Post by Thanin on Mar 5, 2006 13:54:43 GMT -5
I was thinking about that old idea, the one about how you may have already had your best moment and your worst and not realized it or how these moments may yet happen. I remembered us talking about this at Fortimunday (yes that was a Fortimunday). I’m not sure why I thought about this, but I did. Then I decided to change it a little.
What if you thought about the best and worst moments you had with someone, but not with someone you’re still around and will continue to see. Someone you’ll never see again. Then you can pinpoint the exact moment of your greatest and worst experience with this other person. After that, think about other people you’ll never see again. Can doing this establish any kind of pattern? Could anything be learned from this? For me the answer has kind of been a yes so far.
I decided to think about two people: Tony Marshall and Andrea Zimmerman.
Once I when I was 22 years old and at a D&D game, I got into a heated political argument (shocking!) There was me, Jay, Slash, Sean Waterhouse, one of Sean’s friends, and Tony. As usual in these arguments, when you all aren’t around, I was alone. They were celebrating the near genocide of Native Americans (again, normal for most white people in my experience). Sean’s friend (whom I cannot remember his name), was pointing at himself saying, “Hey I’m like 1/64th Indian and I’m glad white people did what they did!” That’s not a joke or an exaggeration either. Jay was saying how half-breeds make society worse, which is ironic since he also claims to have some micro-fraction of Cherokee blood. Sean was laughing at me, but he never liked me anyway and Slash was saying, “well, they should have fought harder.” How do you fight harder when they wait for the warriors to leave to hunt and it’s just the women and children being slaughtered? About the point I was walking into the kitchen to grab a butcher knife, Tony started ripping on white people. For those of you who don’t know, Tony’s whiter than Wonder Bread. He started saying how dirty white people were when they came over and disease was the main reason why Natives lost so much of our population.
Once I realized that was my best experience with Tony, I tried to remember what it was with Andrea. Her memory is too personal to go into, but when I remembered it, both of them definitely shared one thing in common: they both supported me when I desperately needed help.
The worst one for Tony was one year I freaked out. Well, it wasn’t a whole year of freak out, but I had a breakdown and ceased being able to interact or function on my own. I was running a D&D game at the time in Norman and Tony was one of the players. Well of course that died when I had to move back to Pawhuska for a few months. When I finally recovered, which I honestly cannot remember how long this took (months, weeks?), I came back to Norman and checked my messages. I found that Tony had left several, all asking about the D&D game and how things were going. I saw him about two years later and he treated me like a stranger, which I can’t blame him. That isn’t such a bad moment, considering everyone was alive and such, but with Tony that’s the worst it ever got. It still makes me feel bad though because I think our friendship afterward was always hampered by that.
My worst experience with Andrea was when she went into a diabetic, epileptic attack in her sleep… or whatever it was. Now I’ve worked at hospitals for about 5 years, so I’ve seen my share of fucked up stuff. I’ve seen a lot of people die and have heard way too many death moans. Of course they’re usually just death gasps, but sometimes it’s moan-ish. What Andrea did was more violent and disturbing than anything I’d heard anyone sound like, ever. When I turned the light on in the room, I saw how blue her lips were, how her eyes were half open and half rolled back into her head with the pupils fully dilated. She even foamed at the mouth a little. Now, just to let everyone know, I was deeply in love with this person. I thought that I would end up marrying her, and for those of you who know her, how fucked up is that?
Nothing I did could get her to stop, or even look coherent. I had no idea what was going on, and it lasted for a few minutes. I called 911 and still kind of wonder how the ambulance bill was ever handled, if it was at all.
All four of these experiences are completely selfish on my part. They focus on how these events affected me, whether they changed me or just made me feel. I don’t know if that’s normal, as in, does everyone walk away from these things with the self being the most important aspect of these experiences? Regardless, I’ve actually gotten more insight about myself doing this little exercise. I’ll probably think about more people and more best/worst moments since only doing two hardly counts as a pattern.
Even if no one else talks about specific events, please post if someone else comes up with any kind of pattern or if this is all just, as we say, kookie talk.
What if you thought about the best and worst moments you had with someone, but not with someone you’re still around and will continue to see. Someone you’ll never see again. Then you can pinpoint the exact moment of your greatest and worst experience with this other person. After that, think about other people you’ll never see again. Can doing this establish any kind of pattern? Could anything be learned from this? For me the answer has kind of been a yes so far.
I decided to think about two people: Tony Marshall and Andrea Zimmerman.
Once I when I was 22 years old and at a D&D game, I got into a heated political argument (shocking!) There was me, Jay, Slash, Sean Waterhouse, one of Sean’s friends, and Tony. As usual in these arguments, when you all aren’t around, I was alone. They were celebrating the near genocide of Native Americans (again, normal for most white people in my experience). Sean’s friend (whom I cannot remember his name), was pointing at himself saying, “Hey I’m like 1/64th Indian and I’m glad white people did what they did!” That’s not a joke or an exaggeration either. Jay was saying how half-breeds make society worse, which is ironic since he also claims to have some micro-fraction of Cherokee blood. Sean was laughing at me, but he never liked me anyway and Slash was saying, “well, they should have fought harder.” How do you fight harder when they wait for the warriors to leave to hunt and it’s just the women and children being slaughtered? About the point I was walking into the kitchen to grab a butcher knife, Tony started ripping on white people. For those of you who don’t know, Tony’s whiter than Wonder Bread. He started saying how dirty white people were when they came over and disease was the main reason why Natives lost so much of our population.
Once I realized that was my best experience with Tony, I tried to remember what it was with Andrea. Her memory is too personal to go into, but when I remembered it, both of them definitely shared one thing in common: they both supported me when I desperately needed help.
The worst one for Tony was one year I freaked out. Well, it wasn’t a whole year of freak out, but I had a breakdown and ceased being able to interact or function on my own. I was running a D&D game at the time in Norman and Tony was one of the players. Well of course that died when I had to move back to Pawhuska for a few months. When I finally recovered, which I honestly cannot remember how long this took (months, weeks?), I came back to Norman and checked my messages. I found that Tony had left several, all asking about the D&D game and how things were going. I saw him about two years later and he treated me like a stranger, which I can’t blame him. That isn’t such a bad moment, considering everyone was alive and such, but with Tony that’s the worst it ever got. It still makes me feel bad though because I think our friendship afterward was always hampered by that.
My worst experience with Andrea was when she went into a diabetic, epileptic attack in her sleep… or whatever it was. Now I’ve worked at hospitals for about 5 years, so I’ve seen my share of fucked up stuff. I’ve seen a lot of people die and have heard way too many death moans. Of course they’re usually just death gasps, but sometimes it’s moan-ish. What Andrea did was more violent and disturbing than anything I’d heard anyone sound like, ever. When I turned the light on in the room, I saw how blue her lips were, how her eyes were half open and half rolled back into her head with the pupils fully dilated. She even foamed at the mouth a little. Now, just to let everyone know, I was deeply in love with this person. I thought that I would end up marrying her, and for those of you who know her, how fucked up is that?
Nothing I did could get her to stop, or even look coherent. I had no idea what was going on, and it lasted for a few minutes. I called 911 and still kind of wonder how the ambulance bill was ever handled, if it was at all.
All four of these experiences are completely selfish on my part. They focus on how these events affected me, whether they changed me or just made me feel. I don’t know if that’s normal, as in, does everyone walk away from these things with the self being the most important aspect of these experiences? Regardless, I’ve actually gotten more insight about myself doing this little exercise. I’ll probably think about more people and more best/worst moments since only doing two hardly counts as a pattern.
Even if no one else talks about specific events, please post if someone else comes up with any kind of pattern or if this is all just, as we say, kookie talk.
