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edenfallingToday I am thirty-three years old -- a palindrome year!
My parents are coming up on Sunday to attend a concert at my church and take me out for a nice birthday dinner. They will bring cake and gifts and supplies for champagne cocktails, because that is how we roll. (Mmm, champagne cocktails...) I will keep Dottie overnight, because apparently the price differences between the motel that allows dogs and the motel that doesn't are currently dramatic enough for my parents to decide that saving money outweighs the small logistical inconveniences of leaving her with me.
I got my taxes done this morning, for free -- this is a side benefit of working for Not the IRS. The hill office was crazy busy this afternoon, which I suspect is partly just that we're reaching our peak couple weeks, and partly that everyone who didn't come yesterday because of the weather came today instead.
Vicky gave me my birthday present at Christmas and I duly lugged it back to Ithaca and let it sit untouched on my coffee table for a month and a half, but tonight I got to open it. For Christmas, she got me a Talavera ceramic mug from one of her trips to Mexico, and for my birthday she got me some plum wine, some matcha chocolate pocky, and a bowl, a whisk, and what I think is a tin of powdered green tea, all purchased on her trip to Japan last summer. (The Mexico trips are for work -- she's a linguist and currently does stuff with ESL testing -- while the Japan trip was as a chaperone for her church's youth group.)
I also got ten bucks from one of my maternal uncles, and a cool metal charm with an engraved lucky horseshoe from Aunt Cara. All in all, a good day. :-)
---------------
In less pleasant news, I got an email today from...
Did I ever tell you guys the story of Longwinded Man? I don't think I did. I was too annoyed at the time, and it was a little too personal. But today's event needs context, so.
In mid-2012, one of the smoke shop's regular customers mentioned that he edited/published an amateur magazine about [subject], and that several of his contributors needed a lot of editing because they were knowledgeable about [subject] rather than about spelling, grammar, and good composition. And I thought, oh hey, a chance to get some semi-official editing experience that will look nice on a resume if and when I look for a new job! (Plus I just like to edit stuff now and then.) So I gave him my email, expecting to open a polite business relationship.
That is not what happened.
Longwinded Man decided I'd just volunteered to become his new best friend. He started sending me incredibly long emails -- two or three pages if printed in Word -- multiple times a week, telling me all about his personal life and his thoughts on various issues that had NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with [subject]. He never sent me a single article to edit. I answered one or two of the emails, basically saying "I don't have time to read these, and hey, about those [subject] articles..." and he mostly stopped. Unfortunately, rather than sending me [subject] articles, he instead got it into his head -- to this day, I have no idea how or why, since I never said anything that should have given him this impression and in fact explicitly said things that contradicted his ideas -- that I was a dedicated progressive social activist and thus his ideal woman.
He kept trying to rope me into awkward conversations at the smoke shop, which I endured noncommittally when necessary, though I escaped with the excuse of paperwork or phone calls out in the back room as often as possible. I knew he made me uncomfortable, but I couldn't put my finger on why until Melodrama told me that he'd told her that he had a crush on me, or words to that general effect. I began to avoid him more assiduously. Eventually, around Christmas of 2013, Longwinded Man wrote a SIX PAGE love confession to me. It was mostly digressions on the history of apartheid in South Africa, his experience of popular music in the 1970s and 1980s, and the death of Nelson Mandela. And oh yeah, he really liked and admired me and could we have dinner some time, maybe romantically.
Um.
The next time he came to the smoke shop, I told him that I wasn't interested in him that way, that he wouldn't be happy even if I were interested in him because I wasn't anything like the person he'd invented in his head, and that I didn't want him to send me any more emails or letters. I took to hiding in the back room and making my coworkers deal with him whenever he came in thereafter, except for one unpleasant incident after he sent me another incredibly long (and emotionally manipulative, in the "poor, wounded me" style) email and we had a tense argument where I said I'd asked him to please not do that anymore, he said I'd never said any such thing, and I tried not to call him an asshole because he WAS a regular customer for a fairly expensive product and I didn't want to be responsible for losing his business.
Anyway, Longwinded Man sent me an email today, in which he went on about how he's still in love with me, and he won't enumerate his reasons and rationalizations for breaking his "self-imposed moratorium" and contacting me again, and he still maintains I deserve to be happy, and even if anyone fell in love with him right now he'd rebuff them because he wouldn't want to inflict his "trials and tribulations" upon them because very few people have the "strength of character and selfless determination to accept what is to come" -- which I should not take as a disparagement of myself, just that most people can't deal with what he has to endure -- and would I please show him the kindness (even though he doesn't expect it) of acknowledging that I received his email.
I just.
ARGH.
I will give him this: it is a shorter email than he usually manages. But it's exactly the same type of emotionally manipulative garbage and making me into an object instead of seeing me as myself that he used to do.
I'm not going to answer. In fact, I'm going to block his email address, like I should have done a long time ago.
And hopefully I will never have any contact with him again.
My parents are coming up on Sunday to attend a concert at my church and take me out for a nice birthday dinner. They will bring cake and gifts and supplies for champagne cocktails, because that is how we roll. (Mmm, champagne cocktails...) I will keep Dottie overnight, because apparently the price differences between the motel that allows dogs and the motel that doesn't are currently dramatic enough for my parents to decide that saving money outweighs the small logistical inconveniences of leaving her with me.
I got my taxes done this morning, for free -- this is a side benefit of working for Not the IRS. The hill office was crazy busy this afternoon, which I suspect is partly just that we're reaching our peak couple weeks, and partly that everyone who didn't come yesterday because of the weather came today instead.
Vicky gave me my birthday present at Christmas and I duly lugged it back to Ithaca and let it sit untouched on my coffee table for a month and a half, but tonight I got to open it. For Christmas, she got me a Talavera ceramic mug from one of her trips to Mexico, and for my birthday she got me some plum wine, some matcha chocolate pocky, and a bowl, a whisk, and what I think is a tin of powdered green tea, all purchased on her trip to Japan last summer. (The Mexico trips are for work -- she's a linguist and currently does stuff with ESL testing -- while the Japan trip was as a chaperone for her church's youth group.)
I also got ten bucks from one of my maternal uncles, and a cool metal charm with an engraved lucky horseshoe from Aunt Cara. All in all, a good day. :-)
---------------
In less pleasant news, I got an email today from...
Did I ever tell you guys the story of Longwinded Man? I don't think I did. I was too annoyed at the time, and it was a little too personal. But today's event needs context, so.
In mid-2012, one of the smoke shop's regular customers mentioned that he edited/published an amateur magazine about [subject], and that several of his contributors needed a lot of editing because they were knowledgeable about [subject] rather than about spelling, grammar, and good composition. And I thought, oh hey, a chance to get some semi-official editing experience that will look nice on a resume if and when I look for a new job! (Plus I just like to edit stuff now and then.) So I gave him my email, expecting to open a polite business relationship.
That is not what happened.
Longwinded Man decided I'd just volunteered to become his new best friend. He started sending me incredibly long emails -- two or three pages if printed in Word -- multiple times a week, telling me all about his personal life and his thoughts on various issues that had NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with [subject]. He never sent me a single article to edit. I answered one or two of the emails, basically saying "I don't have time to read these, and hey, about those [subject] articles..." and he mostly stopped. Unfortunately, rather than sending me [subject] articles, he instead got it into his head -- to this day, I have no idea how or why, since I never said anything that should have given him this impression and in fact explicitly said things that contradicted his ideas -- that I was a dedicated progressive social activist and thus his ideal woman.
He kept trying to rope me into awkward conversations at the smoke shop, which I endured noncommittally when necessary, though I escaped with the excuse of paperwork or phone calls out in the back room as often as possible. I knew he made me uncomfortable, but I couldn't put my finger on why until Melodrama told me that he'd told her that he had a crush on me, or words to that general effect. I began to avoid him more assiduously. Eventually, around Christmas of 2013, Longwinded Man wrote a SIX PAGE love confession to me. It was mostly digressions on the history of apartheid in South Africa, his experience of popular music in the 1970s and 1980s, and the death of Nelson Mandela. And oh yeah, he really liked and admired me and could we have dinner some time, maybe romantically.
Um.
The next time he came to the smoke shop, I told him that I wasn't interested in him that way, that he wouldn't be happy even if I were interested in him because I wasn't anything like the person he'd invented in his head, and that I didn't want him to send me any more emails or letters. I took to hiding in the back room and making my coworkers deal with him whenever he came in thereafter, except for one unpleasant incident after he sent me another incredibly long (and emotionally manipulative, in the "poor, wounded me" style) email and we had a tense argument where I said I'd asked him to please not do that anymore, he said I'd never said any such thing, and I tried not to call him an asshole because he WAS a regular customer for a fairly expensive product and I didn't want to be responsible for losing his business.
Anyway, Longwinded Man sent me an email today, in which he went on about how he's still in love with me, and he won't enumerate his reasons and rationalizations for breaking his "self-imposed moratorium" and contacting me again, and he still maintains I deserve to be happy, and even if anyone fell in love with him right now he'd rebuff them because he wouldn't want to inflict his "trials and tribulations" upon them because very few people have the "strength of character and selfless determination to accept what is to come" -- which I should not take as a disparagement of myself, just that most people can't deal with what he has to endure -- and would I please show him the kindness (even though he doesn't expect it) of acknowledging that I received his email.
I just.
ARGH.
I will give him this: it is a shorter email than he usually manages. But it's exactly the same type of emotionally manipulative garbage and making me into an object instead of seeing me as myself that he used to do.
I'm not going to answer. In fact, I'm going to block his email address, like I should have done a long time ago.
And hopefully I will never have any contact with him again.
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(no subject)
Date: 2015-02-11 05:39 am (UTC)I'm sorry the Longwinded Man happened to email you on this of all days. I hope your blocking him will end the problem.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-02-11 05:53 am (UTC)Longwinded Man doesn't live in Ithaca proper but rather in one of the suburbs, and I never saw him anywhere but the smoke shop so I don't think there's much danger of running into him randomly around town. I suppose there's an outside chance he might show up at Not the IRS, but I know his name and can arrange to be temporarily elsewhere if that comes to pass.
(I do wonder how he knows it's my birthday. Possibly I told him once? Or possibly he stalks my Facebook page and/or the Facebook pages of other former smoke shop employees? In which case, I am suddenly VERY GLAD that I hardly use Facebook and have my page and timeline largely friends-locked anyway.)
(no subject)
Date: 2015-02-11 10:25 am (UTC)a) what a jerk! and
b) may that be the last you ever see or hear of him, and
c) Champagne cocktails! lovely! and
d) May the whole celebration be just gorgeous, and the beginning of a great year!
(no subject)
Date: 2015-02-11 06:21 pm (UTC)I am glad to have finally shut the door on Longwinded Man.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-02-11 12:26 pm (UTC)The asshole is less lovely, and I think you are doing the very best thing possible in just plain refusing to engage. Block and forget is all that jerk deserves!
(no subject)
Date: 2015-02-11 06:24 pm (UTC)I couldn't cut contact with the finality I wanted back when I was still at the smoke shop, because there was the business's reputation to think of and so on, but I felt so relieved when I put Longwinded Man's email into my hotmail block list (and filtered it straight to the trash in my gmail for good measure).
(no subject)
Date: 2015-02-11 01:26 pm (UTC)... and oh my god that dude. that fucking creep. yeah no, any contact will only be more grounds for him to reinvent what you said into a green light to keep talking you around. you just need a little more convincinc!!!!! uuuuugh.
It is in fact stalking and he is in fact a deluded stalker, and i know you said it hasn't happened yet but yes, if ever he shows up somewhere you are like oh a coincidence i would advise you to contact the police, because he's obsessed in a hella not good way.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-02-11 06:28 pm (UTC)Yeah, Longwinded Man was... not good at hearing what I actually said, as witness his characterization of our lack of contact as his own "self-imposed moratorium" rather than me telling him to leave me alone. *headdesk*
Coincidences do exist -- if I saw him in a public space like, say, the library or a grocery store, I wouldn't necessarily accuse him of stalking, especially since I have no regular schedule for visiting such places so he couldn't plan such a meeting. But if he showed up in my neighborhood or at my place of work... yeah. Stalker. And I wouldn't let that slide.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-02-11 01:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-02-11 06:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-02-12 10:24 pm (UTC)I know that making matcha in the bowl with the whisk is pretty codified, most rituals do get that way. I suspect it's a matter of learning how to do the whisking that is the tricky part (without making a mess, I mean). Enjoy your green foam mustache when you drink it!
(no subject)
Date: 2015-02-13 03:23 am (UTC)Vicky suggested I check out some YouTube videos to get a sense of how to do the whisking and what the end product should look like, which sounds like excellent and sensible advice to me. I will probably make a test bowl/cup on Saturday.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-02-11 05:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-02-11 05:55 am (UTC)Oh well, it can't happen again next year!
(no subject)
Date: 2015-02-12 05:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-02-12 08:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-02-12 08:07 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-02-12 11:00 am (UTC)So far it seems to have worked.
I hope that guy leaves you alone.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-02-13 02:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-02-12 12:25 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-02-12 03:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-02-12 02:56 am (UTC)Sorry that happened to you. That is not a fun situation, but I think you have handled it quite well.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-02-12 04:06 am (UTC)I think the whole saga left a particularly bad taste in my mouth because it started as what seemed like a good and job-oriented thing -- yay, a chance to edit stuff! -- rather than being obviously skeevy from the get-go, as with other three older male customers who got weird about me during my years at the smoke shop. (One of them literally handmade me two expensive necklaces and then thankfully moved to Hawaii, another started giving me expensive chocolates before abruptly vanishing -- we later learned he died of a heart attack -- and the third was just kind of gross toward every female employee.) But it's done now and I can wash my hands of Longwinded Man for good.