Tag Archives: Crush #1

Pre-Prom Paradoxes

26 Saturday May 2012

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“Stop Defacing Signs,” a stop sign ironically defaced, June 24, 2011. (Scheinwerfermann via Wikipedia). Released to public domain via cc-Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.

This week a quarter-century ago was my Class of ’87 senior prom. Though I may tell some of the more boring and significant stories from this prom one year, this won’t be the case this year. Especially since the days before presented themselves with a theme that has remained a constant in my life for more than three decades — irony. If irony were a food, I could feed all of the Global South with it, and still have enough left to keep me in protein and P90X recovery drinks until I turn seventy.

And irony was a full-blown buffet the week before the prom. What told me that maybe my prom date “J” wanted more out of this arrangement than I did was an incident at our Humanities Program honors convocation that Tuesday evening (see my post “Prom-Ethos” from earlier this month). Mrs. Flanagan (then the Humanities Program coordinator for Mount Vernon High School) and the Mount Vernon Board of Education wanted to honor us collectively for making Humanities a grand success.

We had a keynote speaker, one who was a recent college grad and MVHS alum who had started her own business and wanted to talk to us about the value of the education we were about to pursue. It was an opportunity for our parents to share in our success.

My Mom decided to come to this event, only the second time she’d been to MVHS in four years. We got there, with Mom dressed in her best business dress, with high heels, hair done, light-brown makeup powder and black cherry-red lipstick on. I was somewhat dressed up, with a collared shirt, cheap black shoes and the polyester black pants my mother mail-ordered for me at the beginning of the year. The event was in the school cafeteria, where we were to have punch and snacks before the festivities began.

The first person I introduced my Mom to was J, whose mouth fell open like I’d slapped her in the face. She looked at Mom as if I’d been cheating on her with Lisa Lisa.  “J, this is my mother,” I said a second time. J just stood there, angry. Then she walked away in a huff.

“What’s wrong with her?,” my mother said in complete disbelief herself, with the “her” part lingering in my ear.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Clio [Muse of History] reading a scroll, (Attic red-figure lekythos, Boeotia c. 435–425 BCE), The Louvre, March 17, 2008 (Jastrow via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Crush #1 must’ve seen the whole thing unfold, because she came over right on cue, gave me a hug, and then politely introduced herself to my mother.

“Thanks,” I whispered as I walked over to talk to J while Crush #1 had a conversation with my Mom, something I’d hoped my prom date would do.

“That’s not your Mom,” J said when I reached her table. As if I would lie about something as serious as that.

“Yeah, J, she is,” I said, pissed that she’d assume that quiet me would suddenly become bold enough to bring an older women to a Humanities.

I knew Mom looked young, but she still had twenty-two years on me. Since she didn’t want to talk about it, I just walked away and joined in the conversation between my former crush and the woman who was the reason Crush #1 was my former crush.

That Crush #1 came to my rescue was ironic and poetic, given the ways in which my muse has come to my rescue over the years. That one of my nicest classmates acted a bit like an ass that evening contradicted everything I’d seen her do and say over the previous six years. That anyone would think that low-confidence me could walk into a ceremony with a thirty-nine year-old woman was both idiotic and ironic. Yeah, even in the land of friendships and emotions, irony walked with me, hand-in-hand and stride-for-stride.

The Women In My Brain

28 Saturday Apr 2012

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, Eclectic, eclectic music, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Angelia & me on honeymoon, Seattle's Space Needle, May 20, 2001. (Donald Earl Collins)

Today’s my twelfth wedding anniversary. It means that I already have one woman in my brain almost all of the time, mostly around the mundane tasks of running a place of residence, other domestic duties, and watching over/nurturing the midsized human that is our eight-year-old.

Gaius Baltar & Caprica Six, Battlestar Galactica image (2004), June 25, 2009. (http://25fps.cz). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws due to low resolution of picture.

But the reality is, there have always been women in my brain, with images that inspire, voices that encourage, and actions that embolden. This post isn’t about undressing a woman in my mind’s eye every six seconds. Nor is it about putting women on some pedestal so that I can mentally kneel and worship in an empty space. Trust me, I’ve done both and more over the years. No, this is about who gets into my head and how they stay there.

Of course, no one has had more air time on my mind’s screen over the past forty-two years and change than my mother. She did give birth to me, after all, and for better and worse, helped me make it to my preteen years before things in our lives fell apart at 616. For years, I’ve lived with the lessons learned at my mother’s hip, lessons about race, trust, religion and relationships. Many of which I’ve had to revise in order to make better choices in my own life. Still, I can hear my mother’s voice, bad jokes and all, in the things I do with my son, in the mistakes I hope to avoid as a writer and as an educator, in the bills that constantly have to be paid.

I hear my wife’s voice every time I go the grocery store. Or when I’m dealing with my son. Or when I think about our travels over the years. Literal and figurative. I think about all of things we’ve made happen, and all of the things that are still works-in-progress for us, as individuals and as a family. I hear her doubt, her most critical of voices, her scalpel sense of editing in what I write, in how I speak and in the diplomacy I show the folks in my life who otherwise don’t deserve it. Though our marriage is as complicated as astrophysics shows the universe to be when accounting for dark matter, my wife’s voice bounces around my 100 trillion nerve ending almost as much as my own.

Then there’s Crush #1. She’s more insidious than my mother or my wife. The tenacious ballerina of a

Inception (2010), Paris dream construct screen shot, April 27, 2012. (http://dpmlicious.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of poor resolution of shot, not intended for distribution.

tomboy who one represented my personification of Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman often will show up when I least expect. Often enough in my dreams, and usually when I’m writing in my head. I hear her giggles and see her smiles under the strangest of circumstances. A pirouette here, a punch to the jaw there, an encouraging word and a thoughtful look will surprise me in my dreams as much as it would’ve in real life thirty years ago.

Are these women anything like the folks I’ve known and learned to know again over the past three decades? Yes and no. They likely represent the many sides of me as much as they each represent themselves. Loving or not, caring or not, forever elusive, and yet always there for me to grasp, love and even despise. They all represent the best and worst in me, the best and worst I’ve seen, endured and overcome in this life. Hard, tough, blood-from-a-turnip love. Unrequited, one-sided love. And deep, conditional, familiar love. They’re all there. They seem to always be there.

Jennifer Lopez in dream sequence in The Cell (2000), April 27, 2012. (http://media.avclub.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because of screen shot's low resolution.

God, my own thoughts — however deep or shallow —  the billions of images of sports and men and women in my head from every walk of life and every song made in the past four centuries also remain constant in my brain. But mother, wife and first love can’t be shut off or out either. I could use some endorphins for the headache I have now.

Was I Really In Love In 7th Grade?

03 Saturday Mar 2012

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Tomorrow will mark thirty years since I began an emotional journey the likes of which I’ve only approximated maybe three other times since. In the three decades since, I’ve learned that I was actually in love for the first time. Not just a crush, or puppy love, or some preteen infatuation. Love, actually and truly. But as a person of deep thought, a boy surrounded by sexism and misogyny, and a lonely and semi-ostracized twelve-year-old, I didn’t have the thoughts, much less the words, to describe what I felt between March 4 and May 30 of ’82 (see my “On Women and Wired Weirdness” post from March ’11).

To think that this all pretty much started because I picked a fight with Crush #1 at the end of class on the first Thursday in March in 7S. Almost all of my extracurricular incidents that year began or ended in our homeroom with our homeroom/English teacher Mrs. Sesay. The incident began because Crush #1 asked a question about a subject that Mrs. Sesay had spent the entire week going over, a concept that Sesay would test us on that Friday. I laughed out loud — thinking that I was only snickering — after Crush #1 asked that question.

Thinking nothing of it, I began to pack up after the 2:15 pm bell rang. Crush #1 came up to me and pushed me from behind.

“You’re an ugly, arrogant asshole!” she said with the distaste of a ballerina being asked for money by a junkie.

I called her “stupid” and then said something else stupid. “You’re an idiot!,” Crush #1 yelled as she threw two punches into my chest and a third at my jaw.

The fight lasted about fifteen or twenty seconds, but after landing a punch on her left boob and nipple, I stopped fighting, already descending into the land of the idiot romantic, as in The Doobie Brothers “What A Fool Believes” (1979). All while Crush #1 kept hitting me, then being pulled away from me by a couple of her friends. One of them, the recently deceased Brandie Weston, called me a “pervert” as they exited the classroom.

I know that I wasn’t the first boy in history to start a fight with a girl who I’d come to like or love, but I do think that boys who do that have a lot of weird in them. Mind you, I hadn’t quite hit puberty yet, so my testosterone levels weren’t high enough yet to be the cause of my brain malfunction. No, my very sexism and her fierce sense of tomboyish feminism was why I liked her in the first place, and I drank deep from that well for the next three months.

I’ve had thirty years to reflect on this incident and the three months of school-day dreaming that followed. There are only a handful of childhood memories I’ve thought about more. For years, though, I’d packed my emotions away. Through high school and Crush #1’s first dating experiences, through my own high school and 616 trials and tribulations, through college and graduate school and my years of dating and then marriage to my wife of twelve years.

Then, as I began work on Boy @ The Window six years ago, I opened up that dusty box of memories and emotions, to find them almost as strange at thirty-six as they had been at twelve. But unlike in ’82, I shared it with a bunch of friends, and especially my wife. After telling the story of me and Crush #1, my wife said, she was my “first love. It doesn’t matter if she didn’t reciprocate.” Or, for that matter, if she didn’t know. It was the first time it dawned on me that I really had fallen in love before I’d learned how to love. Wow.

It explained why after so many years, through all of my ups and downs, and despite the love I do feel, have and show to family and friends in my life, that Crush #1 would show up in my dreams. It helped me understand why I found few girls, young women and women attractive prior to going to college, and even then, they didn’t compare. It also let me know that a feeling like that can’t die, doesn’t die. If anything, it allows room for more love, and more understanding for how to love in the process.

The video above is about the best way I can express what I felt in ’82, without the complete sappiness of an incurable romantic, or worse yet, a tragic one. Like Professor Snape (as played by Alan Rickman) in the Happy Potter movies, or worse still, Ralph Fiennes’ character in The English Patient (1996). Combining music and two of my three favorite sports (the other one’s golf, but Tiger’s inappropriate for this theme), it’s a mere approximation for how I felt back then.

There’s plenty of other music I could’ve used (see my “The Ultimate Crush” post from March ’08 and “Desert Rose” post from April ’09), other themes like figure skating or ballet that would better show what I saw and felt in Crush #1, and what I see and sometimes feel in my dreams on occasion now. I guess that I really was in love. But there’s at least one thing I can do now. I can be there for Noah when it happens to him for the first time.

The Visit

18 Tuesday Oct 2011

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Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (1977) Screen Shot, October 18, 2011. (Donald Earl Collins).

Over the course of a decade, between January ’02 and December ’09, I exchanged emails, interviewed by phone and visited nearly thirty former classmates, teachers and administrators from Mount Vernon, New York public schools for my book manuscript Boy @ The Window. Not to mention family members willing to be honest about life in Mount Vernon and 616 East Lincoln Avenue. Not to mention my family intervention nearly ten years ago. The saying “you can’t go home again” is such an understatement.

At times, my walks down memory lane have left me verklempt, or feeling that I’ve entered the Twilight Zone. Meeting with a former tormentor from my Davis Middle School days was strangely pleasant, while talking with my class’ salutatorian was both illuminating and a little weird. I met with some former Humanities classmates who seemed more ornery than former Georgetown coach John Thompson after a sleepless night dealing with idiot refs. I talked on the phone with former classmates and teachers who either couldn’t remember details about our school, or flat-out lied about some of the things they had said to me and about me twenty-five or thirty years ago.

But of all of those meetings and time machine-like encounters, none made me more nervous than my interview with Crush #1 five years ago. I was nervous for any number of reasons. I hadn’t seen her in nearly seventeen years when I went to see her in the Old South in October ’06. My plan was to be up front about my crush, my borderline love for her back in ’82, which would make anyone anxious or feel really silly, I guess.

And I was stuck at this point of my memoir, the part about how my crush on Crush #1 came about, and how abuse and domestic violence at 616 brought it to a crashing end, between March and August ’82. I knew what to write. I just didn’t want to relive all of those emotions, as they led me to seriously consider suicide within a year and half of all of that.

Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory (1931), October 18, 2011. (http://www.moma.org). In public domain.

What I walked into on that rainy October ’06 day mirrored my own Silver Spring, Maryland residence. It was a modern-day carpeted flat in an apartment-home townhouse, appearing as lived-in by the scattered toys in the living room and foyer. Crush #1 was making stew peas. If I’d been in another frame of mind, a look of shock would’ve come over me. Crush #1 cooking? Put that above the fold of the New York Times! Yet since I was willing to expect anything from the new Crush #1, I wasn’t all that surprised.

Her husband greeted me warmly, which was a bit of a surprise. I’ve been around enough couples to get a sense of how these kinds of interactions are supposed to work, regardless of sexual orientation. It’s where the husband or the “man of the house” sizes me up, regardless of my intentions. Crush #1 walked out of the kitchen and gave me a hug, the kind friends give each other after seventeen years apart.

Then I met her daughter, this chip off the not-so-old block, a great combination of Crush #1’s and her husband’s facial features. She was an adorable four-year-old wanting to learn about the world around her. We shook hands and made animal noises for about two minutes. I felt at home. It was as if I walked into my apartment and had to chance to see myself, my wife, and my kid in action, with sarcastic banter and silly noises included.

There was so much to discuss and so little time. So I started where the twelve-year-old in me would’ve if he had a voice. I asked about her mother, her family, her growing-up years in New York, her time in school and in Humanities. What came out was so different from what I expected because it was so similar to my experience and because our similar experiences occurred during the same time frame.

It was all so normal, so typical for people from our respective backgrounds, so, well,  human. I liked this real-life version of Crush #1, and not in that twelve-year-old, I-think-I’m-in-love kind of way. That was something else I really didn’t expect. Not only did I enjoy the visit. I enjoyed getting to know one of my ex-classmates for the first time.

One Good Woman

28 Thursday Apr 2011

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My Wife, Angelia Levy, April 2010. Angelia N. Levy

Today is our eleventh wedding anniversary. Tomorrow is a Crush #1 day. The next month covers a series of events that includes my first “date” with my now wife nearly sixteen years ago. Not to mention my last “dates” with the woman who’s the subject of my blog post, “The Power of Another E” (April ’09) from twenty years ago.

And then there’s my Mom, somewhere in the background, distant but still there, reminding me of all that made me, well, me. At least the me that wanted Crush #1, thought too highly of the twenty-two year-old version of “Another E,” and was ready to be involved with my eventual wife. Things have grown so much more complicated since the days when I couldn’t say “Hi” to a woman, much less date or be married to one.

One of my favorite adult contemporary songs about how women can inspire in relationships is Peter Cetera’s “One Good Woman” (1988). It was the first song I’d heard that really summed up the way I’d felt about my first crush back in ’82. And it provided a stark contrast to the way I felt about my second crush/obsession by the time the fall of ’88 rolled around. I bopped to the feelings in that song for much of my sophomore year at Pitt.

But I wasn’t a fool. I knew that there wasn’t anyone in my life at the time, or had been at any time, who could measure up to those lyrics. While Crush #1 definitely “brought out the best in me,” it certainly wasn’t because of her “love and understanding.” The two things I longed for in my life from others I cared for and about was love and understanding. My mother had little of either by the time I was a teenager, even though I know that she did the best she could. It just wasn’t close to good enough. So I put some of my faith in those lyrics, my romantic side in singing those words, eventually with no one in mind.

Even with dating and the ’90s, and even though I played “One Good Woman” less and less, I sought someone in my life who’d fit those lyrics. The problem with a country full of arrogant narcissists — me included — is that most of us present with DSM-IV neuroses (and in some cases, psychoses) long before we reach the stage of love and understanding. For better and certainly for worse, my mother was really the only woman who approximated any sense of the feeling Cetera releases so well in his song. And by approximate, I mean less than one-tenth of the full strength of the music and lyrics of “One Good Woman.”

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sons shouldn’t really think too often of their mother in a romantic light. It certainly would’ve helped to have known how deeply or how superficially I was loved by my mother, but I had nothing in my dating life really to compare it to.

That was, until I met my eventual son’s mother. Angelia was everything in Cetera’s “One Good Woman” lyrics. She wasn’t a dream of it like Crush #1. Or an obsession like Crush #2. Or someone who could be that for a moment like “Another E” or be a trifling ass the next minute like so many women I dated between ’91 and ’96. She was a real woman, good, bad, warts and all.

So when we married eleven years ago, with the Napster era that was, I downloaded Cetera’s “One Good Woman” and made it a permanent part of the collection that would end up on my iPod in ’06. Except that in recent years, my “One Good Woman” image feels more like John Legend’s “Ordinary People,” proving that even women that inspire you to love, cherish and understand are human beings as well.

When I listen to “One Good Woman” these days, I do think of my wife. But I also think of all of the other women who’ve inspired me over the years. Including my mother. Including even some of my more trifling exs. I love my wife, and I hope things in our marriage continue to work even as we work through whatever issues we have from time to time.

Still, I need to remember that romance comes and goes, but marriage only works when people work hard to communicate when they don’t understand, despite their love for each other. If either of us were to quit, it shouldn’t diminish all of the good that I saw and see in that woman, my wife, and the life we’ve had over the past fifteen plus years.

On Women and Wired Weirdness

05 Saturday Mar 2011

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[Why Sade? Closest I could find to my dream-life muse, and most appropriate video I could find]

Getting a bit long in the tooth to be rattling off about Crush #1 again, right? After all, yesterday was the twenty-ninth anniversary of the fight that led to a crush that led to some sort of falling in love for the first time. The three-month period between March 4 and May 30 of ’82 shaped the ways I saw girls and women from the age of twelve until my early thirties. The crush on Crush #1 and its inevitable side-tracking as my then stepfather knocked my mother unconscious in front of me helped shaped my feminism, my womanism and my sexism.

In all of that, I’ve learned that I was wired for this weirdness. Because as a person of deep thought, a boy surrounded by sexism and misogyny, and a lonely and semi-ostracized preteen, the sum was much greater than these contradictory parts.

To think that this all pretty much started because I picked a fight with Crush #1 at the end of class in seventh grade. Almost all of my extracurricular incidents that year began or ended in our homeroom with our homeroom/English teacher Mrs. Sesay. I know that she’s a principal somewhere these days, but back then, her lack of behavioral leadership skills in the classroom led to more verbal abuse and fighting than a group of gifted-track kids should’ve stood for. Anyway, the incident began because Crush #1 asked a question about a subject that Mrs. Sesay had spent the entire week going over, a concept that Sesay would test us on that Friday. I laughed out loud — thinking that I was only snickering — after Crush #1 asked that question.

Thinking nothing of it, I began to pack up after the 2:15 pm bell rang. Crush #1 came up to me and pushed me from behind.

“You’re an ugly, arrogant asshole!” she said with the distaste of a ballerina being asked for money by a junkie.

I called her “stupid” and then said something else stupid. “You’re an idiot!,” Crush #1 yelled as she threw two punches into my chest and a third at my jaw.

The fight lasted about fifteen or twenty seconds, but after landing a punch on her left boob and nipple, I stopped fighting, already descending into the land of the idiot romantic. All while Crush #1 kept hitting me, then being pulled away from me by a couple of her friends. One of them, the recently deceased Brandie Weston, called me a “pervert” as they exited the classroom.

I know that I wasn’t the first boy in history to start a fight with a girl who I’d come to like or love, but I do think that boys who do that have a lot of weird in them. Mind you, I hadn’t quite hit puberty yet, so my testosterone levels weren’t high enough yet to be the cause of my brain malfunction. No, my very sexism and her fierce sense of tomboyish feminism was why I liked her in the first place, and drank deep from that well for the next three months.

The Memorial Day ’82 incident with my mother changed what was an otherwise innocent crush and love into something weirder and more meaningful. I think that’s why it has so clearly affected how I’ve seen girls and women over the years. Crush #1 defended herself, my mother tried and couldn’t. Crush #1 was cranky and usually personable, my mother polite and as close-minded as a clam in deep water. Crush #1 would be fine whether she knew I liked her or not, my mother a damsel-in-distress that needed someone with sense and care to help her.

The weeks following that Memorial Day I made a decision to put my mother first. The side effect of that decision was that I’d spend the next fifteen years or so using Crush #1 as my template — and my mother as the anti-template — for understanding women, for befriending, dating or not dating women, for women I’d put on a pedestal from afar and for women I’d merely sleep with. In the end, I’d resent myself and my mother for that decision. And another six years trying to understand why.

Thinking about it now, it still amazes me how much of what occurred between ’82 and ’96 was part of an unconscious decision process. But since the end of ’89, I’ve gotten a reminder about once every six weeks. Crush #1 has been a part my dreams and nightmares, a muse that would surface some of my wiser thoughts. She’s a reminder that the twelve-year-old in me isn’t dead, just dormant.

The muse reminds me of how little I do know about women and romance, even after eleven years of marriage and more than two decades of various relationships overall. And that the struggle between the various strands of feminist, womanist and sexist thought in me remains just that.

Shopping at C-Town

09 Thursday Sep 2010

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C-Town Sign, Plainfield, NJ. Source: Plainfield Today, http://ptoday.blogspot.com/2010/07/c-town-supermarket-touches-nerve.html

I’ve spent very little time walking down memory lane regarding Crush #1 this year. Partly because I’m sure some of my readers are sick of hearing about my love for her, and partly because I’m sure she’s sick of hearing about herself. But this short story is more about me than her.

Twenty-seven years ago this week, I experienced my first — and nearly my last — embarrassment around food stamps at the one-time C-Town grocery store near the corner of Park Avenue and East Prospect Avenue in Mount Vernon. I was shopping after 7 pm for groceries after a quick stop at Mount Vernon Public Library early on in my freshman year at Mount Vernon High School. It was right around the last Rosh Hashanah I’d recognize as a Hebrew-Israelite, a Wednesday or Thursday night. I was buying some pinto beans, Carolina Long Grain Rice, beef neck bones and other healthy yet cheap things to eat for the next few days.

It’d always been a struggle to shop for my family during the Hebrew-Israelite years, to find kosher food, to buy strange things like matzohs or kosher salt. But it had become stranger for me earlier that year, when we ended up on welfare and using food stamps after April ’83. By that fateful evening, I’d maybe used my

Vintage Food Stamps. Source: http://slashfood.com

mother’s food stamps a half-dozen times. Other times, I’d used my father Jimme’s money to pay for the groceries, the indignity of using food stamps was so great. And when I shopped in Mount Vernon, I was acutely aware of the possibility that I could bump into one of my better-off classmates while paying for groceries with my stereotypical food stamps. As far as I was concerned, they already had too many things they could make fun of me about as it was.

So as I finished combing the slender and short aisles of C-Town for kosher bargains, I began my trek to the cash registers at the front, relieved that I hadn’t bumped into any folks I knew. Only to run into Crush #1, having beaten me to the cashier that was open at the time.” Damn,” I thought, one of the few times before the age of twenty-one that the word damn ever invaded my thoughts. She was polite enough to say “Hey, Donald,” to engage me in a short conversation about the start of high school.

Although I was usually grateful to be in my first love’s presence, all I wanted to do at that moment was run away, get out of the store as fast as I could. Instead, I went through the motions, answering her questions and asking a couple of ones about the teachers we had in common that year, like Cuglietto and Murphy. Luckily for me, she didn’t linger after she paid the cashier, and said her laters while I was still being rung up. I quickly handed the cashier my $20 in food stamps, told them to keep the Monopoly money change, and walked around the corner and down Prospect to 616 at Warp Factor 3.

The funny thing about getting older — not old, but older — is that it would take a lot more than food stamps to embarrass me these days. Especially now that you can get welfare checks and food stamps through direct deposit and EBT cards. I’m sure that Crush #1 thought nothing of our short conversation that evening, and neither did I, other than feeling awkward about the reminder that I was completely out of my league, not only from a relationship standpoint, but in terms of my lot in life overall. Boy, I’m glad that things have changed — that I’ve grown — so much in past twenty-seven years. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have a blog to remind me of my ridiculous past.