lie because she never liked DM before). Also her current boyfriend, who I suspect may not exist, is supposedly a sound engineer working in Sweden. We are in the UK and in spite of him being incredibly rich and her having a current passport, she has not ever visited him in Sweden. When I ask her anything about him, even just his name or where she met him, she clams up and won't say directly. One of my exes was a sound engineer. It is not a glamorous job and is just a bloke pressing buttons and sliding slidey things really. He took loads of speed to keep up with his day job, toured the world with [famous dude] once, then ended coming back to the UK and going back to his day job. Also doubly annoyed because she knows I'm a HUGE Eurovision fan. Fake boyfriend is working on Eurovision this year but no I don't get free tickets or even a sofa to crash on. gently caress, the more I post, the more hosed up this seems. VoodooSchmoodoo fucked around with this message at 22:42 on Mar 13, 2013 |
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Mar 13, 2013 22:13
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Another brief convention story. My company was invited to a semi-annual event that happened last month. We hadn't heard much about the convention and the recent show fell at a bad time for us, so we declined. The convention organizer was hell bent on getting us in as a vendor, however, and coaxed us to attend the spring show, check it out and better evaluate whether or not we want to come to the fall show. We were still on the fence, so he charted us as guests, and comped our admission and a meal. We were going to be travelling near there from another con anyway, so we dropped in. The show was pretty heavy with what I call new school nerdery: anime, furries, Adventure Time, bronies, etc. I'm checking out the vendors and scouting to see if it would be worth our while to vend there. Now I'm walking around with a Guest badge, which means I have all sorts of people asking me who I am. I'm talking to the convention chair, when this guy comes up. He asks the convention chair when the parade will be. I'm staring at this guy, trying to figure out what he's supposed to be. He has this mask on his face that's indistinct, asymmetrical large lumps with poorly glued down fur on top of it. The fur is like you'd see on a cheap stuffed animal, and has been roughly chopped down in places so the netting fabric is fully visible. Another square of fur is attached to the back of a glove on either hand, and he has a piece of it covering his feet. Other than that he is wearing a long sleeve tshirt and jeans. I'm coming up blank on what he might be, and starting to guess weird things like a moldy Elephant man, or a werewolf with tumors, or something potato themed, and none of it is making sense. The convention chair has meanwhile told the fuzzy lump man when the parade is, so I ask about the parade. Convention chair tells me the furries at the con are doing a non-formal "parade" through the event. (When it happened later, it was all of 8 people, and ended up more like a meander set to tinny iPod music) Meanwhile fuzzy lumps is looking at my guest badge and asks who I am. The convention chair quickly explains me and sort of tries to move on, but fuzzy lumps is all excited. He starts telling me that he plans to vend at the fall convention himself. You see, he has mastered the art of inexpensive fur suits. The outfit he is wearing is the basic wolf one, he explains. But instead of using pricey materials, he used canned foam insulation which he allowed to form "organically" and then covered it with fur. He admitted he had one or two problems to work through. Breathing was an issue and some people might have skin irritation reactions to the foam. But he was sure that by the time the fall convention rolled around he would have full production. Convention chair sort of geared us away, and then apologized to me for the guy. He assured us they juried their vendors better than to allow product like that in, and he hoped it wouldn't affect my esteem for their con. Later on that night, I go to try to find the vendor coordinator to thank him for having us. I find her talking to a purple fox. It seems that the other furries decided to kick homemade insulation fuzzy lumps out of their parade as he was embarrassing them. Fuzzy lumps had complained, and they wanted purple fox to apologize to fuzzy lumps for hurting his feelings and that they should understand that not everyone has enough money to afford a nice suit like purple fox's. Purple fox argued that fuzzy lumps was giving other furries a bad name. It was hands down the weirdest conversation. Altogether I was maybe there three hours, including my free dinner, and there managed to be more weird in that time than in the entire 3 day con I had just left. (We probably won't vend there, fyi)
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Mar 13, 2013 22:23
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VoodooSchmoodoo posted:gently caress, the more I post, the more hosed up this seems. Feel free to rant. I know it helped me a hell of a lot to get it all down on Linear Ouroboros posted:Another brief Poor lumpy troll furry, all he wanted to do was Dream! Dream of a world where furries wore cheap fur suits (That may cause rashes) made by him and praized him as their Skin Lord-yeah you know what? That sounded better in my head. :/
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Mar 14, 2013 01:19
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I'm just gonna go ahead and say that I lost it at "moldy Elephant Man"
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Mar 14, 2013 04:01
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Here is a thing. I RP'd during a particularly unhappy time in my life, and found a partner that was uncannily attuned to all of the bizarre power-exchange sex stuff that I was too ashamed to tell my partner about (not that they weren't sex-positive, but it felt terrible to want to humiliate an actual person you cared about). This girl and I came up with and "acted out" these increasingly more byzantine scenes and--between email and chat--must have written something like 30,000 words of porn/meta on interpersonal relationships between psychologically damaged people. Gradually, we got to talking about real life stuff in between composing 10 page scenes that involved my character degrading hers in unspeakable ways. Then one night, about a year into our RP, she and I realized that we had both experienced some pretty bad stuff at the hands of our respective parents on a regular basis. I admitted that sometimes, I was literally (and consciously) repeating poo poo that my mom had said and done to torment me as a kid because--forget all of that chains and leather pageantry bullshit--abusive parents set a kind of gold standard for Dominant/submissive relationships; and instead of logging off and taking a Silkwood shower like a normal person might, she nutted up and told me that her Daddy kink and predilection for non-consensual stuff had a disturbing similarity to the things that had happened to her when she was little. The conversation went like:   For a bit, she and I just kind of marveled at how hosed up we were to want to recreate this poo poo. Also, we figured out that the reason we never roleplayed on Friday afternoons is because we both had therapy scheduled.  We continued RPing for a bit after that, sheerly out of spite, but it was awkward and we mostly ended up comparing antidepressants and cognitive behavioral psychology homework. Looking back, I think that both of us were kind of liberated being able to work out some of the lasting trauma stuff in a "safe" way and on our own terms. Still loving weird though.
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Mar 14, 2013 09:00
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Pnin posted:The healing power of roleplay So I'll be honest and say that I found some of the longer words a little confusing, like "predilection". But I think I got the general gist of it. I'm glad you two are getting better and I'm sorry that you had to go through poo poo when you were both children. But at least you found support in each other (Even if it is a bit of a... none standard way) I think I also want to congratulate you on being brave enough to post something like that here. Do you think it helped you to, for lack of a better word, heal by doing this sort of thing with her? If you even did heal at all.
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Mar 14, 2013 16:13
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Linear Ouroboros posted:Crazy furries. Oh god, Carpet Sample! Or, at least, that was the nickname I've heard this guy by. He's a creepy fucker, and I've told him point-blank the leave me alone at the nerd cons I've freelanced at. At least... I hope it's the same guy... There can't be two, can there? 
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Mar 14, 2013 21:18
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JohnOfOrdo3 posted:So I'll be honest and say that I found some of the longer words a little confusing, like "predilection". But I think I got the general gist of it. Unfortunately, you can't "cancel out" a traumatic event--not even with high quality shrinks and/or booze. A good therapist will help you rewire a lot of the circuitry (self-image, trust issues, regulating emotions) that got messed up by some chucklefuck grownup with self-control issues. It's exhausting, and there aren't too many "breakthrough" moments you can use to track your progress, much less kinky roleplay.  Anyway, I do think this RP helped us work on some hang-ups in a way that traditional psychology couldn't do without tragicomic results involving the creative use of pulley systems, a ball gag, and license-to-practice revocations. Benya Krik fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Mar 14, 2013 |
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Mar 14, 2013 21:25
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(Edit: Eh, never mind, no point bringing up a post that was forty pages ago. Sorry!)
Patchouli Patrol fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Mar 23, 2013 |
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Mar 23, 2013 17:20
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Bobbie Wickham posted:The opening act, I don't remember. Between bands, though, there was a speaker, a professional football player. He began to talk about the misguided people who believe in evolution, and what a travesty that it was being taught in public school. I sank into my seat, sliding lower and lower as he went on about I don't even remember. When he got to the part where everyone raised their hands in the air to rededicate themselves to Jesus, I slunk out of the concert hall and hid in the bathroom lounge. Hahahah I can't remember the band at this point but when I was a teen I got allowed to go to a concert (a rare event) with a buddy of mine from school. I met up with him after my mom gave the go-ahead and then was driven into downtown to meet up with his youth group. Now that the full nerd herd had assembled we went into the arena, got seated and were treated to a few hours of being SAVED by the goofy fuckers up on stage. Hands in the air waving, people standing up to show they were extra super devout and loads of tears as the audience of teens all came to know Christ through the power of neutered rock music. I remember them throwing bibles into the audience and chuckling to myself because this was so NOT the kind of concert I wanted to be at. Thankfully, my brothers in Boy Scouts knocked that nonsense out of my head with a steady diet of Iron Maiden, AC/DC, Judas Priest and other bands that helped to wash away all the deeply embarrassing moments from that concert. When I got into college my second roommate had a giant suitcase full of cassettes. There was an entire column dedicated to Petra and one to Stryper. Oh poo poo. Then I saw the Doctor Demento tape and a Moby cassetted wedged in there and knew we'd be able to find some common ground. I think his Mom still blames me for him not sticking to the straight and narrow during college. Thing is, he's grown up into a fine man and a dad and all that good stuff and still listens to a huge variety of music thanks to getting some exposure to something other than a few parent-authorized hard rock bands. He was in the architecture program and would spend long nights working on house designs and other things to pass classes. Then he'd tell me stories about The Weasel - a dude who lived one floor up from us that was in the same program. It seems that The Weasel didn't understand how to separate his role playing games from assignments for school so he'd add weird poo poo into the designs like trapdoors or secret passages. The professors would tell him to fix it and he'd throw a fit. He finally got cut from the program when he refused to stop putting weird D&D poo poo into his plans. Reading these stories makes me feel lucky that the strange kids I grew up with were mostly harmless or just painfully awkward like me. It wasn't until much later in college that I ever really met manipulative jerks and happily only a couple of them. Thanks for the stories everyone, it's therapeutic reading.
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Mar 24, 2013 08:31
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Haha, hooooly poo poo, Stryper. I have a friend that has a vintage pin with their logo on it from her dad. She keeps the pin out of nostalgia. Seriously, though, Christian concerts are the worst. There is a single Christian band that throws a good concert, and that's Five Iron Frenzy. They were one of my first good concert memories  In high school, I had a group of friends that were basically the what the fucks. We all had assigned Harry Potter characters that we "were". I got to be Sirius because I was the "troublemaker" in the group (ie: I wasn't super Christian and went to punk shows/had a good time). I also had black hair. I think they got into it more than I did, though. They called each other by their Potter names and stuff. I was just happy to have friends. I can't think of any crazy examples. It was just nerds holding too tight to their childhoods.
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Mar 25, 2013 03:44
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JohnOfOrdo3 posted:Feel free to rant. I know it helped me a hell of a lot to get it all down on She does send me tweets sometimes (argh, I hate hate hate Twitter so much). She does tend to generally hold court for her twitter buddies and tends to tweet statements more than anything. It's really only the emails she doesn't reply to. She's got a couple of hundred followers, but gets REALLY annoyed when somebody unfollows her (usually because they say she's too vitriolic, awfully passive-aggressive and moans all the time). Me, I've got about 10 followers because I don't give a gently caress. I only use it to talk to her. She has been talking about her magnum opus a lot recently; did actually email me about it and linked me to her Pinterest where she pins inspirational pictures for her various characters (who I think are now a bunch of child witches or something). She is also using dreams for inspiration. Now, I think both could prove useful writing-wise to get background for her weird witchy-child-haunted house thingy, but still after 20 years she has written barely anything. How do I break it to her that in order to be a writer you need to actually write stuff? I may get her to send me something she's written, if anything, but as I said she HATES criticism. I was also a bit annoyed because I translated a couple of short stories into English (no, not animu) a while ago and asked her if she'd copy edit them for me for typos or provide any criticism. She didn't even bother to read them. They were quite well received online, but I wanted to shoot myself in the face when I spotted a glaring typo in the last dramatic paragraph of one story. I did put her on to Smashwords, Amazon and Textbroker as ways to get a bit of extra money and practice writing. She seemed interested in Textbroker more than anything which I thought a little odd, because it seems to be more for articles than fiction, but of course she's used to researching subjects because of that time when she wrote for a black metal blog. Anyway, at least it may get her writing. I must get on to writing the next instalment. VoodooSchmoodoo fucked around with this message at 14:59 on Mar 30, 2013 |
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Mar 30, 2013 12:35
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SUPERMAN'S GAL PAL posted:The sad brony story reminded me: in the late 90s a friend had a plush animal on the dash of her car and one night at her usual fast-food place had a new guy working the drive-thru window ask her "do you yiff?" She had no idea what he meant and looked it up when she got home. She changed fast food joints after that. I too was ignorant of the term until she shared that story, and that was how we both learned of furries in general. This was important to learn. The person in question was a creepy girl who kept roleplaying and posting her sexual fantasies about Kodachi Kuno from Ranma 1/2 on that first forum (it was a forum for the works of Rumiko Takahashi, so the last part was at least technically appropriate I guess).
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Apr 1, 2013 15:10
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 Denise, charming as ever. Also FAKE GEEK GIRLS ARE REAL  etc.
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Apr 2, 2013 02:00
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uglynoodles posted:
Ah poo poo, the original Denise was in my hood? It seems like there were a lot fewer weird anime people rolling around Seattle this year though.
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Apr 2, 2013 05:26
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