finding your people

Want to hear another boring story about my past? Hint: no is not an option. But first I have to tell you the background here.

In case you are keeping track, I did make it out of the house to party on Sunday. This was good for a number of reasons. Reason number one, of course, was that I was going to be really aggravated if I blew the whole weekend by stupidly believing the (non)AcuWeather forecast. But, also, it was good because I got to see Mr Indemnity before he left the state for the holidays. I wanted to give him his present before he went away, because I thought he might make use of it. Let's backtrack further and remind everyone that while Mr Indemnity does not celebrate Xmas per se, being a chosen person, he has absolutely no problem with Xmas gifts. (Other than a sheep for some poor family in Eritrea.) So he had something for me, too.

And let's backtrack even further. Probably before my birthday he asked me if I wanted the new Nirvana "Live at Reading" cd/dvd. I said, eh, probably not, because I already have like three versions of every Nirvana song ever recorded and I'm really not *that much* of a completest. So he bought it for me anyway. Heh. It was recorded in August of 1992, which led to some discussion of when Kurt died. And to my absolute shame, not to mention astonishment, I couldn't remember if it was April 1993 or 94 (till I looked it up!) Which led to thinking back about that time. Hence our boring story.

When Mr Cobain offed himself in April of (ahem) 1994, I happened to own, and love, this flannel overshirt (with a hood!) and that whole April and May, I think I wore it as a jacket every single day after work and on the weekends. And whenever anyone mentioned it, I would in my smartass manner say it was my Kurt Cobain Memorial Flannel and I was mourning the death of grunge. Next to nobody got it or got me in those days. As I have mentioned, I was pretty depressed at that time, functional but teetering on the edge (later to be pushed over by the massive trauma I suffered in January '95). A big part of it was that I felt so isolated. I was the single mom of a second-grader and I just knew I didn't fit in with the other mommies. I didn't even try. I was still in touch with some of my high school/college friends but none of them had kids and none of them were interested in the things I was becoming interested in. Work friends were work friends, with the limitations thereof. I felt like I had tried to go in the conventional direction--marriage, a kid, a career--but I couldn't really "make it" and fit in as a conventional person, because I was too much of a freak inside. I had regrets about my life path, and was basically having a midlife crisis in my early 30s.

A couple things happened. I started going to writing group. Here were a bunch of people of different ages and sexual orientations and socioeconomic backgrounds, and they liked me. They believed in me. I didn't, especially as we all bonded, have to pretend to be anyone I was not. Oh, and then, almost concurrently, I found the internet. I don't have to tell any of you that the internet is how freaks find other freaks just like them, do I? It was...such a revelation. And I met, through the wonder of internet freaks meeting other internet freaks, Mr Whatever He Was to Me.

I know that, in my FAQ, I said he's not part of the Adventures, or at least not *these* adventures, but I'ma make an exception and talk about him. When we met, I was 33 and he had just turned 40. He was an engineer with an MBA and a really, really good job, the most conventional-looking, Dockers-wearing, golf-playing, whitebread suburban type guy you could even imagine. Look away if you're delicate, but he even was known to vote Republican. But he listened to the same music I did, liked extreme sports and really skeery roller coasters, and best of all, he was a sick freak just like me. Looking back, it's so easy to see why I fell head over heels over him, and couldn't let go until long after I really should have. Here was someone who looked and seemed and was living a life even more conventional than me, and he was just like me in all those ways other people couldn't understand. OMG. For someone who had spent so long feeling so isolated, it was like heroin.

The lesson to be learned in this, of course, is that probably somewhere in those other mommies at my kid's school that I didn't even try to make friends with because I "knew" they wouldn't like me or get me, there were maybe one or two that would have, because they were freaks inside too. But how would you know that without the internet??!?!???!!! Ha!

Okay, I don't know. That was pointless. And now I gotta do some work, and that's all I have to say about that.

xoxo