30 August 1998: Guilty Pleasures

At KMJ's last party, I was so pleased to discover that Barbie loves Watership Down to. That was great, but the real* bonding soulmate thing happened when I found out that Sabrina knows Ayn Rand--her parents named her and her sister for Rand protagonists. Also she likes Flowers in the Attic and its sequels, and she even said what I would be so reluctant to admit first, that I as reader wanted to be Catherine and raped by my brother. I mean oof, how do you explain or justify that to anyone who hasn't fallen under V.C. Andrews's spell?

* This originally ran "the read bonding soulmate thing," which is also accurate.

A couple of weeks ago I bought The Clan of the Cave Bear at the Tattered Cover. It has just been re-released in hardcover, not the original hardcover format but obviously the paperback page format made sturdy. Ten bucks in the bargain section, although Amazon has it so I know this was a deliberate release and not just a remaindered supply (much like other bargain books now). Anyway, I reread a great deal of it, and then Ayla's chapters of The Valley of Horses, and then skimmed The Mammoth Hunters and Plains of Passage, which are both embarrassingly bad--embarrassing for Auel and for myself.

On our walk, I talked to HAO about it and though she sympathized with my attraction to this (particular) trash, she couldn't empathize because she's never read it herself, nor any cheesy trash stuff. Then we realized that she wastes her time with stupid movies all the time. So I felt better. Her sympathy is not as soothing as her empathy. She hasn't seen the cinematizations of either Clan of the Cave Bear, Flowers in the Attic, or The Fountainhead though. I guess you can't count the last quite in the same class of cheesy.

Anyway this morning I checked back at Amazon and Random House, looking for any information on the fifth's novel's release date. Then I searched further and found all this crap on the web devoted to Jean Auel, like fan fiction. None of the three pieces I hastily skimmed, choking on my chortles, had either correct spelling or accurate use of Auel-given detail. Only a few of the Amazon reviews I read came close to my mixed opinion of Auel, but even those few made me realize something else isolating: that while I have outgrown my Ayn Rand stage and am only nostalgic about VCA, I am going to be right there baby when the fifth Earth's Children book comes out and I know no one with whom to share the shrieks and smirks of guilty delight in the new installment.

Dunno. Maybe I'll ask Barbie or Sabrina. I need to find someone who got into the series early enough that her literary taste wasn't too refined yet, someone who understands that attraction toward lesser texts doesn't undermine or negate appreciation of better texts, someone who can read both Austen and Auel, someone for whom Auel is an indulgence and not the epitome of literature. If I could find REBD again, she who first told me about The Valley of Horses in maybe 10th grade, and she's still interested in Auel (and me), that would be super.

This morning in the elevator for what I assume was the first time I saw a man who I further assume works in this building. This afternoon in the convenience store in the lobby I saw him again. So what, you ask, OMFB? Why do I assume this had to be the first time I saw him? He looks like NCS plus about fifteen years. I still think NCS's father looked like Dudley Moore and I'm pretty sure NCS will look a lot like him in time, though ameliorated by his mother's genes. This man has NCS's stature, hair, eyes, expression, and most of all his gait. It was scary enough this morning, when I figured my brain, not yet awake, was delivering me a nightmare. For my awake and alert brain to confirm the resemblance six hours later was too much. NCS works in my building.

This got me thinking of my last NCS-sightings. "Last" isn't accurate. "Intra-" and "post-SSP" is what I mean. Post-break-up yet pre-SSP were just regular NCS encounters. Probably because I continued sleeping with him until I had someone new. How unkind that was, how dishonest. I always put my needs and wants ahead of his, however wrong he thought I was for thinking of myself ahead of him. What made me miserable in that relationship was my own trying to convince myself that his world view was right. That summer though I had my way with him, fucking with his brain as much as I did with his body. I knew what it meant to me [sexual gratification] and suspected it meant something else to him ["she still loves me"]. However, since I had broken up with him and had explicitly renounced the responsibility he had slung around my neck two years before of making him happy, I never felt it was objectively wrong. It was wrong, though: it was wrong for me, for my sake, to continue to have anything to do with him. Hormones, though.

The last time I did fool around with him I couldn't easily categorize as "pre" or "intra" SSP. The previous pre-break-up spring or maybe even post-break-up summer he had bought tickets to REM. So one night in early September, after SSP and I had been nosing around each other but (I believe two days) before what would be our first kiss, NCS and I and two others (who'd also broken up between ticket purchase and event date) went to the concert. After Michael Stipe sang lyrics off a clipboard, NCS came to my room, whether by my invitation or my failure to ditch him in a convenient roadside gully I don't remember. There on the door was a note from SSP. I don't remember now if that was the first hint NCS had of The Next Man, but he wasn't pleased to see tangible evidence of him. Being from SSP, the note was Tolkien runes and I quick like a bunny rabbit deciphered the thing while NCS was in the lav. He wanted to go for a walk in the moonlight. Here's where we see that I wasn't faithful to SSP either, right from the start, except that we weren't going out yet: I called SSP and declined (it was after midnight by this time) and declined to mention anything about NCS, who stayed over for a rousing night that John Malkovitch in "Dangerous Liaisons" would have been proud of.

Then SSP and I started going out (not that that immediately took care of my sexual gratification, which was another issue). One day after our eleven o'clock classes, NCS ran into us. He was curious about the New Man and accompanied us back to my room. There for a few minutes we chatted, and I faced the usual NCS dilemma: I was hungry and wanted to go lunch, but he, having moved off-campus, no longer had a meal plan, and therefore everyone should sit and be hungry in my room because he wished to chat and he was the most emotionally manipulative little thing I have ever known. (I'm sure more manipulative emotional tyrants exist, but after NCS I had learned my lesson, knew what to look out for, and failed to acquaint myself with any others.) But my new neighbor Van saved the day. She knocked on the door and leaned in, followed by her hip-length blue-black hair, and asked me and SSP (and smiled at my guest, polite woman she was) if we were going to lunch. This was the opportunity I needed. See, Van's unsolicited external invitation meant that I wasn't making up this ludicrous concept of a noon meal called lunch just to avoid NCS. Maybe he would take the hint and leave after I said, "Thanks, Van, we'll join you there." But no, he'd seen Van and thought of something else to say. "She's beautiful," he breathed, observing nothing more than simple undeniable fact. SSP asked him if he'd join us for lunch. NCS had the cash (of course) and accompanied us.

At lunch that day, as on most MWFs that semester, most of the crowd was there: SSP and me and all my gang, who had mostly happily adopted SSP. Another pertinent fact to know in this situation is that my friend PLT and I had conducted ourselves for the whole last month of the previous schoolyear in a manner wholly displeasing to our respective SOs, while PLT's SO and my friend SEB was in England and before I had bothered to break up with NCS. We each therefore were finding our footing after that snafu. So SEB wasn't any too friendly to me and she'd never liked NCS. I was happy when lunch was over that day and I could get away from NCS to my one-o'clock.

Later PLT questioned me about that lunch, which he hadn't been at. "SEB says that SSP looked pretty unhappy about the whole thing," he hinted, wanting to hear some delicious dirt.

"Well that must be because that's what SEB wanted to see. Inviting NCS along was SSP's own idea."

I was pleased to be able to offer that refutation of her assumption and amused that she saw something so contrary to reality solely through her desire to do so. Because of course I never do the same.

And seeing the man in my building got me thinking of my last NCS sighting, which this wasn't. Not by a long shot. It was only the first intra-SSP sighting.

SNAFU: allegedly an unofficial U.S. military acronym meaning "Situation Normal: All Fucked Up." This term is staggeringly appropriate here.