Reading: Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge, and Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose.

Learning: that eleven instead of five minutes at 450 degrees might be enough to ruin a pie.

Listening: Rescue me, indeed: the theme to "Welcome Back Kotter" is in my head.

Viewing: A still full moon

24 November 1999: Thanksgiving Eve

HAO picked me up at 6:00 this morning and I drove her to the airport. I have never driven her car, a Chevy Tracker. I hope, after picking her up Sunday, that I never have to again. It seems shoddily built (which I noticed as we vacuumed it out a few weeks ago), like the turn signal lever might snap off in my hand, and it has more blind spots than see spots. The spare is mounted on the right instead of left side of the rear door; if it were on the left at least it would be behind the driver's seat instead of obscuring the driver's field of vision.

CoolBoss doesn't understand how RDC and I get along with one car and she asked if I had big plans for the weekend with my own wheels. I'm going to stay at home and stamp my Christmas cards. Thpblt. At least when I'm in HAO's passenger seat I don't feel responsible for murdering anyone. [HAO read this and says I'm a foreign car snob. I apologized for insulting her wheels (whose make and model which she had no say about) and decided I'm a safe car snob. The Impreza couldn't stand up to an SUV (of any nationality) and Mercedes are safer and I secretly crave a VW Bug, but I haven't got over my adolescent lust for a red convertible '68 Mustang either. Which is neither foreign nor safe]

And I drove to work. This is the first time I've driven to work downtown. I had no idea how to get from DIA to downtown. I figured what the hell, it can't be that hard. It wasn't. I figured some exit after one for Colorado Boulevard would work, and there was a sign for Coors Field (but not the Denver Art Museum) at Brighton Boulevard, and hey, that's what I used when I came back from meeting LEB. So I have driven to downtown from DIA, just never in rush hour. It was okay, since I was early, sitting at my desk by 7:30. Leaving was another story. I left at 3:45, my regular time, but either everyone else left early as well or I don't know the best way to escape downtown or there isn't a best way or even a good way. I got home 22 minutes later than I do when I take the bus, and that's including the five-block walk to the car and the stop at Safeway for pie crusts. I guess that's not bad; I just never do the driving and her radio was stolen (before, not today) so it seemed longer.

Yes, pie crusts. RDC and I had planned to do them together tonight so I could maybe learn, but last night, reading up, he remembered that dough has to be chilled for twelve hours before it's rolled and baked so he'd have to do them this morning. When he called me at noon having just got back from grocery-shopping, I knew I'd be buying pre-made crusts. One day I'll learn.

This evening as I sliced apples, my mother called. We had a pleasant conversation despite at least one snap on my part: she told me it's been so warm in the past few weeks that the forsythia on the west corner of the house is blooming. "Anyone who doesn't believe in global warming is just an ostrich," I said, my way of saying has a head in the sand. (Some day I should explain what I mean by "the chair of the cookie" as well.)
"Do you believe in global warming?" she asked. "I'm not sure I do."
Well, not like I believe in the sea and the full moon and my Climbing Tree, but yes, I think it's happening.
I muttered "I'm not surprised" then told her aloud that the arctic ice cap has lost 40% of its depth since U.S. submarines first measured them and she said "I hear what you're saying." As I've said, this utterance indicates she's registered an aural stimulus but hasn't registered the concept expressed in the stimulus.

She asked what I was doing and I told her I was slicing apples and she said she didn't have to guess why. Then she teased me for not learning how to make pie crusts. I think this is why she calls Thanksgiving Eve instead of Day, to discover if I've finally attempted pie crust. This was acceptable needling on her part.

I have attempted it. And I have failed miserably both times. When I was living at the Beasts', LEB was in Perth over Thanksgiving but gave me a recipe over the phone from Oz for a crust so short anyone could make it. This was the first time I heard "short" used as an adjective and finally understood where the word "shortening" comes from, but I still don't know how short got that additional meaning.

Speaking of her being in Perth then, I've been wanting for a while to discuss my Obsessed Todds. This is my best reason to call Columbine Columbine, not to have those associations.

One: At orientation for UConn, the June before freshling year, I met Vicky from Town, CT. Moving in that September, I met a sophomore hallmate also from Town and mentioned the orientee I'd met and whaddya know but Sharon knew Vicky and that's how Vicky and I met up again. We were immediate pals the first several weeks of school, I think both in that "omigawd I'm away from my hometown and someone likes me" kind of way. It was that way for me, anyway. She, in turn, introduced me to yet another Town freshling named Todd.

Todd fell in love with me.

Meanwhile I was in love with SEM. Meanwhile one of SEM's several formerly high school and now college classmates was in love with Todd. It was all very circular. I had my monster crush on SEM, sure, but I knew he was Taken and I was intrigued with almost any man who showed an interest in me (emphasizing "almost" to exclude Todd) and one night when we were all up in Towers, I got deep into a conversation with Mark. (This is not, if anyone I know is reading this, MCB. This was another Mark. TJZ wasn't the only one with a Mark problem. I just got over mine faster.) To demonstrate how much my rejection of him and my taking up with another wounded him, Todd left in a huff. Mark and I were slouching at the end of a hallway by a window, gabbing about whatever, when Todd left, and through the open window we saw him climb a sapling in the yard below. It wasn't a sapling but a very young tree, but too young to support even his skeletal six-foot frame. He fell out. Onto his head. And I admit laughter escaped me before I exclaimed three stories down, asking whether he was okay. (He was.)

As I began to make other friends, I spent less time with Vicky and quite deliberately less and less with Todd. When my parents came up for Parents' Weekend, Vicky attended a soccer game with us and got to witness the monster fight my parents got into that day over nothing identifiable. For years my father would ask how Vicky was. "She was a nice little girl." Quiet, he might have meant. The last time I saw her was senior year. She and Todd were going out, had been for ages. So she and I were friendly, but Todd ended up hostile at me for my lack of good taste. I should have learned from him that men who listened predominantly to Pink Floyd were probably more depressed/ing than I could handle. Oh, and freshling spring I latched onto SLH, whom I knew not so very well from History 100 freshling fall, as he entered the mass Bio lecture, so he could shield me from Todd, who also took that class. Once after class I did go along with Todd somewhere because he wanted his best friend from high school (visiting from his own school) to meet me, and this friend was reportedly shocked, shocked that we had barely spoken, by that point, for a few months. We seemed to click so well, as the friend's observation proved, so clearly I was wrong not to be in love with him my own self.

[I added another Todd anecdote here.]

Two: I used to participate in a Live Adventure game. My then-boyfriend SSP and I were friends with a medieval studies grad student TEWS and his wife LAR. They were the founding members of Live Adventure, which would happen one weekend a year with 40 or so friends of friends of friends. Medieval, D&D-ish, generally snooty about SCA. That was the crowd. The first year I attended, 1990, SSP and I were going out. I met everyone, either in character or not, including Todd, who sported the most bizarre arrangement of facial hair I have ever seen on a human being. (Later I learned he'd been growing a beard just so he could shave it oddly this weekend as a costume and shave fully to return to his workaday life on Monday.) By the summer of 1991 I had broken up with SSP and he brought his new girlfriend to the Game. I spent that weekend mostly in my borrowed tent. Live Adventure 1992 marked the weekend I--yes, finally--put SSP behind me, but I still wasn't the best Live Adventurer you've ever met. I don't lie well and I don't think on my feet very quickly and without a script I flounder. So I opted out and took a swim in the pond. I was the only one in it for a long while, doing laps, but as the upstate New York afternoon wore humidly on, several others joined me. Most joined me without bathing suits, and in an epiphany I thought "Oh!" and removed mine. (SSP and AFK were not among the swimmers, either because of me or because of the nudey-dipping.)

When Todd (now clean-shaven and normal) swam up to me and told me he'd been meaning to tell me for two years that I was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen, our lack of bathing suits was the only thing that kept me from hugging my thanks at that moment. Between Consciously Finally Recovering, two hours of laps, and the plain old fun of a watering hole swim, I was untaintedly happy at that moment and able to accept his comment simply, at face value. Later, dressed, I kissed his cheek and thanked him, telling him that that was one of the nicest compliments I'd ever received and I'd really needed to hear it right then. Billy, the jeweler who made my pendant, heard this and asked what Todd'd said. I told Billy, and he smiled (and I always have cringed that SSP, nearby, might have thought, if he overhead, that this was a deliberate orchestration of conversation on my part). That's when I bought the pendant.

Todd asked me for my address and I gave it to him. By the time we'd exchanged a letter or two, I'd begun to date RDC and moved in chez Beast, and LEB had left for Australia. I had to have ABW do a dramatic reading of Todd's next letter, because she does them so well and it was ludicrous and she can make me laugh like nobody's business. This is how I responded to it, and this, OMFB, is why I keep all my correspondence, written and received:

Because your directness in disclosing your feelings deserves no lesser response than its equal in forthright, I state immediately and without further ado (except the following deconstructing declaration of absence of apology) that I am not interested. That said, I'll elaborate.

I have no interest or desire to explore what you suggest. I would not even were you not married, were I single, and did a couple hundred miles not exist. This I know without considering other reasons. If you wish them, one day I might give them. Presently I am too taken aback by your letter to be either lucid or fair.

A friend asked me why I had corresponded with a married man to begin with, and I told him because if two people can't be interested in friendship alone then they need a lot more help than any beyond-friendship relationship could offer. I had no problem with the crush I suspected might exist because I thought either I was conceitedly exaggerating what I was picking up from you (because, frankly, you are not alone among my male Game friends in your sentiments) or that you would stand by your initial--Sunday morning, that is--comment that such a friendship is valuable.

That you write such a letter to someone whom you have met but thrice over two years and have had but one letter from tells me you have, as you yourself have admitted, projected upon and idealized me overmuch. Such a declaration is a huge risk even for the unmarried to the unattached; your writing so, married, to an attached woman tells me you are flailing outward from your marriage more than reaching toward me, for myself, specifically.

To sum up, then, I am not interested nor will be, and do you need to vacate your marriage, do so, but never have me (or any other external to the marriage) be your impetus. I will for now believe your professed intentions, so you write as you want, but please not on this topic. lisa

Reading this seven years later, nearly to the day, I remain impressed. Haughty and dismissive I wanted, and haughty and dismissive I achieved. He knew about RDC from my one letter, dated a month before; it's not as if his profession of luuuv crossed my announcement of RDC in the mail. So he was cheating on both his wife and my boyfriend. The friend who asked why I was writing a married man was LEB's husband, in whose house, without LEB, I was renting a room. I thought his question was kind of goofy--I can live in a house with a married man whose wife is on the other side of the world (and with yet another man (neither married nor old enough to be my father) down the hall), but I shouldn't correspond with a married man living in another state? As far as propriety went, if one situation was questionable both were. (I didn't think either was, but I wonder, if LEB had been gone when I asked for the room, whether I'd've got it. Mr. Beast is very modest.)

What really hurt was the fact that I could no longer accept the compliment. Only very rarely do I believe anything nice that anyone says about me, either the truth of the comment or the honesty of the speaker. Since that rare moment of Belief, for four months, I had treasured Todd's compliment as an honest opinion given freely without ulterior motive. That he knew he had pleased me and had that pleasure as a Romantic and Sexual Interest when I had received it as a simple Kindness between Friends, made me feel cheap. Objectified. Naïve. Vain.

Hence, the obsessed Todds. LEB's giving me the recipe during her long absence reminded me of the Todd-incident during that period. Everything connects.