Hey, the first meal that Grandma made for me in our first place together was....
Well, that. I chewed (crunched) with feigned enthusiasm, until she growled, "burnt offerings," and I could maintain the facade no more. They were pretty awful.
Public Display of Yourself
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Hey, the first meal that Grandma made for me in our first place together was....
Well, that. I chewed (crunched) with feigned enthusiasm, until she growled, "burnt offerings," and I could maintain the facade no more. They were pretty awful.
The summer I was 16 I was working at a mass mailer marketing company. You know, the ones who send you that advertising junk mail that goes in the garbage so this may have been a little bit of karma. In my defense, I was 16 and it was just a summer job, not a career choice 
but I digress. It was a beautiful, but hot summer day (and the building was old and not air-conditioned) when I went to the ladies room with my mind a million miles away. This was an old building and a single toilet restroom so no stalls. I hiked up my skirt and sat down to do my business. I don't remember what exactly brought me out of my reverie but to my horror that's when I discovered that the frosted window that was usually closed was open. That may not sound like a big deal, but for gawd knows what reason, the toilet had been placed right beside the window. Perhaps what broke me out of my reverie was the several sets of eyes and smiling faces on the men staring at me from the building across the street. I'm sure I made a lovely picture with my mouth open as I shook my head no in disbelief at what just happened. The response was an even bigger smile and an affirmative head shake from across the street. Ok, this is bad but you've probably by now had the same thought I did that day, how in the hell was I going to get UP without disgracing myself even more?! Suffice it to say, I probably did, though, as I shot up from the toilet all the while trying to hold my skirt down to cover my very "public display of myself". And sorry, but in my haste to get out of there, I probably forgot to wash my hands or put the window down. Until later, when I had to use the restroom again and you can be sure that whenever I used that bathroom again, I ALWAYS checked the window first.
but I digress. It was a beautiful, but hot summer day (and the building was old and not air-conditioned) when I went to the ladies room with my mind a million miles away. This was an old building and a single toilet restroom so no stalls. I hiked up my skirt and sat down to do my business. I don't remember what exactly brought me out of my reverie but to my horror that's when I discovered that the frosted window that was usually closed was open. That may not sound like a big deal, but for gawd knows what reason, the toilet had been placed right beside the window. Perhaps what broke me out of my reverie was the several sets of eyes and smiling faces on the men staring at me from the building across the street. I'm sure I made a lovely picture with my mouth open as I shook my head no in disbelief at what just happened. The response was an even bigger smile and an affirmative head shake from across the street. Ok, this is bad but you've probably by now had the same thought I did that day, how in the hell was I going to get UP without disgracing myself even more?! Suffice it to say, I probably did, though, as I shot up from the toilet all the while trying to hold my skirt down to cover my very "public display of myself". And sorry, but in my haste to get out of there, I probably forgot to wash my hands or put the window down. Until later, when I had to use the restroom again and you can be sure that whenever I used that bathroom again, I ALWAYS checked the window first. 
It helps to drunk when you pee so that when you find yourself doing it publicly it's the right thing to be doing.
Wish I'd thought of that then.
Might've made your job more fun, too. You remember that fellow-worker who was always laughing? Yep.Wish I'd thought of that then.
At 16 might have been a little difficult to do, though, unless fellow worker was willing to share.
You just didn't know the right people.
Yup, I was one of the good girls who didn't get into trouble--at least not of that variety.
Oh, that reminds me of a major public display of self: I was maybe 11 or 12, and my friend's parents were going to a party. I don't remember if it was my idea or his to get his dad's whiskey bottle down. It's impressive how little a 15 year old boy knows; we simply started drinking, one a shot at a time, me first, then him, then me again. I'd counted 13 shots for me before starting to not remember the rest of the night, except as brief, hard-to-see scenes appearing as islands in a vastness of black time. One scene was me bouncing my head off my friend's parents' concrete driveway and it not hurting at all. One scene was me with my head on the ground in another friend's front yard and staring at a distant light which was somehow deep down, so deep as if beyond the soil, between grass blades, imagining that I was seeing the Universe. One scene was me being assisted in walking, by my friend and another friend whom he'd gotten to help, around the block and them wondering aloud what the hell they were going to do with me.
These scenes were memories, but unlike normal memories they consisted in parts - for instance, when my friends dropped me off in my yard, rang the doorbell and ran, I seem to remember hearing the doorbell, and possibly remember my mom saying from the open door, "Frank...?". Mostly it seemed that what I was experiencing was happening to someone else. I've always been grateful to not remember that night more than I've been able to.
The summer I was 16 I was working at a mass mailer marketing company. You know, the ones who send you that advertising junk mail that goes in the garbage so this may have been a little bit of karma. In my defense, I was 16 and it was just a summer job, not a career choice
I did a hybrid of Ms. Mod's and blunt's one of these events back about 30 years ago. I was in my mid-ish twenties and completely smitten with a biker, his name was Rick, and he was HOT! Anyhow one night I was in a biker bar with him and I was loaded for bear! I was having a big time, then I had to pee. The ladies room was just a tiny regular bathroom, with a sink and a toilet. The overhead light bulb was out and there was only a small neon something above the mirror. I couldn't see jack, but I didn't care. I was high, drunk and in love.
I pull down my pants, start to sit and hear a woman screaming, right behind me, HEY WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING??!!! It became evident to me that someone was already on the toilet as my butt hit her lap.
Thank God I could stand back up before anything happened. I got sober right quick (kind of) and apologized until I thought my face would fall off. I didn't get my A$$ kicked, which was awesome. I did however get a lot of LOL at me, the whole rest of the night.
I pull down my pants, start to sit and hear a woman screaming, right behind me, HEY WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING??!!! It became evident to me that someone was already on the toilet as my butt hit her lap.
Thank God I could stand back up before anything happened. I got sober right quick (kind of) and apologized until I thought my face would fall off. I didn't get my A$$ kicked, which was awesome. I did however get a lot of LOL at me, the whole rest of the night.
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This reminds me of something that happened in high school. Was at a party and a friend had way too much to drink and passed out. I was concerned for her safety and got both of us a ride to her house (I didn't get my driver's license until I was 18). I got her inside the door and she was back on the floor partially passed out when her parents came downstairs. Her dad was yelling at me, blaming me for her being drunk. I tried to explain that we didn't even go to the party together, that I just wanted her to get home safely.
I don't think we were ever really friends again after that. What can I say? People suck sometimes.
Epic.
Back in college, two girl friends and I were riding along with someone who didn't want to get back to campus anytime soon. We said, oh, just let us out here. it was about three, four miles across town from campus. We were tipsy. At least.
We have a WONDERFUL time walking back, talking the deep talks, sharing the deep thoughts. But it was a long walk back, and our bladders were full. We found an alley, and we stood guard for one another just outside the alley while we drained. The girls giggled and told me that the biggest caution for them was not to pee into their shoes. (I later used this vignette as a little casual detail in a story I wrote.)
We got back to campus all happy. A few weeks later, one of the girls said she had SUCH a good time with that walk. She and I got a ride back out to the same spot, walked back the same way, stood guard for each other at the same alley. And we had a good time, but not as good. Thomas Wolfe was right.
Probably the closest I've ever come to urinating in public. But I had a guard. BTW, while both girls were pretty and charming, our relationship was entirely nonsexual friendship, although we did discuss sex things a lot, as you might expect with college students.
But you did right. Good for you.
I was at a party at a convention hotel when one of the ladies pretty much passed out from alcohol intake. A guy said they were together, and I could take her to his room. I fireman-carried her past curious and shocked guests who weren't part of the party, got to the room with three other males, one who had the room and two others who were curious, I guess. I deposited her on the bed, and we were talking about her condition, and I said, well, we shouldn't let her pass out on her back, in case she vomited.
(By the way - it is NOT easy carrying a dead-weight body. She just kept wanting to slide right off.)
She came to drowsy life, reached down, pulled her shirt off, and went back to sleep. She wasn't wearing a bra. I said, "Okay, I'm out of here, and make sure she doesn't sleep on her back," left the room, but stood there with the door open until the other guys came back out. It took a few minutes, probably delayed by their appreciation of the scenery. I didn't want to be in there with her, and I didn't want them to be left in there with her. They finally came out.
Don't pass out drunk with a bunch of boys around, ladies. I know, that should be obvious, right?
Fair enough, but gentleman should remember ladies have the right to get drunk and pass out without being raped. You did good Grandpa. I'm proud of you.
She lost a good friend then.
Have not yet finished the long post I started, but here is one I wrote on another board. Hope this is not the wrong thread, but none seem any more suitable, and frankly my whole life has been an embarrassing display, sometimes public, and when not it was because I was deliberately in hiding.
Agreed, parents make mistakes. Even a chapter in Princess Diana's book is entitled "I Was Supposed to Be a Boy." Her family needed a male heir and she felt the need to replace a brother who had died. Later a brother was born, but Diana still didn't feel adequate, so she decided to become Queen of England to make up for it. Ended very badly.
I could identify. Diana was just two months older than I. My parents married as sort of a last ditch thing. My dad had a brief marriage annulled--his first wife didn't want kids and other issues. My mom was stuck on a man with a lot of problems who ended up marrying someone else, running out on his family and dying suddenly leaving a number of young children. So she sort of settled for my dad, who was a lot happier with her than she was with him. I was a bit floored when I read Gone with the Wind, one of my mom's favorite books and movies, as Scarlett's parentage so much mirrored mine, with a florid Irish father and a delicate mother forever pining over her lost love--Mom certainly had her little Ashley Longworth moments!
My parents were counting on a boy, Dad somewhat moreso than Mom, and even called the first baby before birth James, or Jimmy, after Dad's late brother. (I often ponder that my real trouble began in 1925, over 30 years before I was born, when Jimmy died. That was another can of worms. Jimmy was an incredible blond, blue-eyed boy genius loved by all who knew him, to whom my Dad was considered a poor second, and as a matter of fact his mother died to be with Jimmy rather than stay alive with Dad! She didn't exactly deliberately kill herself, it was just between the poor medicine available in 1926 and her neglect of her own health and Jimmy's due to her crackpot religion, they both died. My dad developed a phobia about disease and an intense dislike of crackpot religion.) Dad also felt neglected, having a stepmother he did not get along with who favored her own son over her stepchildren. Dad had enough sense not to rub it in with the Jimmy thing to avoid the fits I'd throw, but Mom had no compunction and upset me very much with it. Oddly, our best friend as kids was a blue-eyed blond named Jimmy and when he moved away to a distant state it was the end of what I considered the good era of my life if it can be said to have had one. One sister married a man named Jim and they have been together for many years. (I kept hoping for another good era, but since that was 1973 by this stage I've pretty well given up.) I not only wanted to be acceptable to Dad, but make it up to Mom for having married him, and show that my sisters weren't all that and a bag of chips. I have been a complete and total failure in all I have tried to achieve in life and really wonder that I am alive at all and if so for what end.
To top it off, my sisters were adorable redheaded identical twins who soon became overachievers while I was barely able to pay enough attention in school to realize I was there (which helped prevent me from being a lot more miserable)! Around 1971 I decided my problem was that I was simply a misunderstood genius and once I proved my genius enough to be adequately financially compensated for my works I would not only make up for everything but make people who doubted me appear very foolish. My dad showed a contempt for our property and feelings which only made me more determined to get everything right. I WAS TOTALLY NOT LYING OR IMAGINING THAT I WAS SPECIAL AND WOULD SUCCEED, I TRULY BELIEVED IT! So, I couldn't be a boy, and I couldn't be a twin, so I figured the only thing was to be a phenomenally successful internationally famous author. How I felt about myself waxed and waned over the years depending on how well I felt I was progressing toward my goal. Just before Princess Diana died I actually felt near death myself, convinced God was going to kill me for not succeeding by age 35, but following her death I sort of rebounded.
I actually didn't really begin to completely give up until 2004, when my doctor sister showed me a list of symptoms of Asperger's Syndrome and I realized I had it. I received a formal diagnosis in 2006 we all knew I would get. Dad by then was bedridden from several strokes so we never tried to explain it to him. He died in 2007, so I lost my job taking care of him and I went on disability in 2009. I was glad to be approved but rather demoralized by being passed right through on the first try. Here I had accepted as an article of faith for thirty-three years that my sister or whoever else thought I was weird or something was wrong with me, were either brainwashed by my dad, mistaken, or just trying to be mean, and here the state said yeah, you're officially a case all right! Towards the end of his life, when my dad would talk on the phone with people who didn't know the family, he would always say, "I have two children, a doctor and a lawyer," although I was the one he saw every day as I was taking care of him! So I was most definitely disowned.
Since then I've had to manufacture increasingly desperate false hopes, that maybe I do have some latent or undiscovered talent, and other more or less insubstantial or fake reasons to keep existing. I know when my mom goes, it's all over, and she is pushing 90, and only two members of her family lived even as far as 90--her grandfather and his brother were both 95--so unless a miracle occurs I don't have too much longer in this mortal form. My one sister has plans that if they work out as envisioned will make my life absolutely unbearable, and my other sister is not being very much help in trying to come up with better solutions. I will try to come up with something myself but don't know where to turn with it. If I do end up having to be Xed out 35 years before my time, I am upset that some way was not found to prevent it, and at all the people who will be let down by it.
Agreed, parents make mistakes. Even a chapter in Princess Diana's book is entitled "I Was Supposed to Be a Boy." Her family needed a male heir and she felt the need to replace a brother who had died. Later a brother was born, but Diana still didn't feel adequate, so she decided to become Queen of England to make up for it. Ended very badly.
I could identify. Diana was just two months older than I. My parents married as sort of a last ditch thing. My dad had a brief marriage annulled--his first wife didn't want kids and other issues. My mom was stuck on a man with a lot of problems who ended up marrying someone else, running out on his family and dying suddenly leaving a number of young children. So she sort of settled for my dad, who was a lot happier with her than she was with him. I was a bit floored when I read Gone with the Wind, one of my mom's favorite books and movies, as Scarlett's parentage so much mirrored mine, with a florid Irish father and a delicate mother forever pining over her lost love--Mom certainly had her little Ashley Longworth moments!
My parents were counting on a boy, Dad somewhat moreso than Mom, and even called the first baby before birth James, or Jimmy, after Dad's late brother. (I often ponder that my real trouble began in 1925, over 30 years before I was born, when Jimmy died. That was another can of worms. Jimmy was an incredible blond, blue-eyed boy genius loved by all who knew him, to whom my Dad was considered a poor second, and as a matter of fact his mother died to be with Jimmy rather than stay alive with Dad! She didn't exactly deliberately kill herself, it was just between the poor medicine available in 1926 and her neglect of her own health and Jimmy's due to her crackpot religion, they both died. My dad developed a phobia about disease and an intense dislike of crackpot religion.) Dad also felt neglected, having a stepmother he did not get along with who favored her own son over her stepchildren. Dad had enough sense not to rub it in with the Jimmy thing to avoid the fits I'd throw, but Mom had no compunction and upset me very much with it. Oddly, our best friend as kids was a blue-eyed blond named Jimmy and when he moved away to a distant state it was the end of what I considered the good era of my life if it can be said to have had one. One sister married a man named Jim and they have been together for many years. (I kept hoping for another good era, but since that was 1973 by this stage I've pretty well given up.) I not only wanted to be acceptable to Dad, but make it up to Mom for having married him, and show that my sisters weren't all that and a bag of chips. I have been a complete and total failure in all I have tried to achieve in life and really wonder that I am alive at all and if so for what end.
To top it off, my sisters were adorable redheaded identical twins who soon became overachievers while I was barely able to pay enough attention in school to realize I was there (which helped prevent me from being a lot more miserable)! Around 1971 I decided my problem was that I was simply a misunderstood genius and once I proved my genius enough to be adequately financially compensated for my works I would not only make up for everything but make people who doubted me appear very foolish. My dad showed a contempt for our property and feelings which only made me more determined to get everything right. I WAS TOTALLY NOT LYING OR IMAGINING THAT I WAS SPECIAL AND WOULD SUCCEED, I TRULY BELIEVED IT! So, I couldn't be a boy, and I couldn't be a twin, so I figured the only thing was to be a phenomenally successful internationally famous author. How I felt about myself waxed and waned over the years depending on how well I felt I was progressing toward my goal. Just before Princess Diana died I actually felt near death myself, convinced God was going to kill me for not succeeding by age 35, but following her death I sort of rebounded.
I actually didn't really begin to completely give up until 2004, when my doctor sister showed me a list of symptoms of Asperger's Syndrome and I realized I had it. I received a formal diagnosis in 2006 we all knew I would get. Dad by then was bedridden from several strokes so we never tried to explain it to him. He died in 2007, so I lost my job taking care of him and I went on disability in 2009. I was glad to be approved but rather demoralized by being passed right through on the first try. Here I had accepted as an article of faith for thirty-three years that my sister or whoever else thought I was weird or something was wrong with me, were either brainwashed by my dad, mistaken, or just trying to be mean, and here the state said yeah, you're officially a case all right! Towards the end of his life, when my dad would talk on the phone with people who didn't know the family, he would always say, "I have two children, a doctor and a lawyer," although I was the one he saw every day as I was taking care of him! So I was most definitely disowned.
Since then I've had to manufacture increasingly desperate false hopes, that maybe I do have some latent or undiscovered talent, and other more or less insubstantial or fake reasons to keep existing. I know when my mom goes, it's all over, and she is pushing 90, and only two members of her family lived even as far as 90--her grandfather and his brother were both 95--so unless a miracle occurs I don't have too much longer in this mortal form. My one sister has plans that if they work out as envisioned will make my life absolutely unbearable, and my other sister is not being very much help in trying to come up with better solutions. I will try to come up with something myself but don't know where to turn with it. If I do end up having to be Xed out 35 years before my time, I am upset that some way was not found to prevent it, and at all the people who will be let down by it.
This may seem like an over simplified response to your heartfelt post, but you are precious and you are special and you were meant to be here. Please don't let the broken hearts and spirits of others break yours. Don't let them steal your joy. They don't have the power to do that unless you give it to them.
Asperger's is not a curse, in many ways it's a blessing. Many people with Asperger's are creative and brilliant, some of the greatest people in history have been believed to have been challenged by Asperger's.
So far as your false hope goes. Never for a minute. Wayne Dyer said something that has proven itself true to me over and over in every way. "When you change the way you look at things, things change."
Expect good things Cori.
Asperger's is not a curse, in many ways it's a blessing. Many people with Asperger's are creative and brilliant, some of the greatest people in history have been believed to have been challenged by Asperger's.
So far as your false hope goes. Never for a minute. Wayne Dyer said something that has proven itself true to me over and over in every way. "When you change the way you look at things, things change."
Expect good things Cori.
That was you?The summer I was 16 I was working at a mass mailer marketing company. You know, the ones who send you that advertising junk mail that goes in the garbage so this may have been a little bit of karma. In my defense, I was 16 and it was just a summer job, not a career choice