Sorry Vie Tool… *Editated

In which our Hero keeps poking at the accumulated queue of questions as a topic to write about.

After this I get to the more current ones, which works out well since I have the weekend to actually think them through. 🙂

2.1 Stalkers in your diary

Seems like every so often, I read a diary recently where the author had an unwanted and disrespectful visitor wreak havoc by sharing entries with others “in real life” as the expression goes. Equally, I’ve read a few folks who have an ongoing un-relationship of cat-and-mouse avoidance with others that were formerly close and can’t deal with the fact that the situation has changed. I can certainly sympathize, but so far, my personal experience is limited.

I’ve never blocked anybody from visiting my diary (in part because it’s too easy to work around short of completely locking people out of the diary or entries and I’m just too lazy to do that). And for the most part, the situations that have ended have done so with relatively tidy endings so there hasn’t been too much left.

Ex-girlfriends generally seem to have needed a little while to stop reading me. And of course, every once in a while, there’s the temptation to peek in on people. One ex spent a while under the incomprehensible impression that the fact that I was not raging or ranting meant that there was a basis to rebuild a friendship. Her occasional notes were.. probably sincere in their good will, if I’m honest. But baffling in their disconnect from the reality in which my trust was destroyed and then salted.

The biggest intruder, the reason while there’s two thousand entries that are privatized now, was my dear cousin, Willow, who stumbled her way to my diary and snooped. That was the time where the real world painfully intruded and suddenly I was very differently aware of the kind of unrestrained content I’d been putting here.

2.2 Your REAL LIFE love life from teenager to university years

I was a socially disconnected boy, not so terrified of girls that I couldn’t speak, but terrified enough. Which means, Gentle Reader, that my entire romantic history until university goes like this:

• Ew, girls.
• Ahh! Girls!
• OHMYGOD, HER BOOB BRUSHED MY ARM DID I JUST SEXUALLY HARASS HER?! (This was around 14. Her name was Christine something. And I still remember the terror that she’d be mad at me after I’d held the door for her and clearly done it wrong)
• Why, yes, I will help you and your friends cheat on an exam just because you’re really pretty and nice to me

(It suddenly occurs to me that I can really cover the first 18 years of my life with just those first two lines. Ha!)

I left high school, and went to university, spent a lot of time talking to a friend’s room-mate which led to my first kiss. Yeah, in university. Luckily now, sadly at the time, said room-mate had the attention span of something that pays attention for a month or three, and moved on to another acquaintance.

And then I ran into an old friend from a summer camp I went to. And then I spent a summer going 30km out of my 10 klick trip home, detouring through the downtown to visit with her. She dumped me that summer. And then we dated a while, till she tragically left me to move away to a different school. Then I got my degree and the scope of this question ended before I could say what happened next.

Oh no, so sad! 🙂

2.3 Your childhood (memories with grandparents)

I grew up on the other side of the world from my grandparents. So I knew who they were from photos, and memories more than anything else.

My maternal grandfather died when my mother was young, so I never knew him. My maternal grandmother was a commanding woman with a sharpness to her face that was a little scary looking, but I think I get my loving sort of evil from her, through my mom. She raised 5 kids by herself, and I know that she was tough as nails. On the other hand, I remember, as a grown man, standing with her hands clasping mine as she guilted me about being old and tired and just hanging on till I got married. Which seemed like a profound burden to lay on me till my cousins cheerfully shared that she also used the same technique to ask for great-grandkids, weddings and visits from remote family like me. Even when she was old and her memory was mostly gone, she saw me and remembered my dad and smiled a toothless smile asking about his parents and his wife my mother.

I’m really lucky that my dad’s parents came to stay with us for a few months when the Mouse’s mother emigrated to Canada, because it meant that while I still can’t say I knew them, I did get my own attention from them and to see them just be, albeit away from their own home, which is still different, I know. They’re the grandfolks I know most. We lost my granddad about 20 years ago, but the other day, when I was writing about doing basement renovations, I was thinking of the way I enjoyed working with my dad because of how he can be obsessed about some details and completely indifferent to others. I was laughing about it, but I was also thinking there is a stillness to my father which suddenly made me realize that he moves like my grandfather. I remember him holding my hand when I was very small, of being scared as I was helped up a ladder to the roof of his home and looking out over the world, but that memory is so old that it’s certainly tainted by a photo from the ground of me up there with him.

My maternal grandmother got married at 16, moving to the house she’s lived in ever since. She makes me feel like a baby, not immature, but cherished, the way small children are. I wish you could meet her. I wish I had enough of the language that I could too.

She’s my last true tie to the place my people come from. When she is gone, I will still come from that place, but I don’t think I will ever belong there again.

2.4 Your earliest pets

I had a gold fish. I must have been 5 or 6, only because I remember reading a batman comic next to a tank in the basement. I have no idea how it could have been there, my parents are not pet people, and the only answer is that I must have cried or insisted or wished or something. I think I need to ask about this one.

When I was 7 or 8, I briefly had a bird who had hurt its wing. My mother did what she could for it, and we improvised a cage from my wicker trashbin. But obviously we had to let it go pretty quickly.

EDIT

The question said earliest pets. For a little while, I had an apartment of my very own, a big fish tank that made me very happy to watch, and a kitten that was nominally mine. The fish died out for the most part or went back to the store when I shut down the tank. And the cats stayed with the bitch.

What?

No, I never had a dog. ;P

2.5 Yourself (describe how you look like, height, etc)

I’m pretty average in height and build. I’ve been conditions to stand straight so that makes sure I show my height. I’ve got just a bit of a tummy but I’m not too grossly inflated. I’ve got brown eyes and my voice falls in a tenor register, I think. I speak relatively well and clearly.

Sadly, my hair is thinning at the temples and up top, and the silvered sideburns are nowjoined by grey hairs elsewhere.

2.6. Good friends and ex-friends in OD (no need to describe real OD names. But up to you).

This repeats the question from the other survey. The friends are here. The ex-friends aren’t worth mentioning.

2.7 Your kinks (if you dare to write about them!)

It’s not that I don’t dare to write about them, it’s that I’m in a relationship which makes whatever I’m wanting into a very private thing.

2.8 What would grab your complete attention (not talking about your girlfriend, sorry) ie entries that your faves write which you enjoy reading AND what you WON’T enjoy reading.

I like this question. Things that grab me: The top level bucket is emotion. The other overlapping category in the venn diagram is humour. Those are the reliable things that pull me in.

Emotional honesty is something that reaches out through the screen and grabs. People talking about personal triumphs or personal defeats. About their dreams, not the win the lottery one, but the since-I-was-2-I-always-wanted-to-[something] dreams. People sharing a moment of deep pride or deep fear about loved ones.

I’ve found I can usually enjoy when you’re venting your spleen too, Gentle Reader. Something about being a person who writes down their thoughts seems to make us find ways to pull sharp and raw humour into our darknesses.

But that isn’t an all the time thing. Maintaining that kind of openness leaves too much rooms for things to just fall out and spears to fly in. Everything adds up. The casual entries about dinner with family, the frustration about a busted lawn more, the glee at finding jeans that fit… it all builds the matrix that frames the moments that transfix.

Edit continued…

I also forgot the second half of this question, what makes me not read. I don’t know… Malformed language makes me not read. I h8 trying to read when u tipe like this, Gentle Reader. I make allowances but even favourites for whom english is not their native language write better than what you get from a lot of teenagers these days.

I still struggle to identify that trainwreck stage. It’s definitely more than calamity, I think it requires substantial lack of self awareness.

Another good point to break.