nate e-mailed me. (spoo, not the communist.) i haven't even written back to him yet but his note reminded me of saimin, the nearly incestuous little online community of friends and ... friends ... that made high school so interesting. also, i read ryan's july top 5 list and thought i'd make one of my own. yes it's late and i have nothing else to write about.
in no particular order, my 5 most memorable breakups. minus details and whole stories that are, you know, sacred.
note: ha ha, i'm still young enough for high school stuff to count.
5. el jefe
i always say it's a good thing that i went out with an obsessive control freak in high school because it ensured i wouldn't waste my time in college on the same kind of mistake. we knew each other since we were kids, his parents and mine related (very distantly, and through marriage) and good friends. he was a lot of firsts for me, but not my first love. unfortunately i was that for him and now i always say, free spirits should avoid L-virgins like the plague. gently-used with a once broken heart is best.
he was a grade-B makatoonie mama's boy: nice car, worked at (mc cully) taco bell, couldn't hack fraternity rush. sweet-sour personality: considerate until scorned, then just psychotic. possessive crybaby. made me talk to his mother once when we weren't getting along. she told me to grow up. i made my first attempt to dump him soon after.
this was a pain in the ass breakup because he was possessive and totally crazy. i wasn't blameless but at least i didn't literally twist his arm when things didn't go my way. it's been long enough so that the memories are blurry, but what little i do remember about him is nearly all bad.
4. escargot
he was a sweetheart, a very, very good friend that i met online (there! i said it!) during the summer between sophomore and junior years and continued to be friends with after his family moved to california. through the lovely USPS and long-distance phone calls we discovered that we ... i dunno, what would you call it? really liked each other? okay. it was actually a day at disneyland that did it, i think. my family went to southern cal that summer so one day escargot and i met up at the new orleans square train station and spent the whole day together. he made me go on space mountain (i was a fraidy cat), and we went on peter pan's flight, and we watched fantasmic together and by the electric light parade i knew everything about him. when it was time to meet my parents, my brother, who was still pretty small at the time, told us to hold hands and he pulled us through the crowd of people watching the fireworks show. it was the sweetest day. it was so uncomplicated. and he came to see me off at the airport and i realized that when you're that sad to leave someone, you're probably not just friends anymore.
so anyway. through letters and phone calls we (silly teenagers) got closer (and madder at the wretched ocean between us) and i decided i wanted him here for christmas, plus everyone at saimin missed him, too. so we had a car wash to buy a plane ticket and i called his mom to ask permission for him to come and she said okay and i was superly, really, excited.
but all the stuff that we planned of course didn't go as planned because there is a lot of time between summer and winter. a lot of time to meet new people. he still flew in (can't be wasting a $500 plane ticket) but things were awfully awkward and we tried but didn't end up together, no. he came to my aunty's for christmas dinner and we talked and agreed that we should still be friends. and then he left. and i don't exactly remember, but i'm pretty sure things were never the same between us. we still wrote letters, but from all this i learned, fortunately at a young age, that it's hard to make long distance work no matter how pure your intentions, how sweet your love. plus, our collective age was 33. i'm guessing at that age LD is still a bitch. we moved on (which is why i can speak of him only fondly.)
3. m
hey, there's nothing wrong with meeting people online. besides, saimin shouldn't have the same stigma as any other form of chat because mostly all the members knew each other irl. anyway, back then m was #31 or something like that. he went by various jpop singer handles, i.e. tetsuya komuro, fujii fumiya, etc. i didn't even know his real name for a long time and when i found out, i thought it was a typo. all i knew about him was that his sister was a real bitch (eventually she and i came to terms with each other; we had too much in common) and his best friend had red hair. eventually i figured out that #31 was the cute hapa guy, presumably from roosevelt, who took the number five home (got on at punahou) occasionally. always listening to a walkman. later i would learn that he was pining for this girl named yui, and he was listening to horribly sad jpop ballads by all his favorite depressing singers.
he was a real jerk, but i didn't know it then. i thought he was funny and nice -- and he was. nice to my friends (he would take up with nearly all of them, in time -- but wait, it gets funnier!). nice to me. not nice to my boyfriend, but what did i care? i was a jerk, too, and i didn't know that then, either.
blah blah drama i'm never talking to you again well fine i'm going to kill myself fine go ahead fine i will FINE! drama blah blah blah.
obviously he didn't kill himself (and since then similar manipulative threats only piss me off) because he played mack daddy with all my friends and then got involved with a girl named kitty (another saimin alum) and when she ran off with another guy also named mike, and i decided it wouldn't kill me to start talking to the shmuck again, we carried on an embarrassingly long on-off "relationship," all the way to my beginning at UH. we made lots of mistakes, such as not breaking up. just kidding. well, no, not really. specific mistakes included working at the same paper (in some long ago entry i wrote about the Weekend at Kylie's House, and i'd link it but i can't find it), taking ethnic studies together, me going out with my high school crush, him, well, spending the weekend at kylie's house, etc. it wasn't all bad, just mostly. well, no. yes. no. whatever.
his encounter with another co-copy editor of mine sped up our imminent demise, but we didn't really, truly break up till i met the Demon.
we still talk, kind of, not really. he lives in washington now with his girlfriend. she's a lot nicer to him than i was, ever. i try to avoid talking to him but he put me back on his mailing list so from time to time i have a signal that he's still alive, and i think that's a healthy amount of communication.
2. the sweatshop
it left me bitter, okay? it was like being dumped by a boyfriend who was once intelligent and good-looking in an interesting sort of way. then he got hit by a bus carrying toxic waste and boy was he ugly after that.
before it was the sweatshop, it was ka leo. an actual newspaper edited by actual journ majors. it was actually soon-yi's idea to apply for copy editing positions early in our first semester at UH. okie doke, i said. so we entered the KL building for the first time ever (little did i know i would soon sell my poor freshman soul to it) and got set up with copy editing tests administered by either greg or ryan. i think it was ryan because he called me later and said i did okay and that i could start soon. don't remember but i don't think soon-yi did all that well, but she wrote features stories instead (i think) and it was all good. ryan and greg, who bore remarkable likenesses to ernie and bert, were really cool and no i'm not saying that just because they're the only two people who read this journal. the building was a second home: before classes soon-yi and i would eat our power breakfasts (twinkies and mountain dew) at the big table and talk about deep stuff like strapless bras and semi-cute guys. m started hanging out, too, and it was all good. everyone was friends (that seems so grammatically wrong). and there was always the news, and always copy editing, but that's not really what i remember about KL and that's probably why i never did become a journ major.
when ryan was done, gen and m duked it out for head honcho and when gen got it KL wasn't the same but it wasn't the sweatshop yet. tons of smart people left but i figured i hadn't gone there to make friends so i shouldn't leave when my friends vacated. though i totally respected (and even shared) a lot of their feelings about the handover.
after a period of acclimation i discovered the KL was a happy place now. i got to know nir, gen, j, meg, aac, and christi, and later d. when m got to know gail and i got to know d is about when m climbed out a window and never came back. which pissed me off because since he had quit without a word, i couldn't fire him. (for real, by the way. he literally climbed out a window.)
we had so much time for scandal and personal relationships, lunch at manoa garden-no-s and trips to ala moana. that semester i was out of class more than i was in it. totally worth it, i still say.
um, tangent.
eventually dewboy took gen's position and sharon stone, i mean estrella lavella, his managing editor, redecorated the office with samplers from successories and this is when it became the sweatshop. and i knew it was WRONG to be there any longer but in true me fashion i hung on, and on, and on. i got blamed for missed deadlines that were other people's fault, and i hung on. i got patronized by sharon stone, and i hung on. d quit, and i hung on. then dewboy and sharon decided i belonged on probation because i didn't take their bullshit with enough grace, so i signed on the dotted line and when dewboy smiled in that embarrassed way that said the devil named sharon stone made him do it, and said "so, about next year ..." i finally realized that neither the integrity of ryan's paper nor the fellowship of gen's paper would ever, ever be found in dewboy and sharon's paper, and i quit.
it's hard to tell who did the dumping, here. but then there's no pride in dumping a prostitute so i guess it really doesn't matter.
... and i don't have a fifth, either. well, i guess i do, but that would be filed under something else entirely. and i'm not feeling that candid tonight.