What the hell is with my luck. It seems that more often than not, when I meet new people, they morph into outright freaks! Some take a while and do it stealthily, others waste no time about it. But it’s all the same in the end. Whatever was cool about the person has diminished, and what’s left creeps me out and won’t leave me alone!
It started very early on. My first real friend, at first, was a very shy person who wouldn’t talk much. I started talking to her and then we started playing together. She seemed pretty cool. She liked to play all kinds of games, she didn’t get frustrated if I missed the stupid ball, etc. But then. Oh then!
Next thing I knew, she wouldn’t let me see any of my other friends. She’d actually push them away. She’d get mad if I went and did anything without her. If they tried to separate us, she’d scream!
Ten years later, I was still friends with her, who the hell knows why, and pretty much no one else. That was when she pulled the ultimateout of her bag of tricks. She accused a local guy whose kids she babysat of getting her pregnant. Now, keep in mind that this town is small. She told me this, told me she was getting kicked out of her parents’ place, and asked to stay with me. That’s when my mom found out that she wasn’t pregnant at all, she had lied to basically stalk and harass this guy. They tested her, she wasn’t pregnant. I wasn’t ever able to confront her about that and tell her that I knew the truth because mom found out from someone who wasn’t supposed to tell anyone. But this person told mom because mom said she needed to know what she was getting into if she took my friend in. So because I couldn’t stop the bullshit, my friend kept on lying to me. Saying she had a miscarriage when it came time to start to show signs of pregnancy, grieving the loss of her unborn child, and on and on and on it went! And she wonders why I want absolutely nothing to do with her.
So I go off to school, first a school for the blind. I think, “Well, this is a brand new start.” The first people I meet, well, make me wonder if I have been placed in an asylum without knowing it. One shuffled across the floor very…slowly, clapping his hands and snorting like a horse. When I asked him where he was from, he gave me his full street address! The next told me that he could communicate with me telepathically. I stared at him and said “really? try me!” Then he just stood there, dumbfounded. Or maybe he was trying to send me his thoughts. They didn’t make it. Then, from across the room, I heard a laugh befitting a mad scientist and someone incessantly checking their talking watch, so all you heard was, “ding ding ding ding ding ding ding!” I turned my head in that direction and saw a shadow that looked like a head violently rocking back and forth. This was all on the first day!
Later that week, I met a very tall, very energetic girl who, for some reason, liked to grab me and drag me into her room. It was usually to show me something or introduce me to her parents, but there was no resisting her once she started to drag. Eventually she stopped doing this and seemed to calm down. After thinking she was just goofy but harmless, I started helping her with homework. One day, without warning, she kicked me in the face! This got me to kick her out of my room and tell her to leave me alone. The funniest part of that whole thing was she called my shooing her from my room a “clobbering.” Ok, She’s six feet tall and I’m under five feet. Who’s getting clobbered here? Then she started showing up in the girls’ change-room when I was changing for gym. Then I found out that she had a thing for me! I have nothing against lesbians, but I don’t swing that way! And her mom wonders why I didn’t come to her birthday sleepover.
Another person I met there was harmless, but, well, had issues a mile high. She liked to write stories for fun. She was reading a bunch of them to me, and I noticed that there was someone always made to be an outcast for some really superficial reason. So I asked her why there was always someone different from the rest. There was a two second pause, and then a shriek came out of her that could have broken windows! “Send me to the funny farm!” She bellowed and stomped her foot, and I just stood there wondering what in hell I’d done.
I slowly noticed that the reason there was always an outcast in her stories was because she was an outcast. She didn’t have very many friends and she always got made fun of. I stayed friends with her and, years later, invited her to a new years party. Ooo bad mistake! She managed to make a giant ass of herself and weird out everyone who didn’t know her from before.
I tried just going to see her. That drove me nuts. So I brought her to my place. That drove Steve andI both nuts. My final attempt to go see her and have some fun with her was when a friend and I invited her over and we had a few people over. After she’d had a few drinks, she started asking complete strangers when their parents gave them the talk about the birds and the bees. There was no lead-up to this. Just boom! and there it was. Oh god I was so embarrassed. And she wonders why she feels like such an outcast.
I left the school for the blind thinking, “allright. There were a lot of weird people in there, but sadly, some blind people have, well, issues. Maybe the attraction of freaks will stop now.” Nope, wrong again.
At first, it seemed to stop. Everybody seemed normal. Then I started noticing things about my room-mate. She wasn’t really a freak, bitch is more like it. She would call me embarrassing names in front of her soccer buddies, she’d take my cane and try to poke me with it, all kinds of weirdness. Then a few months later, she said she couldn’t handle me as a room-mate and left. My first reaction was to be hurt, but I think it was the best thing she could have done.
I decided to try out this funky chat program someone told me about. I knew that chat rooms were freak heaven, but good god, they didn’t even waste time being halfway normal with me! Straight to the freaky stuff we went! The one guy who stayed halfway normal long enough to add me to MSN and teach me how to use it eventually went weird. I should have known things were bad when he called himself “boom boom.” That can never be a sign of good things to come. It didn’t take too long before he started making all kinds of veiled, and not so veiled, sexual references to me. Writing “voulez-vous enlèver vos vêtements>” (Wanna take off your clothes?) after I’d just said I came back from five weeks in Quebec is not a good idea. It was right after that that he became very closely acquainted with my block button.
After that, I thought, “Ok, no more adding people to MSN so quickly. They have to prove to me that they’re cool or I have to know them from somewhere else.” Oh no, that wasn’t good enough.
The next new resident in Freakville took a long time to get there. He seemed pretty cool. I knew him in a couple of different contexts. One day, I decided to add him to MSN. Right after I thought he was cool, he started asking me strange questions. He was obsessed with my legs, for one thing. He didn’t want them to get sunburned, he wondered how long they were, *eeewww*. Then he told me about this project he was running, and he needed human sound effects. He said one sound effect that was particularly hard to get was a yawn. He said they always sounded fake. So, I thought I’d help him out. I could yawn. But then he started setting parameters on these yawns. I had to talk while I was yawning, I had to make them x number of seconds. After I sent him the yawns, he started asking me more questions. What was I thinking about whenI was yawning? What was I saying? How did I go about recording these yawns? Gees Louise!
A few months later, I heard that he only asked girls for these sound effects. Not long after that, his girlfriend broke up with him, and coincidentally, he lost all my yawns and needed more! I started to wonder if he was getting some kind of pleasure out of listening to my yawns. Um, eeewww!
Then there’s always the guy who, as soon as he found out I was single, started trying to cyber with me, even when I told him to stop that! He was all flirty, telling me he wanted to go out with me, and then I found out he just wanted to have a little fun on the side. He, too, had a nice meeting with the block button.
And then there are the freaks in my own town. I always meet them in the most innocent ways. One guy was knew to university and was visually impaired. So, to help him and the disability services people out, I decided to be there to answer questions, help him in any way I could. And he had a lot of questions!
That was all it was, at first. He would call a lot, but he seemed to have a ton of questions. Then, like it always does, the metamorphosis started to take hold. He started asking what I was doing every moment of the day. He started asking where Steve was in the house. He started getting mad when I would mention people he didn’t know. The changes sped up when Steve andI weren’t together for a while. Then he’d do weird things like tell me he had a computer problem, and then when I’d return his call, the problem was fixed and he’d try and ask me all kinds of weird questions. He started inviting me to lunch, saying he had something to tell me, and then there was nothing. The weirdest time he invited me to lunch was when his mom was there! They started speaking their native language, which was Egyption I think. After I was home, I called him and asked him what him and his mother were saying in their own language. He told me it was nothing major, she just thought we should have taken me to a better place than the cafeteria in the main university centre. I thought this was a bit suspicious, but really became suspicious when I met his dad one day. A bunch of us went to see him sing in the choir. After the concert, we went up to tell him it sounded cool, bla bla bla. His dad came up to me and asked when I was coming over for tea, and that I can feel free to call their house whenever I want. I left, bewildered, and couldn’t shake the feeling he told them we were dating! He has never admitted that, but why else would they do all those weird things to only me? Why else would he start acting like some kind of possessive boyfriend? No, dude, we’re not dating.
Then there was this nice older man, or so I thought, who used to randomly walk up to Steve and I and talk to us. This isn’t really that odd for me, since random people seem to talk to me a lot, asking me if I know where I’m going, etc. But his behaviour took a weird turn one night.
Right after I had to give Babs up, I was pretty sad. Since he had just seen me with the dog, and then saw me without her, he had to start asking questions. When I told him what happened, he said he wanted to cheer me up and invited me for coffee. I thought there was no harm in this, and we’d only go where I knew where I was. Well, he showed up with a thing of tarts and then wanted to lead me down a trail. I said no, and every so often, he would ask me if I still knew where I was. Um was he hoping I would say no? Was he hoping to get me lost and do who knows what? When I got back to my house, he tried to kiss me! Um what the hell? Do I look vulnerable or something? After that incident, he would show up everywhere I go. Thankfully, that happened significantly less when Steve and I got back together, and I told him we were back together. Another interesting coincidence.
I feel like I could go on and on. Why in hell do I attract all these weirdos? I don’t mean to say everyone I meet is a weirdo, I’ve met a lot of awesome people. But it seems like I have to constantly watch for signals that someone is starting to morph, because it happens way, way, way too often!
