Showing posts with label stalkers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stalkers. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 09, 2011

New-Friend-Dating and Brain-Crazy-Stalking




I had a very nice New-Friend-Date (see yesterday's post) the other night. We got along really well, had a lot to talk about, laughed at each others’ jokes and generally found each other to be good company. Ok, well I felt all of the above regarding John, my New Friend. I can’t be certain he returned my fondness, but let’s just suspend our disbelief and assume he did.

You may recall that I’m a cyberstalker by trade, so I can find out all sorts of weird shit about people online. But I’m also a brain-crazy-stalker, meaning that when I meet a new person who interests me on any level, I develop an intense need to get inside their head to discover the crazy.

In case you were not aware, Gentle Readers, it is a fact that everybody is crazy on some level. Everybody. Some people hide their crazy very well, however, and sometimes it takes a mildly retarded Punchman with legal training and a penchant for cross-examinations to get to the crux of a personality and find the crazy. Plus, with me there is the added benefit of an uncanny ability to smell crazy from fifteen miles away, having spent the majority of my childhood around the clinically insane.

Brain-Crazy-Stalking is a delicate operation, and I especially need to keep tabs on myself while engaged therein. If I find myself able to crack open someone’s crazy even a tiny bit, it becomes an enormous struggle for me not to let what should be some casual social questioning bloom into a full-on interrogation.

With all of the above in mind, my gentle probing into John’s unique character and personality flaws revealed the following:

John is a picky eater. He will not eat any kind of onion, mushroom or pepper. He doesn’t want anything spicy, and shuns almost all fish. He refuses to eat any kind of meat containing a bone ---- everything must be boned or filleted. He said he likes Chinese food unless it’s something slimy that he can’t recognize. (Hence, most Chinese food will surely gross him out.) He also refuses to handle any kind of raw meat because it scares him. So when he cooks at home it’s vegetarian.

And all this is despite the fact that John has lived abroad multiple times. I asked him about that and he just said “it was hard, REALLY hard.”

I’m normally very put off by finicky eaters, but John is entertaining enough in other ways that I find myself able to write it off as a charming quirk. If he’ll let me make fun of him about his food phobias, we might be able to go places with this relationship. Plus, the picky eater thing is offset by two other important facts: John drinks alcohol, and John has a cat.

So, for now, I’m ready to move my New Friend up to second date status --- assuming I make the cut on his end. I need to wait the requisite amount of time before emailing John again, remembering that he’s operating from the position of power here. (i.e., he already has friends whereas I do not.) We’ll see where that goes. But no matter what happens, Gentle Readers, I will keep you well informed.


Love and coasters,
CP

PS: I just learned from our mutual friend that John is also a bit of a hypochondriac. I will definitely need to investigate that more fully!

Sunday, May 13, 2007

A poll for my Gentle Readers



I was recently slumming over at Write Procrastinator's blog, joyfully cringing as I read about his experience with some of life's more awkward moments.

Write's heartwarming tale reminds me that I need to take a poll of my Gentle Readers. The following actually happened to me and my friend Martha, and it's imperative I find out which of us should be more offended.

My senior year in college I studied abroad during the first semester, so there was a mad scramble to find housing for my spring semester back on campus. I ended up in a dorm room in a cool old building on campus widely known for its ample supply of drugs. Lucky me, I wound up as a roommate to one of the dorm's dealers. On one level it was convenient, but on many other levels it was highly annoying; visitors traipsing through at all hours and that sort of thing.

Although I found him repugnant, my friend Martha was one of those gals who dug the bad boys, so of course she took an immediate shine to my roommate, Roland. At first Roland and I didn't have much to say to each other, so he didn't really know who my friends were. Which was nice for Martha because it enabled her to stalk him.

One day Roland came back to the room and said "I swear to God there is a woman following me around campus" and proceeded to share an elaborate tale of how he took all these winding paths to see if she would lose him - and she didn't. A few days after that, Martha dropped by our room for a few minutes when we were both there, and when she left Roland said "my God, that's my stalker! You know her? She's hot!"

Well, I thought, this will be very interesting.

We lived together in that dorm room for the next five months, and while I couldn't stand a lot of his drugged out friends, he and I actually got on quite nicely. Even started to hang out a little bit toward the middle of the semester, at which point I decided to facilitate relations between him and Martha.

One night I organized an outing to the town's only bar and made sure that both Roland and Martha would be there. I kept finding ways to include the two of them in any conversation I was having, and by the end of the night they were getting quite chummy. I made plans to sleep over in another friend's room.

The two of them carried on in some fashion for a month or so, although it never grew serious. They were just having a good time, an endeavor I wholeheartedly supported.

********************

Flash forward. About a year later, Martha and I had graduated and were both living in Minneapolis where we still hung out together a lot. One day she and I made a trek down to St. Olaf for some reason that I can't remember right now.

We were walking around campus, and decided to stop in the student center for a refreshment. Lo and behold, who did we run into but our old friend Roland!

"Roland!" we both exclaimed. "Hi!!! How have you been? What's going on? Are you graduating soon?!!!"

"Hi..." he said rather tentatively. "Yeah.... things are going fine.....how are you guys, um......?"

Martha and I looked at each other, looked at Roland and then back at each other.



He didn't remember us. Neither one of us. He lived with me for five months, and fucked her for a month, yet had no idea who we were.



"Roland, remember me? Your old roommate?" I said.

"OOOOOH, yeah, that's right, in Ytterboe, right? I know I know your name....."

"Tom."

"YEAH, TOM! Hey bud, how's it going? What have you been up to?"

"And I'm sure you remember this lovely young woman," I said. I wasn't going to make this easy for him.

"Oh yeah, it's.... it's... M......M something......"

"Martha," she replied, flatly.

"Yeah, Martha baby! How you doing, girl?"

"Fine. It was very nice to run into you. Tom, we do need to get back on the road now."

"Ok. See you Roland." We turned to leave.


Martha was fuming. While I was not fuming, I did find it a bit insulting that I slept in a bed next to him and talked to him every day for five months straight, only one year prior - and he had no idea who I was.

Martha thought that was nothing compared to the fact that she had sex with him at least a dozen times and he had no idea who she was.

We then debated at length as to who should be more offended. Most of my girlfriends started off saying she should be, but when I laid out the facts (five months of day-to-day vs. one month of passion) they were on the fence.



So the question is now put to you, Gentle Readers. Who should be more offended here? CP or Martha?