Once upon a time...

... long, long ago, in a faraway land... no, come to think of it, it was a classroom and not all that far from where I sit now. Anyway, something slightly more than a decade ago, I first saw with my very own eyes the most gorgeous man in the world. Okay, maybe you wouldn't be so impressed if you saw him. There's a strong possibility that I would no longer be impressed myself. But the fact remains that, given who I was at the time and the tastes I had developed, this man's appearance was so close to being my ideal that any tiny flaws got glossed over. You know how sometimes you spend a day trying to remember something you should know (a word, a name, where you hid the keys to the kingdom), racking your brains for hours until you're sure the rack itself is overstretched, and you finally give up and stop thinking about it entirely? Then suddenly, at a moment when you weren't expecting anything to happen, you remember and you have this feeling of enormous relief? When he walked into the room, I felt as if I suddenly knew the answer to a question I'd been asking all my life.

It took a few weeks for me to get up the courage to look in his direction during class--before then, I was afraid that if I looked his way, I would be unable to stop staring. After a while, we exchanged smiles. He had the face of someone accustomed to smiling, and the little crinkles around his eyes increased his appeal immeasurably.

About a year later, there finally came a day when I could look at him and remember how to breathe, to speak, and even form complete sentences all at the same time. I saw him in a student lounge where he was resting, waited till he opened his eyes, and said hello. He ran away.

Oh, it's okay. He came back in a few minutes, hadn't run away permanently after all. We ended up speaking for a couple of hours that day. He never ran away from me again, though I must admit he tended to get a "deer in the headlights" look anytime he saw me.

We had a few good conversations after that. They were nice enough. Nope, never asked him out. I seriously thought about it the last time I saw him, but he had to run(!) elsewhere, and, well, it turned out to be the last time I saw him. All these years later, I know that I can never know for sure if his answer would have been (as a friend predicted after seeing him) a heartfelt "Sorry, I'm gay."

So anyway, this is the internet, and one of the first things I learned how to do on the internet was to find stuff. He had an insanely common name and I had no idea what he might have been doing in the intervening years; but it was the late '90s, I couldn't drive, and I barely had the energy to walk a quarter mile. In short, I had time to kill and I killed it by searching for him.

Yes, he was online then (I knew he would be). After a few hours, I found his website and read through just about everything. Sent him an e-mail which read like a fan letter. Got a pleasant response and was thrilled for days (even though it didn't quite convince me that he had a clue who he was writing to). I was thoroughly charmed all over again.

And then one day I looked for Usenet postings made with his e-mail address. Let's just say that, while there was every reason to believe the man was both physically attractive and doing reasonably well financially, there was also reason to believe that an attempted conversation with him on anything other than safe topics would seriously tick me off. I judge it a good thing that he never answered my last e-mail.

Out of curiosity, today I looked for his website again. His latest tagline: "Abandon the search for Truth; settle for a good fantasy." I can't think of a more appropriate way to end this entry.

Today

Woke up too hot & tired to do much of anything, so since the library wasn't open today, I spent a few hours listening to music on Launch while trying to stay conscious. Also watched the day's reruns of Buffy (Willow returns from England) and Angel (Lindsey is rescued from a cute little Hell). Finally dragged myself out of the house this evening to go buy an onion. On the way to the store, saw one of the cheerfulest sights you can see in the summertime: a pair of goldfinches flying around a stand of sunflowers. Since birds see a different part of the electromagnetic spectrum than we do, do they see themselves as closely matching the flowers? Or can that particular beauty be appreciated only by a being with a human's limitations?

Inside the store, there were no worthwhile onions at all, and very little decent produce of any kind. All I could find that seemed worth buying were some kiwi fruits, so I looked in other parts of the store for cheap canned goods. (That store's "Reduced for Quick Sale" section has contained interesting items lately, which would explain why there are sausage soup, blackcurrant nectar, and buckwheat flour here in my bedroom.) Saw a few other things I could use at prices which didn't make me squeak and went to stand in line.

The line wasn't moving. None of the lines were moving. All of the clerks were having problems ringing up the orders of people whose carts were full to overflowing and why the heck was I standing there with a few small fruits and cans of things I don't really want that anyway? All I wanted was an onion and there are no good onions left here!

I gave up. I put my items back (mostly where I'd found them) and left the store. Something about the shopping experience must have seemed like a metaphor to my subconscious brain, because soon I was hit by waves of panic and anger about all the things lacking in my life, all the health problems and money problems and lost chances and and and. Fortunately it was twilight by then, so most people in the parking lot didn't see my face. One woman walking by did look at me warily as if I might be dangerous. I walked under shadows of trees after that.

Sobbing as I walked up the street. Sobbing more quietly as I came into the house. Then for some strange reason I thought about looking up that guy online. Found his site with the quote on it, did some searching to find out who else used that quote, ran across this site, and instead of wasting precious energy being panicked over things I could do nothing about, I found myself in a halfway decent mood.

Distractibility can be a survival skill.