CUL8RQT!


CBS REPORTER: Mr. President, what is your plan to stop the war?


FORMER PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Strategery.


This is an essay about how text-messaging is turning us into a nation of illiterates. And one of the illiterates is, in about thirty years, going to become President of the United States.

I voted for Barack Obama for two main reasons:

1. I was terrified that one night John McCain’s mind would snap and we’d be suddenly in a nuclear war. Do I respect him? Absolutely. Do I think he’s a brave, courageous man who went through hell and came out alive? Without a doubt. Am I proud of what he did for our country? No question about it. Do I trust him as Commander In Chief of our Armed Forces? Not as far as I could sling a piano.

2. Obama is the best public speaker I’ve seen since Clinton. Actually, he’s better than Clinton. He’s smooth, articulate, makes excellent eye contact, appears authoritative without being overbearing, is both calm and passionate at the same time, and believable. Yes, of course I know he doesn’t write his own material, but you can tell he has a lot of hands-on experience with his speechwriting team.

What does all of this have to do with text-messaging? Well, take a moment. I want all of you right now to try to think of five people you know who do not own a cell phone. You can’t do it, can you? (No, your Mad Uncle Renwick who lives on the Arctic Circle doesn’t count). Heck, I’ll even give you a freebie—me. I don’t even have Caller ID. I do get free unlimited long distance, though.

Now, before you think I’m some kind of neo-Luddite, I will disclose my drug of choice—the internet. God, do I love the internet. If I had more than three friends, I’d e-mail all day long. I can’t go for 4 hours without looking up something on Google or Mapquest or Wikipedia, and when I was dragged kicking and screaming onto Facebook I would stay there for days if my dad didn’t need me to go food shopping.

I absolutely love Dictionary.com because, even though I own over a dozen dictionaries in print, Dictionary.com is updated daily; for example, my most recently printed dictionary doesn’t have the words “internet” or “website” and the definition for “browsing” merely delineates wandering aimlessly through a store.

But then came text-messaging. And the bastard children of text-messaging, “leetspeak,” “netspeak” and “chatspeak.” Now, I understand that texting costs money per character typed, but here’s the logic I could never wrap my mind around.

1. Let’s pretend I have a cell phone. I am supposed to meet my cousin Annemarie for lunch.

2. Annemarie is running late. She has a cell phone.

If I have a phone, and Annemarie has a phone, why can’t she just call me (which is actually cheaper than texting)? We could quickly make alternate plans, hang up, and be done with it.

But the worst thing that text-messaging has done is its effects on my college students. I have been an English professor for over a dozen years, and every year as texting becomes more and more “indispensible” to the 18-22 year-old sect, their actual vocabularies in the English language decrease.

I am literally stunned, each term, when I receive formal academic essays, the rules and etiquette I have gone over for copiously (complete with handouts) with the numerals “4” instead of “for” or “u” instead of “you” and “r” instead of “are” and “8” instead of “ate.” Folks, here is the golden rule:

Unless you are Prince, you cannot use numbers for words.

(I am deliberately omitting Van Halen’s OU812 and INXS’s whole name because those are just clever. The e-mails—real, actually, completely un-futzed with e-mails, came from sophomore college students to me. Their professor. Their English professor.

Whenever I write a short (two or three sentences) e-mail to my department Chair, it takes me half an hour. Do I have everything punctuated correctly? Did I run it through Spell Check nine times? Am I sure that word means what I think it means? I sweat, chatter my teeth, and almost chew my acrylics off.

But go ahead—see for yourself:

Example One:

hey professor how are you doing I been fighting a crappy cold that
has been draining me I couldnt get out of bed today Im very sorry for
being absent I go to doctor tomorrow here is my paper you have a
good one Peace

(Schmo’s name)

Wow. Barely any punctuation and no capitalization at the beginning. Great.

Example Two:

sorry that i didnt make it to class earlier today, i was on my way
here and there was a 3 car accident right in front of me and i was
stuck in the middle of the road for like 45 minutes. by the time i got
to the college it was 9am already and it was pointless to come to
class. once again im sorry for this but i wil be attending on thursday.

This one was unsigned, so I have no idea whose it is.  I guess he thinks I'm like Patrick Jane on "The Mentalist." No capitalization or punctuation at all.

Example Three:

Hello Ms. BeowulfGirl

Hi Mr. Nigroc

I'm just letting you know that I won't be able to make it to class tomorrow ( 9:30 am /tue). My son and I were in a car accident today and my car was towed and is un drivable. I will bring u a copy of the accident report when it's ready. Hopefully by tomorrow. Please let me know if there is anything you would like done for Thursday's class.

Thank you,

(Whole name)

(“Street” name)

Ooooookay. First of all—Ms. BeowulfGirl? Sweetie, I spent seven years and tens of thousands of dollars to earn the title of “Professor,” you are going to damn well going to use it. Also, this person apparently also thinks I’m “Mr. Nigroc,” whoever he is. Did you catch the “u” for “you?” And the signing with the street moniker was actually kind of considerate, really.

Example Four:

Here is that paper that you started grading today in class, my cell
phone number is ###-#### give me a call, if i dont pick up its
either because im in class or im driving, leave a message and as soon
as i get the chance i will call back..

(Guy’s name)

He never did call back, and since he submitted the paper in a program I can’t open, he ended up with a zero. Again, no punctuation—even on “I” for God’s sake. Are we really that lazy? That we can’t hit the Shift key along with the letter?

Example Five:

Hey beowulfgirl I came to class late Tuesday I was sick and I missed my 8am class but I dragged myself there by 945 to walk into ur class 15 mins late to find no one there lol I walked around aimlessly for like 10 mins till I saw Julie and she told me that almost no one showed up I wanted you to kno I had my rough draft for you cuz I couldn’t find a 07 issued of word sorry, also I will also have to try email u my “lie” paper cause I need to get printer ink tomorrow so you will have it asap tomorrow after class again very sorry for just missin you Tuesday.

Wow. Again…”Hey beowulfgirl?” See previous paragraph on correct use of my title—this clown is not my best friend. I challenged this guy to actually read aloud this missive exactly as he wrote it—with absolutely no pauses or punctuation—without running out of breath. He couldn’t do it. Neither could the other five brave souls that tried. I also find the juxtaposition of “cuz” and “cause” rather quaint, along with the omnipresent “u.”

This one, though, is my absolute favorite:

Example Six:

Hi proffessr Bayowolfgurl,, IWill not be in class today becase I have to go to Wal-Mart to buy a strapless braw for my bridesmaids gown1


Wow, there’s so much wrong here I don’t even know where to start. Aside from the mangling of the word “Professor,” this chick doesn’t even know how to spell my name (which is very, very common and easy) after fourteen weeks. But what horrifies me the most is that a 21 year old woman doesn’t know how to spell “bra.”

And to think that when some child-burdened person has the nerve to badger me for remaining blissfully childfree for life, their first whine is always “but chyyyyyldrennnn are our fyooooture.”

Not my future.  Not these children, you dumb bint. Better check Harvard or Yale or Oxford.

And take away their damn cell phones.


Next Time: My Past Career As A Fag Hag

Where Does The Aspirator Go Again?

"There's nothing more dangerous than a resourceful idiot." -- Dilbert

Yes, I did e-mail this telephone exchange to several people because it was just too good to keep to myself. Finally, it was my eloquent and dangerously persuasive friend Sebastian who convinced me to blog it because he felt it was unjust to deprive the world of this individual's raging idiocy.

Because of the nature of my profession, I am (thank God) largely surrounded by insanely smart and can discuss any number of subjects with grace and aplomb. Sometimes there is a "coming down period" in which I slowly crank up my brain to "Mensa might not actually laugh, but..."

And now, let us begin our story.

As you have no doubt gathered, I have this. . . well…extremely stupid friend. This friend has somehow managed to get through about 40 years of life relatively unscathed, aside from some rather common personal drama, such as marital troubles and job difficulties (the most common of which is that he can't maintain one). This friend somehow found me on Facebook, and because this person is more or less illiterate, they asked me to phone them instead of writing.

While I babbled on about my life and this insipid individual grunted about theirs, we got into a discussion about the recent passing of Michael Jackson and how we had first heard the sad news. The following, thanks to my phonographic memory, is a more or less verbatim transcript of that conversation:

ME: Isn’t it sad about Michael Jackson?

STUPID FRIEND: (tries to remember who Michael Jackson is) Uh—yeah.

ME: Man, remember him in the mid-80’s, before he got all weird on us? We thought he could walk on water. Hey—how did you find out that he had died?

SF: I think my dad told me.

ME: Your dad lives in [another state].

SF: Oh, wait…it was [guy who used to hang around with us who is now serving a life sentence for capital murder; no, I am not kidding]. Why…how did you find out?

ME: I was on the phone with my friend Mark, actually. The news was on TV but muted, and the caption said something about Michael Jackson being dead and I was so stunned I said it out loud, and Mark confirmed it.

SF: (long pause to process complex sentence) Who’s Mark?

ME: You don’t know him. He lives in England.

SF: Oh, well, that explains it, then.

ME: Explains what?

SF: Well, if your friend lives in England, of course he’d know about Michael Jackson being dead before you because he’d have been dead longer for him than for you.

ME: Um…what?

SF: (sighs in frustration) England is what…nine, ten hours behind us?

ME: No, five hours ahead.

SF: Okay, so then, Michael Jackson would have been dead five hours earlier for your friend, therefore giving him five more hours to find out about it than you.

ME: But…no…listen, [Stupid Friend], where you live in the world doesn’t affect when Michael Jackson actually died. Mark just happened to hear about it before I did because he actually listens to the news and I don’t.

SF: No, no…if Mark lives five hours away, Michael Jackson was dead five hours for him before he died for you.

ME: (weirdly understanding the twisted logic, but unable to mount a defense against it because my mind doesn’t work like this) Okay…wait…first of all, Mark doesn’t live five hours away, he lives five time zones away. Second, using your logic, Michael Jackson died twice – once for Mark, and once for me.

SF: I didn’t say he died twice…I said he was dead longer for Mark than for you.

ME: Well, again, applying your twisted logic, Michael Jackson actually died twenty-four different times; one for each time zone.

SF: (pause) Is that possible?

ME: (slightly freaking out) [Stupid Friend], will you shut up and listen? The Earth rotates on its axis once every twenty-four hours. It is therefore impossible for it to be the same time everywhere in the world at the same time. It would be chaos.

SF: I think it would be easier, actually.

ME: For you, yes, no doubt. But for the rest of us, to avoid confusion, time zones were created. We begin with Greenwich Mean Time—which is where Mark is, coincidentally—and move across—

SF: But what about the Jews?

ME: (confused) Jews? What about them?

SF: How long has Michael Jackson been dead for the Jews?

ME: Well…I don’t get why you think he’d be dead for a different length of time for Jews, especially, but it’s the same thing—If these fictional Jews live in our time zone, Michael Jackson would have been declared dead at [I honestly don’t remember when it became “official” in my time zone, so I’m just going to pick an arbitrary time] 5:00pm.

SF: But isn’t it the year 5000 and something for them?

ME: (screams) What in the name of God does that have to with when Michael Jackson died?

SF: Well, wouldn’t that be the date and time for them, in their newspapers and stuff?

ME: (hardly able to follow at this point) What…what…look, for American Jews, or really any Jews other than maybe Hassidic Jews, I—why are we talking about the Jews? We’re talking about Michael Jackson!!!

SF: (reverently) Yeah, he was pretty awesome, wasn’t he?

ME: AAARRGGGHH!

I either completely blacked out at this point or am suffering anterior grade amnesia because the next thing I knew I was writing this.

So the next time you fly through multiple time zones, just think for a moment how many times Michael Jackson had to die for YOU! Get off the cross, Michael--We need the wood.

What Must That Feel Like?

“Time slips away, mister,
And leaves you with nothing but
Boring stories of glory days.”

--Bruce Springsteen


Yes, I know. This was supposed to be about the three people who helped me through my mother’s slow, horrible, 114-day deathwatch, but every time I tried to start it it either ended up eleven pages long or went so hopelessly off topic that I finally took the hint my psyche was trying to tell me and decided to put it off. However, I did want to write my blog, so I’ve decided to babble about a certain humbling feeling I get when I see certain people doing certain things. Allow me to be more clear.

Regular readers of my blog probably can agree that I’ve seen and experienced some pretty extraordinary and downright weird things. However, there is nothing (and I must stress this) there is really nothing outstanding about myself. Yes, I’m smarter than the average bear and I sometimes have an uncanny ability to sense when something is horribly wrong with people between the ages of 18 and 22, but other than that, God didn’t deal me many aces.

It is because of this that I so often see a truly extraordinarily person do something amazing, and I sit in my den, stare at the TV, and say in complete wonder; “Oh my God…what must that feel like?” I shall now give examples—maybe you have thought about them, too.

President of the United States Example

The first president I remember is Richard M. Nixon, and the first thing I remember him doing was resigning on television. My mom and I were cuddling in her bed (God, I miss that) and although I understood only about a third of what President Nixon was saying, I could sense something bad was happening. I asked my mom what was going on.

I was a bright kid, but not bright enough to grasp the concept of Watergate at age five, so my mother just explained that the president had lied. Well, that I understood—I knew lying was a very, very bad thing, and the fact that the president had done it to the whole country—well, that was unconscionable.

Later that night, I went up to my mother and asked, “Mommy, was President Nixon making that up as he went along?” (This seemed perfectly reasonable to me; after all, I told myself elaborate stories every day). My mom said no, and explained that he had a team of people to write his speeches for him. (I think a five-year old’s equivalent of “what an illiterate clod” went through my mind at this point).

It didn’t hit me until President Clinton’s first inaugural address. I was watching it with my friends and suddenly my mind drifted from what Clinton was actually saying to this:

“This is the most powerful man in the world. And someone—unseen and uncredited—wrote his words. What is it like to hear your words come out of the mouth of the person who could change the world? What must that feel like?”

I was fascinated by this. And then, of course, we had Bush, whose speechwriters must have gone through about eleven thousand bottles of Excedrin.

Billy Joel Example

My cousin Annemarie just went to a Billy Joel concert, and I’m extremely jealous. I’ve been a huge Billy fan since junior high, yet have never seen him live. In 1990, he was performing at Yankee Stadium. I was all set—I rounded up a group of fellow Billy fans, saved my money, and…and…my best friend chose that day to get married.

I was disappointed, but happily, MTV aired the concert several months later so I was at least able to watch it on television. The whole show was awesome, and of course one of his encore songs was “Piano Man.”

Billy took his harmonica and played the opening notes. The crowd went wild. He began singing the first verse, but soon realized something; he was being drown out by the crowd. By the time he got to the first chorus, no one could hear Billy at all, even with his microphone. He got a very amused look on his face, shrugged his shoulders in a sort of “okay, whatever” way, and held out the microphone toward the audience, which was entirely on its feet, swaying and singing.

Yankee Stadium holds over 52,000 people. I cannot even conceive of that many people packed into one venue. And all of them—every single one of them—was singing the song he wrote to him. I sat on the sofa, gaping. And again, all I could think of was: “Oh my God…what must that feel like?”

Billy got a big kick out of it. I’d have fainted.

Michael Phelps Example

I enjoy the Olympics even though I have absolutely no sporting ability whatsoever. I admire athletes because they possess the discipline to make their bodies do whatever they want. I just eat a lot of potato chips.

As you all know, this year, the untouchable star was Michael Phelps. As he is very young, I’m not sure if he grasps the enormity of what he did. But I do, and I’m not talking about the fact he won eight freakin’ gold medals—I just want to talk about one; for any sport, for any Olympic athlete.

Whenever an American athlete wins an Olympic gold medal, I am incapable of sitting through the medal ceremony without bursting into tears at the playing of our national anthem, especially if the athlete her/himself begins crying (which they usually do).

I sit there, staring, astounded first at the words. “In the gold medal position, representing the United States of America…” and begin to shiver. I can’t even imagine what it must feel like to hear your name after those words. Then, of course, they clanked another gold medal around Michael Phelps’ neck, and began playing our national anthem and raising our flag.

And I felt so…insignificant. And again, in my imagination: “I’m representing my entire country. Billions of people are watching this. That flag is being raised for me. Our anthem is being played for me. My God, what must that feel like?”

Queen of England Example

Being only 42, Queen Elizabeth II is the only reigning monarch of the United Kingdom I have ever known, and I suspect I will feel quite weird when I have to start saying “King Charles.” However, what fascinated me most about Queen Elizabeth is the fact that whenever she attends a public event, everyone stands and sings “God Save The Queen.” I can’t even imagine what it must feel like to have that happen every time I went somewhere.

I have a very loving and devoted British friend to whom I once posed the question, “how do you think the queen feels hearing ‘God Save The Queen’ every time she goes to an official event?” My friend, whose sense of humor is only slightly more skewed than mine, quirked: “I imagine she’s pretty sick of it by now.”

Michael Jackson Example:

The last time I had my nails done by the angry Vietnamese woman, Michael Jackson had just tragically passed. They have a large plasma TV in the salon, which was showing a Michael Jackson concert (It was the Dangerous tour). However, the cameras didn’t seem too interested in Michael himself—what they kept showing was the crowd, which of course was made overwhelmingly of young people.

I don’t know what the venue was, but Michael was fantastic and the special effects were overwhelming. But I kept staring at the crowd. People (mostly girls) were screaming his name, sobbing hysterically, flailing, and at least four girls passed out and had to be dragged out by security. I have always found the concept of crowd hysteria to be fascinating (I wish Paul McCartney would return my call and explain it), but all I could think of was, “one man is causing absolute hysteria in tens of thousands of people. What must that feel like?”

BeowulfGirl Example:

Two terms ago, I had a shy, brilliant student I’ll call Ellen. On the first day of class, I asked (as always) what my students’ career goals were. Ellen said she would like to become a lawyer. I told her that was a fine choice and wished her luck.

Fifteen weeks later, after the last day of class, Ellen lingered. I asked if she was all right and she told me, with an odd tone that she no longer had any intention of becoming a lawyer, but a college English professor. Horrified, I told her she’d make ten times less than if she became an attorney. Here is here response:

“But I chose it because of you, Professor BeowulfGirl. You changed my life. You change everyone’s life. Can I ask you something?”

Somewhat shaken I said, “sure.”

With a profound, idolatrous look, and asked: “What does it feel like?”

And my world. . . shifted.

The Mother And Child Reunion Is Only a Motion Away

“Salve Regina, mater misericordiae. Vita dulcedo es pes nostra, salve, salve regina. Ad te teclamamus, exules fillir heavae, ad te sepstumatis gementes, et flentis, o clemens o pia.”
--Traditional Catholic prayer


“Doctor, doctor, will I die?
Yes, my child, and so will I.”
--Anonymous




My mother died two months ago.

For my entire life, I’ve looked with a sort of wonderment at people whose parents are deceased because all I could think was: “They’ve been through it. They’ve been through the worst thing that I can imagine and they’re still functioning. How do you do that? It would kill me if one of my parents died.”

She was in the hospice for 114 days, admitted with serious pneumonia. But she was terrified that if she went to the hospital, she would get wore pneumonia and die.

She did not leave her bed to do anything except use the bathroom and get the occasional snack. She was 20 pounds underweight—101 pounds at 5’%”. She was so weak she couldn’t feed herself.

Finally, I snapped. “Mom, you are a 76 woman with a 60 year smoking habit that has ravished your lungs. You are technically anorexic. You cannot ride out bronchial pneumonia with Tylenol and Mucinex! You need a doctor! You need antibiotics!”

Long story short, she ended up going to the hospital. And she did die there.

Once they confirmed the pneumonia, they discovered a whole hoard of other life threatening diseases such as:

--pleural effusions
--cancer (we already knew that one)
--congestive heart failure
--sepsis
--severe kidney failure
--ischemic strokes
--severe edema
--unexplained rectal bleeding

I knew, on day four, she was never walking out of that place. No amount of prayers, no amount of rosaries, no amount of get well cards was going to do it. And all I could do was look at her, swollen with edema, her eyes sometimes recognizing me and say, “why did you do this, God? She had mental problems but was far from evil. I’m the bad one in the family. It should have been me. It should have been me!

Imagine having to watch your own mother on her deathbed for five horrible terrifying months, most of which she didn’t know me Pretty awful right? Now imagine that when you have Borderline Personality Disorder (very first diagnostic criteria: “Irrational fear of imagined or realistic abandonment.” That’s probably worse, right?

Now imagine how it felt go to through that completely alone.

My father is emotionally neutral. Mom died on April 24th and he is absolutely astonished that I’m not “over it” yet. Well, I’m sorry, I’m not. I haven’t found my emotion switch, Dad. I kept reminding him that when his mom passed (he was 28), he had an older brother, a father, two sisters, all their husbands and wives, his Navy buddie, and, oh yeah, a frigging spouse! I HAD NO ONE!

My mother was not always loving, She found my weak spots early on and she played into those fear. (What’s that line from The Wall? “Mother’s gonna make all your nightmares come true / Mother’s gonna put all of her fears into you.” And she did. She made me paranoid. She had a one-way intercom installed in my bedroom just so could hear what was “going on up there.” (With a female friend?) .She blatantly admitted to reading my journals, which is how she a She is largely responsible for my own mental illness.
Oh, yes, the psychiatrist gave me a little extra chemical help, but

But there were so wonderful things about her. I can hear her voice so clearly it’s scary. I break down when I smell her perfume. We would watch movies from the 1940’s and it was she who made me fall in love with Cary Grant and Gary Cooper and Gregory Peck. We traded books we knew the other would like—and we always did.

She taught me how to knit, just for fun. Even though she hated sewing machines, it just look so neat that she taught me, too. We played games, horsing around on the floor, then my dad would come in and then all three of us would start roughhousing and it would be…love.

She taught me how to wear makeup. She taught me how to pluck my eyebrows, shave my legs, and of course when it came time for the sex talk, she was stellar. She had charts. And audio-visual aids. And she loved to play dress up, and bride and groom, and game show.

My absolute favorite thing she used to do, though, was whenever I was upset, she would make me lie my head down on her lap and stroke my hair with such love and she smelled so good, but weirdly rarely wore perfume. And it was so comforting and so loving and tender that it almost was like being part of her body again or something and now..

and now…

and now…

I’ll never feel that again! Her gentle, warm fingers with those long nails will never make me feel better again. The very last words she spoke to me were, "it'll be okay," and then she started yanking on my long hair. I was confused, but then I realized what she wanted and I laid my head on her hospital bed in her lap and she gingerly started stroking my hair. I sobbed and sobbed. Even on her deathbed her FINAL THOUGHT was to COMFORT ME.

Get over it in three months? If something funny or weird happens in class my very first thought is, “Oh, I have to tell this to Mom right now!” If my department Chair gives me a merit raise or a commendation, my knee-jerk reaction is “I can’t wait to tell Mom!” I once so far as to borrow a cell-phone from a student and start to dial.

If something bad happens I have no one in whose arms to cry. My father tries hard, God love him, but he so obviously hates physical contact that our “hug” is about two feet apart.

Did I mention he’s got lung cancer?

Next time: The Powers That Be send three people into my life to help me.

And So It Goes, And So It Goes, And So Will You, Soon, I Suppose

“I only wanted to talk to you one last time
not to change your mind,
but just to say I’ll miss you, baby,
good luck, good-bye, Bobby-Jean.”
--Bruce Springsteen

Friendship is important to me.

The reason friendship is so important to me is that when I was younger (up until about my mid-twenties), I really didn’t have any friends. I had buddies, pals, work and school colleagues, but no real friends, no one I could share secrets with, or go places with, or just hang out with when I had no money (which was often the case.)

Regular readers of the BeowulfBlog (all four of you) may have noticed that the vast majority of my entries begin with phrases like; “I once had a friend who…” or “I used to know this guy who…” or “Years ago, my friends and I…” The reason for this is simple—I am once again pretty much alone.

Don’t get me wrong…I know people. I talk to people. I have people in my department with whom I do social things, but there’s nobody I can really talk to except for good old Andrew in California, and my favorite cousin, with whom I am getting very close. As a result of this, I spend a lot of time online, and therefore, the vast majority of my “friends” are found there.

The problem is, though, whenever someone does make a friendly overture toward me, I get so excited at the prospect of having an actual live, in-person friend that I get all obsessed about the friendship and tend to analyze every aspect of it. Now, this is not to say that I play and replay their voice-mail messages like the Zapruder film, but I am somewhat “clingy.” If I haven’t heard from, say, Sue in a few days, instead of asking myself, “I wonder what Sue’s up to?” I am more likely to think, “what did I do that Sue is avoiding me?”

Also, for some reason yet to be explained, people keep…well, they keep leaving me. It began about ten years ago when three of my best friends (who were in my wedding) simply told me, point blank, that they didn’t have room in their lives for me anymore; that I was too “intense” and too “high maintenance” a friend. I understood. I was heartbroken, and I miss them every day, but I understood. It had been that way all my life--I was "the weird kid," so I was ostracized. Then of course my husband left me and that pretty much sealed the deal on my end—something was obviously wrong with me.

I decided it would be emotionally safer to make friends online, and for a while it seemed to work. I made two very close friends in other states (Alan and Jessica, respectively), but those friendships just sort of petered out naturally, and I wasn’t really hurt by them.

Which brings us to Meg.

Meg is not her real name, but I like the name Meg, and I’ve decided to call her that. Meg and I “met” on a message board for a TV show that we both liked about four years ago. We instantly hit it off in the forums, and before we knew it, we had taken it to e-mail, and we e-mailed like crazy for the next three years. I’m talking long, involved, profound e-mails, in which we divulged secrets, hopes and dreams, and most of all…most important of all…she made me laugh. It may surprise some of my readers to learn that, despite the humorous tone of my blog, I really don’t have very much joy in my life. In fact, most of the time I feel very empty and alone. When I would open my in-box and see a message from Meg, it absolutely delighted me. It made my whole freakin’ day.

Although we never talked on the phone, we exchanged lots of pictures and I felt—strongly—that our relationship was growing into a real “friendship” rather than “e-mail buddies.” I knew, of course, that she had other things going on in her life—other friends, her job, her family, her hobbies and interests. But I didn’t have any of that. Aside from Andrew and the aforementioned cousin, Meg was the only one I could really open up to over e-mail. Although there was a significant gap in our ages (she was about 12 years younger), I never once felt ware of that--and she was so amazingly articulate and eloquent that she made the perfect correspondent for an English professor. She was bright, witty, funny, loyal, (and extremely beautiful).

And then it started to happen. Like it always does.

Her life somehow got “busier,” and she wrote to me asking if we could write shorter e-mails from now on. I was totally on board with that—I would much rather have shorter, more frequent messages from her than to have to wait days and days for her to construct one of our usual missives. Besides, with the easy schedule of a college professor, I could roll with it. So I said of course, let’s go for it.

That lasted for about two months. Her e-mails began to come so infrequently that I actually had to save up all the things that had been happening to me in the meantime, then felt guilty because I had to send her a “long” e-mail, which she clearly didn’t want.

Now in the past when this happened (when one of us didn’t get back to the other right away) we would send each other a quick friendly message—simply with the subject line of *waves* and the message reading, “pop in when you have a chance, will you?” And that would be all. This method worked fine for years. However, about a year ago when I sent her one of these friendly shout-outs, I got a very snappish response saying, “I am perfectly aware of when I owe you an e-mail. I don’t need your little reminders.”

Um…okay. That shut me up for about two weeks. But did I take the hint? No, of course not. After all, we were friends, right? Right?

It started to go downhill from there.

Halloween came, her favorite holiday. I wrote to her asking her what she dressed as. No answer.

Two weeks later was her birthday. I sent her an e-card and a note asking how she had celebrated. No answer.

Thanksgiving came. I wrote asking her how her dinner had been with her family. No answer.

Christmas came. I wrote to wish her a Merry Christmas. No answer.

And still…still I refused to admit what was right in front of me. She wanted out. She was trying, gracefully and delicately and with extreme diplomacy to solve “the BeowulfGirl problem,” and I wasn’t letting her because I was so selfish that I wanted her friendship—contact with her, any way I could get it. So I kept torturing myself by e-mailing her, then for the following three days running to my computer every hour to see if she’d written back.

About three months before all the unanswered holiday-related e-mails, I got what I refer to as “the penultimate e-mail,” meaning that I knew—somehow I knew that this would be the second to last time I would ever hear from her. She wrote a beautiful letter about how she needed to concentrate on her “real life friends,” and that stopped me cold.

“Real life friends?” After four years of writing extremely intimate things about our lives, did I still not count as a real-life friend? She and I told each other things we had never told our “real life” best friends, our parents, our psychiatrists…nobody. We spent literally hours every week writing to each other—yet I still wasn’t close enough to count as a “real life friend.” Was there some sort of trial period I wasn’t aware of?

Still shaking and confused, I continued to read the e-mail (which I really must emphasize was so elegantly written) until I got to this sentence: “The nature of our relationship (pen-pals, basically) dictates that…”

That’s as far as I got. My eyes wouldn’t move beyond those three words. “Pen pals, basically.”
I couldn’t wrap my mind around the concept that that was all she considered us to be. With those three words, she managed to devalue our entire friendship (excuse me, “relationship”) to the level of an assignment for a high school French class.

I was reading this e-mail in my office at Very Serious University when a colleague (I’m frankly too terrified to call anyone a “friend” at this point since people seem to bolt whenever I use the word) passed my door, noticed the look of horror on my face and asked what my problem was.

“I think…I think my best e-mail friend is breaking up with me,” I said, kind of bewildered.

Somehow (I don’t remember how) I crafted a response which wasn’t nearly as expressive as hers and waited. I didn’t have to wait long.

What arrived a few days later was, without a doubt, the most beautifully written ending-a-friendship letter I’ve ever received (and I’ve received several). I won’t quote it here out of respect for her privacy, but it was so overwhelmingly eloquent that I immediately wrote back requesting a few days grace because she deserved an answer as carefully written as her letter had been.

Oddly, the same colleague who had read "the penultimate e-mail" was chatting outside my office with a professor from another department and I waved him in. At this point, I was literally in tears. I just got up and he sat down at the computer and read what Meg had written. Because he knows me so well, he was able to point out the exact phrases that were like daggers and said, softly, "she's extraordinarily well-spoken. I can see why you loved writing to her." Then he handed me tissues and closed my door and let me grieve in peace.

I can’t express how I felt (and still feel). I was angry, deeply confused, hurt, heartbroken, crushed, dejected, disconsolate…all with the overwhelming feeling that once again I had done something to drive yet another close friend away. Her e-mail, beautiful as it was, was actually unclear as to why she was ending our friendship, though she did say she was “pulling away from her e-mail acquaintances.” (I have to admit that I wondered, briefly, if she meant all her internet acquaintances, or just the ones who were “high maintenance.”) She also gently assured me that this was something she was “not going to change her mind about.”

My ultimate reply to her was emotional and visceral, and I’m ashamed of most of it now.

I keep thinking about the things I’ll never know about her future. I’ll never see a picture of her in her wedding gown. I’ll never see pictures of her children. I’ll never meet her in person (which I was planning on). She has invited me to continue to read her blog, but it’s much too painful right now—it would be too much like she was writing to me again.

The thing is, though, I know she reads my blog. And I hope if she reads this entry, she’ll know exactly how much she hurt me, and how utterly destroyed part of me is now, how I feel part of my soul is gone, I and how I’m going to think about her and miss her for a very, very long time…possibly years. And I will absolutely never really get over it.

I know a lot of my readers have many online correspondents whom they do not consider to be “real” friends, either, and I only ask one thing of them. Please, please remember that there is a human being at the other end of that keyboard, who feels the pain of rejection just as much as you do. If you are blessed enough to have friends—in person or online—please be gentle with their hearts. You may never know how much you helped save someone.

Wait A Minute, Mr. Postman

"Deliver the letter, the sooner the better..."
--The Marvelettes

I have never, ever trusted my mailman.

I’m not sure what it is. As a 40 year old adult, I have no problems with mail carriers, or anyone who works for the U.S. Postal Service. But when I was a teenager, our family’s mailman gave me the serious creeps. He was about 50, fat, and had a puffy red face. It got to the point where, when we left our front door open in the summer, I would run screaming for my dad whenever I saw him coming down the street.

In 1983, however, I wasn’t too concerned about the mailman—yet. The biggest drama in my life at that time involved the repertory. I was in my second year, and it happened to be the year that Scott had his Big Gay Crisis and left us. This left Victor (who had been planning on directing a show in which Scott would star) kind of in a quandary. With Scott gone, the only other actor who even approached “good” was Joe.

Now, I liked Joe a lot (see previous entries), but even I, at age 15, didn’t think he could handle a serious leading role. Joe’s main attributes at the tender age of 16 were (1) if given enough time and a hacksaw, he probably could act his way out of a paper bag eventually, and (2) he was really good-looking.

Victor (wise man that he was), however, saw yet a third aspect of Joe—he was so popular, if all his friends came to see the play, we would make a killing. Victor went off in search of a play which could feature Joe without making Joe work too hard at it.

He came up with L’il Abner.

It’s a dreadful play, really. For those of you fortunate enough to have not experienced it, here’s the “plot”: The United States government wants to test a new, powerful superbomb (think the Manhattan Project with one-tenth the I.Q. points), and they search for “the most unnecessary town in America.” They end up picking Dogpatch, which is, of course, where L’il Abner and his worthless, stupid, soulless friends reside.

The characters spend most of their time trying to convince the government that Dogpatch actually is necessary, and they search like hell to find something useful in their town to keep from getting bombed. By the end of the play, most of the audience feels like going out and getting bombed, too.

Hating every minute of it, I went through auditions. I had no idea what part Victor was going to stick me with. It sure wasn’t gong to be Daisy May—we had a very slutty, blonde, talentless twit who was currently sleeping her way through the company that had that part pretty much sewn up. There were no other large female parts at all.

And, finally, the call sheet went up. I was going to play a secretary, in Washington. I had fourteen lines.

This bruised my ego tremendously. The year prior, I had had a second lead, and no one could understand why I had been “demoted” like that. When the night of the first read-through came, I was so disgusted by the inanity of my part that I told Victor I didn’t even want to be recognized and asked if I could wear a disguise.

Weirdly, he called my bluff, and I ended up wearing a blonde Marilyn-Monroe type wig. Because my natural hair is straight, honey-colored, and to my waist, I hoped no one would recognize me. Despite repeated attempts at bribery, I could not get the crafts people doing the program to leave my name out. Even worse, during tech week, the press showed up, and for some unfathomable reason, instead of taking a picture of the leads for the newspaper, they took one of me and the guy playing my boss and ran it.

Opening night came. I tromped onstage. I said my fourteen lines. I tromped off. This went on night after night, until, thank God, the run ended.

Two weeks later, I was sitting in my living room when I heard the familiar, horrifying sound of the mailman coming up the sidewalk. I bolted off the sofa and yelled for my dad, who didn’t really understand why I was so freaked-out by this man. However, he came to the door anyway to deal with him. I cowered behind the door, out of sight.

Dad tried to take the mail, but the mailman just stood there, huffing, and said; “I saw your daughter’s picture in the paper.” (Ewwww!)

“Well, she’s in there a lot,” said Dad, again trying to yank the mail.

“She looked really hot in that blonde wig,” said David Berkowitz. (And in my head I was screaming, “dude, I’m 15!”)

“Um…okay,” said my father, clearly getting uncomfortable.

“I went and saw every performance, too,” hissed the mailman from hell. “And every time she came out in that wig and that slinky dress—I almost lost it.”

Mentally, I sent to my father: “Why the hell aren’t you decking him?”

“Can I just have my mail?” asked my dad, who really isn’t good in a crisis.

“I don’t suppose,” the mailman began, in a lecherous tone, “that you have any color photographs of her dressed like that, do you?” (Ewwww!)

“Nope,” said my father, and shut the door.

“You see?” I said, leaping out at him. “I told you there was something wrong with him! Why didn’t you believe me? Why does no one ever believe me?” And I walked out in a huff.

Two weeks later, my family and I were eating dinner in front of the 6:00 local news. I wasn’t really paying attention (the news depresses me), but suddenly, my mom dropped her fork and said; “Oh, my God!”

I looked up. There, on my television, was our mailman. He was being dragged away—in handcuffs-- from a very seedy apartment building in our town, in which he apparently lived. The reporter was talking, but we were so busy staring that we missed what he said. In the following day’s paper, it all came out.

Due to an anonymous tip by a mother who had become concerned that the mailman had been getting “too friendly” with her son, the police searched his apartment (I have no idea if this is a Fourth Amendment violation or not, but when you get to the end, you won’t care, either). Upon entering, they found the walls of the apartment covered from floor to ceiling with photographs of naked pre-pubescent children (boys and girls) and pictures of teenagers which were either blatantly sexual or very revealing.

And on the rear wall, near a closet, were five color Polaroid pictures of me in the Marilyn Monroe get-up. Apparently, the mailman had showed up during tech week pretending to be a member of the press, and was therefore able to shoot as many pictures of me as he wanted. Also on the wall was the legitimate picture of me which had been in the newspaper.

It took me two weeks to stop shaking.

I am currently very close friends with a very powerful, very brilliant, and very talented criminal lawyer. When I told him this story, he blinked twice and said, “if your dad had shot him, I’d have argued justifiable homicide.”

Stay safe out there, my friends.

Next time: Perhaps something about someone I once knew who was profoundly stupid.

My Vietnam War Story

In 1985, I starred in The Unsinkable Molly Brown. It’s a dreadful show, really, but when you think about it, there are only a handful of musicals that have a strong female lead only (with the exception of Funny Girl or Evita). Despite the show’s awfulness, I vowed to give it my all. Fortunately, I had a very strong supporting cast.

The worst week of any theatrical run is Dress and Tech Week, because that’s when you find out everything that goes wrong. Costumes don’t fit (I’ll bet you didn’t know that professional theatre costumes—especially elaborate period pieces—are only held together with Velcro. All those buttons are purely for show, and if the actress turns wrong, she ends up naked on the stage), lighting cues are missed, props disappear, scenery falls down around your ears, you deal with the orchestra for the first time—everything.

We generally opened on a Friday night. However, the Thursday night before, we always had a special free preview for senior citizens and the residents of our local Veterans Hospital. I’m not sure why veterans were so interested in musical theatre, but they showed up faithfully every time anyway.

Here’s where my ego goes off the charts.

My absolute favorite part of any live performance is when, after the curtain calls (which are pretty damn awesome too, let me tell you), the cast stands in the hall in the back of the stage and the audience files past us telling us how good we were. Keep in mind that I was hearing all these compliments while I was still flying on adrenaline and endorphins, clutching a ton of flowers and kind of shaking. To this day, I tell my students that that particular rush is better than any drug—legal or illegal—I have ever taken.

Finally it seemed to be over, so I went into my dressing room to change into my street clothes and meet up with my friends at the diner. While I was doing this, my friend Sue knocked on the door and told me that “a guy wanted to see me in the hall.”

“What guy?”

“I don’t know, he’s just a guy.”

“Does he have a name? What does he want?”

“How the hell would I know,” she asked, getting irritated. “Just come out.”

I put everything down and went out into the hall. Waiting for me was a bearded man with longish hair in a flannel shirt and jeans. He was in a wheelchair. He looked to be about 50 years old.

He had no legs from the knees down.

I wasn’t sure what to do, but when he saw me, his eyes brightened. He wheeled himself over. “Hello,” he said, in a nice voice. “My name is Gary.”

I shook his hand. “Hi, Gary,” I said. “I hear you wanted to see me?”

“Yes,” he said, still not letting go of my hand. “I’ve been coming to these plays since I’ve been in the V.A. hospital. And I have never seen a performance like yours. Ever.”

“Thank you,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“I just have to ask,” he said, seriously. “How do you get the courage to do that?”

I blinked. “Do what?”

“Get up there in front of six hundred people and sing, dance, and act. I don’t get it. You’re the bravest person I’ve ever seen.”

I looked in his eyes, which were soft and grey. Very quietly I said; “You were in Vietnam, weren’t you?”

He nodded. “Yes, ma'am. Two tours,” he said. “Marines.”

I was trying very hard not to cry, and was failing at it. “Sir,” I said, “if you don’t mind me saying, I think what you did was a hell of a lot braver than what I just did. And if my acting gave you any kind of distraction from the memories you must have of that—well, I’ve more than done my job.”

I might have gone on babbling forever, but he took my hand. “Honey,” he said, “all that stuff I did over there—I’m proud to have done it, but there was never any beauty in it. The show I just saw you do…that has beauty in it.”

That’s when I lost it. Through tears, I asked Gary if I could take a picture of us. He said of course. I rounded up Victor (who always had a camera at the ready) and we took some shots.

The bus back to the V.A. Hospital was leaving, so he had to go. I pushed him down the hall, kissed his cheek, and we hugged. We both said “Semper Fi”, and I never saw him again.

I have that picture framed and on my office wall.

I never knew his last name.

Next time: How I helped convict my mailman of a felony!