**WARNING!** Serious Lori ramblings lay ahead. In fact, you will see the darker side of Lori in the following paragraphs. Not 'Making Cartoons in MS Paint' Lori, but 'Sitting in the Dark and being Unhealthily Introspective' Lori. You have yet to see this on this blog. Proceed with Caution!



Warning #2!! - I wrote this blog months and months ago, but just never posted it. Which is a pity, because I dearly love the above cartoon. I've decided, in the interest of getting back in the habit of blogging, to post this. A pretty sizable contributing factor to my lack of posting lately has been that I feel I can't really say what I want to say. Self censoring, in a way. Mostly because I've been afraid of offending people, should they happen across my little corner of cyberspace. Recently a few things have happened that have made me stop caring whether or not I offend someone by telling everyone the Emporor's naked. So I decided, before I start venting my frustrations by showing off everyone else's dirty laundry, I would expose a little of my own.


It probably doesn't come as any surprise to you that I enjoy writing fiction, as well as over exposed diary entries. I mean... blogs. So I've been mulling over the idea of Heroes and Villains. And in the good stories, there are no differences in their motivations. Each character believes they are doing what is right. The Villain doesn't know they are the antagonist, or at least, have not set out to be the bad guy. It seems that in the best stories, the Hero and Villain don't even know they're the protagonist and antagonist, they just are.

I've had the word 'fairytale' thrown at me as an insult by both friend and foe, and I fully admit that my coping mechanism is storytelling. I put things into a linear storyline so it's easier for me to swallow. I know perfectly well that life doesn't always happen that way. People don't even behave in a linear fashion, usually. Many factors motivate people, not a sequence of events. Literature, Life and Fairytales alike begin and end in medias res. Life is told in chapters. I've been translating my written world way of thinking into real life, and I've realized that we are all both Hero and Villain. Even the people I love most - me, my family and friends, Future Husband - we have all been both.




Lately, I've been thinking a lot about Crazy Ex #1 and Crazy Ex #2. It's well known among Future Husband's friends and family that he has terrible taste in women. The joke is that he's just very lucky that I have strange taste in men, and we ended up together.

(Seriously, when I met his parents for the first time at Christmas 2010 I could tell they were uneasy. Even in March when we stayed with them for two weeks, it seemed like they were a little reserved, just waiting for me to take a sudden detour into Crazytown. It took them a while to realize I wasn't going to go kookoo bananas anytime soon.)

Future Husband and I met before he'd even met Crazy Ex #1. Which is how I've been able to justify being a terrible female by allowing him to cheat on her with me, back in 2007. Things didn't turn out very well for me then, which I suppose is exactly what I deserved. In the beginning I made the mistake of trying to become friends with Crazy Ex #1, so when everything went to hell in a hand basket, she not only had to deal with her boyfriend being unfaithful, but someone she thought was a friend betraying her. That is what I feel awful about. I never should have tried to be friendly with her. After everything exploded spectacularly (I won't tell the story here, as it's the subject of an entire novel I'm writing), Future Husband had a lot of back peddling and butt kissing to do. Their relationship only lasted another year, which delighted me - he lost forever with me for one more year with a crazy girl (or so we thought). In that year, he got her name tattooed inside a heart on his arm. It's also a common man's name, so it's kinda funny. We humorously took care of that in Denver. But he also made the mistake of entering into a Domestic Partnership with her. We've been working to dissolve that, and we're almost done, but that's why she's been on my mind lately.

Thinking of Crazy Ex #1 has made me feel something I thought I never would, especially where she is concerned. She is a spectacular waste of space and, in general, a lousy human - nothing to contribute to mankind on an intellectual, creative or humanitarian basis - but that doesn't mean she deserved to be treated the way I treated her. That doesn't raise her on the human bean scale at all, but it does seem to lower me. I'm disappointed in myself for behaving so poorly towards her, and not doing myself justice. I purposely manipulated her, used her, and thoroughly despised her during the entire duration of our 'friendship.' I felt territorial over Future Husband. He knew me first, and yet she had somehow wiggled in line in front of me. She's a pretty loud, 'out there' kind of personality. While I was flirting subtly with young FH, she was bold and socially aggressive. Of course, now I know that FH was just as unsure of me returning his feelings as I was of his. So it's understandable why a 21 year old boy would go for the girl that made her feelings readily available and easy to read. I can't blame him for that. I can't blame her, either.

A long time ago I made a joke to Future Husband about Crazy Ex #1, and he said, "Well, we know how that turned out. You won."

It ruffled my feathers a bit, because I always considered her to be the competitive one. (Towards the end of the craziness in 2007, she kept lightening her hair, and flat out told me she wanted it to be the same color as mine.) I realized something when he said that; I hadn't cared about winning where she was concerned, I'd cared about being right. I've always been one of those stubborn kids that has a hard time admitting they're wrong, and on the same note, backing off when I'm right. To me, Crazy Ex #1 and Future Husband just didn't make sense together. They were incompatible. We made sense. We fit; we were right. They weren't. That's why I was territorial. Why I was uncharacteristically competitive, manipulative and mean.

Now, with Crazy Ex #1 on my mind while Future Husband and I work on getting rid of her paper trail, I am prepared to do something I rarely do. Crazy Ex #1 is unintelligent, uncaring, spiteful, competitive and manipulative. And I lowered myself to her level.

So if you ever come across my little corner of the blogosphere, Crazyhead, on that long walk I want you to take off a short pier... know that I'm sorry for the way I treated you. I was genuinely terrible to you, and I should not have been. Your inferiority to me did not give me the right to behave badly.

I was wrong. I'm sorry.

As far as Crazy Ex #1 is concerned, when the credits roll on her life story, I'll be billed as a Villain, and justly so. I'm the Hero of my own story, and she's simply a plot point. But I was a terrible person towards her, and she has every right to feel that. If she's capable of human emotion (I have my doubts.)

Maybe it's the time and the distance between the shit storm that was 2007, and now; maybe it's just that I'm older and a little wiser, but I feel more forgiving towards Crazy Ex #1's behavior towards me. Granted, just because I was horrible, doesn't mean she was Pollyanna, she's bar fight kind of crazy. Once she realized I had feelings for Future Husband she was just as manipulative and mean. Now I can see why, though. How horrible to realize that someone you thought was your friend was actually using you just to be closer to your boyfriend. Major suckage. And honestly, I probably would have acted the same. But when the manure did hit the oscillating air dispersal device, I got mad at Future Husband. In fact, I was mad for years. Sure, I wasn't quiet about recognizing what an awful person Crazy Ex #1 was, but I didn't write blogs about how angry I was at her. Because I wasn't. I didn't turn into one of those ridiculous Springer-esque kind of girls that gets mad at the girl. I got mad at FH for using me, and treating me horribly. Like I should have.

Crazy Ex #2, however, can't say the same about her behavior....

Get it?

"I love you! I'm leaving."
"I also killed your puppy."

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Weeper.

As any of my close friends will tell you, I have usually bestowed my favorite little nugget of advice on them at some point; "Guilt is a useless emotion."

And it really is. The only time guilt does you any good is if it motivates you to make right the situation that is causing you to feel that way. If it's something in your past, then you can only change how you act moving forward. There's no way to undo anything. You just have to learn and grow and make amends. Guilt will only weigh you down and keep your mind rooted in the past. If, however, you're feeling guilty about something you're about to do... well. Then I would usually say, "Don't do it."

That's the pickle I find myself in. I'm sad about leaving my family. I'm sad about leaving my closest friend. But I know that with the social network era we live in, I'll be fine. We'll be able to communicate every day. It won't be the same, and believe me, I will still cherish the time I get to physically spend with them, but I know that our relationships won't suffer. I'm guilty, however, about the little girl I mentor.

Right after I moved to Tulsa, I got involved in a volunteer mentoring program at the elementary school by my house. For almost two years, she and I have met once a week and just hung out. In a weird way, I do consider her a friend. Sure, she's only 10, but I've known her for two years. I've watched her grow from an imaginative 8 year old to a clever 10 year old 'tween' (I hate that expression, but it fits here.) She was enrolled in the program originally because she was anti-social. She's the youngest of three children; her brother and sister were 28 and 18, respectively, when I met her. Her mother was quite old when she had her, and her father is not in her life. She knows he's a meth addict, and that's why he's not allowed to see her. Her grades were only average, though all of her teachers agreed she was a bright girl, and they told me she rarely played with the other children at recess. So you can imagine my surprise when they told me at our annual progress meeting that she was making friends, attending sleep overs, had gotten involved in her youth group at church, and all of her grades had improved to A's and B's. When our moderator told me all of the things she had said about me in her meeting, it actually made me cry.

Now you have to understand the gravity of the situation. Sure, I cry when I watch Grey's Anatomy. Sure, I cry when someone I like dies in a movie. In real life, however, I very rarely cry. In the last year, with the exception of my Godmother's death/funeral, I've cried four times about something real. Four! And I was drunk for two of those. Until yesterday, when I cried about leaving that little girl.

When I was in Seattle for the first time, I sent her cards and postcards while I was away. I've gone to Arizona twice since I've started mentoring her. The first time I brought her back a little refrigerator magnet puzzle in the shape of a sun, and the second a pencil in the shape of a saguaro cactus. Both kitschy, cutesy souvenirs. This most recent trip to Seattle, I couldn't find postcards until halfway through my trip, and the grocery store nearest my hotel had the tiniest greeting card section I've ever seen. There were no cheesy 'Thinking of You' cards, no adorable 'I miss you' cards. Nothing. Even the blank cards were overtly Valentine'sy. Roses and chocolates and hearts... excuse me while I vomit. So since I couldn't find any touristy postcards, I decided to get her a little souvenir. While Boyfriend and I were waiting for our Chowder place to open, we popped into a shop across the way and I found her a little teddy bear with a rain slicker. Her school does a ridiculously awesome sorting, like Harry Potter. (I'll have to ask her if there's a talking, mind-reading hat involved.) Their mascot is a bear, and there are five different kinds of bears, like houses. She's a Polar Bear. The little rainy day bear I got her is not white, but it is a pale yellow, so it's close enough.

When I saw her yesterday and presented it to her, she immediately started playing with the coat (which you can remove.) As we were walking back to her classroom, she held the bear out in front of her and said, "What should I name it?"

"I don't know. Whatever you want to," I said.

She danced the bear around in front of her while she thought, then said, "I'm going to name it Lori! It's Loribear." And hugged it to her chest... while a knife went through mine.

I haven't told her yet that I'm moving. I wanted to wait until the guys have their new van, so I'm absolutely, 100% going on tour. I don't want to tell her I'm leaving and then be like, "Just kidding!" The downside of this, of course, is that we're getting closer and closer to me leaving, so she won't have much time to get used to it.

Granted, most of these mentoring relationships only last one school year, so we're ahead of the curve. And I'm planning on sending her postcards and cheesy trinkets while I'm on tour. But it's not the same, and I feel terrible. This change in my life blindsided me. I always thought Boyfriend and I would just be friends; that our boat had sailed. I never expected to have feelings for him still when we became friends again, and I definitely didn't think we'd ever get together. It was such an unexpected twist. I thought I would be in Oklahoma for the rest of my years. I thought I would either find some country boy I liked enough and have a passel of kids, or spend the rest of my days writing and tending to my passel of cats. I thought I'd be here to see her go on to middle school, to high school. I fully expected to mentor her long enough to talk about boys and whether she should take art or driver's ed. I might get to do those things if we keep in touch, but it will be a lot more difficult now. And I feel absolutely horrid about that.

I think maybe I'll give her a stack of pre-stamped envelopes with my parent's address on it. That way she can send stuff to them, and they can send it to me, wherever I may be.

Damn... I just... wow. I'm dreading telling her. I'm so scared she's going to cry, and that'll make me cry. Or worse, she'll not cry. She cried around me once and tried her hardest to hide it from me. It was heartbreaking.

I am sooo not looking forward to this.