April 08, 2005

The Man Comes Around

I just received a text message from my first boyfriend. This is the person I invited to my wedding last year but who didn't come because his girlfriend at the time was too jealous to allow him to. But...but...I was getting married...to somebody else?!

Yes pet. Yes, you're right to worry. You should be frantic, in fact. Usually when a woman is getting married to the man she has been with for six years, all she can think about is her first boyfriend back when she was fourteen. It is torture on a stick for her to keep her hands off him. You were right to deprive him of this celebration with an old friend. More than that, he was absolutely right to indulge your insecurities. Good on you both. May I call you Mr. and Mrs. Wackojack? You pair of deliciously crunchy walnuts.

This old boyfriend usually contacts me when he has broken up with the current girlfriend. I think I am his poorweather friend. That's ok by me. His girlfriends always hate me anyway. We dated for a year when we were kids...first love thing and all that. I think he still has a framed picture of me in his bedroom. Once one of his girlfriends came to the restaurant where I hostessed, and I didn't recognise her. If I had recognised her, I would have given her free dessert, like I did with all my friends who came by. But I didn't know her at all, and she told everyone I'd blanked her. It felt like fifth class all over again; all we lacked were a reader, a couple of pinafores and some knee high socks. Oh, and a squashed picnic ham sandwich in tinfoil and a carton of milk with a too-short straw.

Odd people aside, and back to dwelling on this journal's central character: me. Damnit I'm hot.

I forgot when it happened a while back to recount my most recent encounter with the abnormal. I was watching a movie late one Saturday night with K, when my mobile phone rang. I didn't recognise the number and was tempted to ignore, but unfortunately I had set the ring tone for unrecognised numbers to be a cat's meaiow, so I answered in order to shut it up. SHUT UP PHONE. It was a nurse...called Mary...in a hospice. She had found my number on an old redundant website off my college Christian Union and, in search of a born-again Christian to pray with a dying patient, had called me.

Well, although I have been a Christian for almost nine years now, I didn't feel equipped to deal with the spiritual needs of a dying African woman. I contacted a mature Christian couple I know who lived right by the hospice and they went to attend to her until her death.

This is not the first strange thing that has happened through my number being on that website. Last year, a researcher on Newstalk called me and asked me to come by and talk with them on the morning show about being a born-again Christian. I enjoyed such gems as "Do you believe in dinosaurs?" (why yes! yes I do!) and "Isn't the bible just fairytales?" (why no! It's 66 books spanning four thousand years and a dozen genres!)

What never fails to amaze me is that all these calls that have come my way have been from people to whom the thought never occurred that maybe they could contact any one of the hundreds of reformed Christian churches around the country. Nope, some college chick off a website that no longer exists will do! I guess Newstalk at least were hoping for a loony. And let's face it: that's what they got. Ha!

After the last call I considered taking it down, but then I figured, I would have less to write about on my blog.

I am stressed to the hilt. That is why I have been absent. I am suffering a kind of writer's block ne'er seen since the producers of this bad movie gave up the ghost and just used a random plot generator. I am trying to scrabble together a thesis and failing horribly. Please don't wish me well or ask me how it's going: NEURO DUNNA WANNA DISCUSS IT.

neuro-praxis -- I Talk So All The Time...So

Posted by neuro-praxis on April 8, 2005 05:36 PM, in the category Bushy Hair