Sometimes nothing can make you laugh like a tragedy and nothing can make you sadder than a comedy. When I look at the movies and shows that have hit me the hardest emotionally, almost all of them have been comedies or at least a weaving of comedy and drama. The thing about a drama is that you expect it to tug at your emotional strings. You’re prepared for it. Just like The West Wing gets laughs out of jokes that wouldn’t work as well on a bona fide comedy, sitcoms can smack you with a sudden seriousness because there is a laughter that’s stuck in your throat.

Comic book writer Peter David said the following of his writing (on X-Factor specifically, though it applies to his work on Young Justice and Supergirl):

The humor in the book will arise naturally from character interaction. Also, it will serve to set up the serious moments. Alfred Hitchcock said the best type of laughter from an audience is the type that catches in their throats. So although there will be snappy dialogue and such, be aware that sometimes we’ll be in the midst of what seems like a humorous moment and then, bam, something unexpected happens that leaves the reader going “Whoa. Didn’t see that coming.”

I’m including two examples in this post. The first is a scene from Frasier that I have actually commented before. The first time I saw it I was slightly inebriated, making the funny scenes funnier and the sad scenes sadder. I wanted to yell and throw something at the TV at the close of the episode.

The set-up is thus: When Daphne breaks up with her boyfriend, Niles is about ready to make his move. He holds off for a day at Frasier’s urging and that night Daphne meets a man, Rodney, who could pass for Niles’s twin. The actor for Rodney was amazing in his ability to duplicate Niles’s mannerisms. If Niles had only made his move, he could have caught the woman of his dreams. Niles moves on and meets Adelle, but not long after discovers that Rodney and Adelle have fallen for one another. This scene takes place towards at end, when Niles shows up to tell Daphne about Rodney and Adelle.

The second is from The Drew Carey Show, which I only saw recently. I actually listened to this before I watched it, but I happened to be at lunch at the end of the episode, so I got to see the all-important closing of the episode. After catching the end, I watched the whole episode through when I got home.

The set-up is thus: Several episodes before, Drew met a real estate agent named Nicki and they (eventually) started to date. Though she’s thin when they met, Nicki revealed to Drew early on that she had previously had a weight problem. She gains weight as the series progresses, but Drew doesn’t care and he proposes to her. This episode opens with Drew and Nicki filming a sex video. It forwards to the next morning where Drew informs his parents that “something happened” and he decided that he didn’t want to marry Nicki anymore. In this scene, he’s coming home from the bachelor party.

(note: there are some jokes in the first 40 seconds that you may not understand. They involve Drew’s father finding out about Drew’s cross-dressing brother and his attempting to feign depression to get out of yard work)

From The Daily Mail:

The golden rule of getting away with a bigamous wedding must be this: Don’t invite anyone who was there the first time round.

Sadly, this small yet crucial detail escaped Randolf Edge, 54, in his haste to marry a woman 33 years his junior.

A guest who had also been at his first wedding tipped off King’s Lynn Register Office in Norfolk.

And a quick check of the records proved that Edge had tied the knot with 21-year- old Patience Carey while still married to his estranged wife Edna. He was quickly arrested.

A lot of people out of Deseret think that the (non-FLDS) Mormons secretly approve of or engage in polygamy, though in truth I’ve never met a group so preoccupied with denouncing it (in current day) than when I was out there. As was pointed out about the Republican primary, the only candidate that ran that had only one wife was Mitt Romney (until Huckabee entered the race).

As luck would have it, I did know of a polygamist while I was out there. After getting married and divorced a couple times, Carol Goddard’s father decided that divorce was too expensive so he got remarried a couple times without one. His previous marriages were functionally over, but not legally. The federal government eventually caught up with him. The FBI didn’t care, but the IRS did.

So here’s a question… was what Mr. Goddard did all that wrong? Could we replace the current system with one where a new marriage nullifies an old? Having never been divorced, I’m not sure what the full ramifications of that would be.

For several months a year or so ago, a post started formulating in my head, but I never actually got around to posting it. Had I written it, it would have gone something like:

One of the interesting things about relationships (both of the platonic and romantic variety) is how often they are dependent on timing and circumstance. My wife and I both commented that had we met earlier in our lives there is a pretty good chance that we never would have gotten together or if we had it might have been really toxic. Julie and I were nearly perfect for one another when we got together, but then we drifted separately to the point that I’m not sure we’d even be friends if we met today. There are also times when so much has happened that the best two people perfect for one another can hope for is to split up and meet someone almost exactly like their previous soulmate.

When Evangeline made her final effort at reconciliation shortly before marrying Clancy, one of the reasons I gave for going forward with the engagement was that while it was every bit as possible for things to go poorly with Clancy as they had with Eva, I knew in painstaking detail everything that could go wrong with the latter and a part of me would never stop bracing for it, no matter how honest her intentions were.

But this post actually has more to do with friendships than relationships. Specifically, it’s about my friendship with my former roommate Hubert. When Hugh and I were roommates at Southern Tech, we got along really well the first year, not so well the second year, grudgingly the third year, and miserably the fourth.

During that time, he was going through a real rough patch. His mother and step-father were divorcing, which was causing all sorts of financial problems. His college funds were drying up and suddenly he was unexpectedly going to have to start paying for his schooling. He had to change majors. Relationship troubles. Various family members were sick. Things just weren’t going his way. Add to that, he was wearing thin on a lot of his friends even before things in his private life turned nasty.

At the same time, I was going through my breakup with Julie after nearly five years. I was deciding not to go to law school. I’d gotten into my second serious auto accident in two years. I was carrying a full-time work and classload. There have been times in my life that I would have been perfectly happy and willing to help a friend through some troubled times, but that wasn’t one of them and Hubert at the time did not accept help gracefully. Do him a favor and he’d criticize you for doing it wrong.

By the time we parted ways, I lamented the fact that our similar circles meant that I couldn’t extricate him from my life entirely. Being as unlike him as much as possible was actually somewhat important to me. In some ways this was genuinely helpful to me because it broke me out of certain behavior patterns that he and I had in common, but it’s never good to carry that kind of hostility around you all of the time. When he announced to me that he was getting married, the first feeling I had was dratting that after all was said and done he was getting married before I was. Fortunately I’d met Clancy by that point and I knew I was going to marry her, so I was at least able to accept defeat gracefully. It’s noteworthy that he is the only friend whose romantic failures I delighted in and for whom I cared about who found their life partner first.

By the time he got engaged and got married, though, he had become a different person. He started getting a handle on his temper, which was huuuuugely important. He stopped trying to be so impressive and working triple-time to fit in. He got a better sense of what was and was not important and stopped alienating people trying to dictate unimportant things. You could mention something vaguely political without a big giant political wrath coming down upon you. Heck, you could actually discuss politics with him where you disagree without everything blowing up. He stopped talking about how he was becoming more laid back and actually started becoming so.

These changes were noticeable. He actually had a serious relationship that lasted more than nine months, and then when that fell apart, he went on to meet someone else and she tolerated him for more than nine months, too. She even married him! Clancy met Hubert on the same weekend that she met Julie. With all I’d said about both, she expected to like Julie and to have to tolerate Hugh. Instead, she came away with it not sure at all what to make of Julie and with a very positive impression of Hubert. She had to ask if that was the same Hugh I’d been talking about or if there were somehow two different Hughs.

Of course, there is a rub. No matter how much I can see the changes in him, I don’t feel the changes. It’s not that he’s betraying his new-self with old-self behavior just under the veneer anymore. Rather, it’s that I have difficulty seeing him as he is without seeing him as he was. I can’t stop walking on eggshells when I’m around him. I can’t stop waiting for the old-self to make itself apparent in some subtle or unsubtle way. I can’t stop letting all of the little things that would never bother me with anyone else bother me with him.

It’s all rather unfortunate. For better and worse I lived with the guy for four years. He and I share a whole lot of the same interests and developed them together or having introduced them to one another. We have many of the same friends. If I met him today, we’d be great friends.

But I didn’t meet him today. I’ve seen his really ugly sides and I don’t know if I can really get the image of it out of my mind and since it’s all so instinctual I don’t know how to influence these unhelpful thoughts.

—

I never wrote the blog post because I kept procrastinating and procrastinating and now I can’t write it anymore. I’m not sure when all of the above finally changed, but it did. Though I don’t know when it happened, I do know when I realized that it had happened. Clancy and I made our way back to Delosa for a short vacation. We got together with our wives and a friend and his wife and we hung out for several hours going to see a movie and then talking about it afterwards.

When the night had come to an end, he said, “This has been great. We should really do it again next time you’re in town.”

I said, “Yeah, we should.”

And I actually meant it.

Logtar wants to know how someone becomes an expert on marriage proposals:

What makes him a expert on the subject of proposing? that is the question that still lingers in my head. I could see a jeweler maybe knowing more than him, because he is actually the person that gets to hear the stories of proposal before they happen. I could see maybe someone that did something really outrageous and was turned down… but a cook?

Just being famous does not make you an expert in my eyes, but more and more people with fame get to have a voice. I think that is the real danger of the celebrity culture, that maybe we are getting information from sources that are not very reliable. Be careful of where you get your expert advice, and next time you see one on TV, ask yourself if the person talking should really be considered an expert on the subject.

I’d imagine that proposals is something that it’s very easy to become an “expert” on. Proposals are one of those things that you can ask virtual strangers about and a lot of them will open up about it. Heck, I considered making last weeks Ghostland piece a look back on planned proposals (and the one of course I executed). Collect a few hundred stories, find out which ones worked and which ones didn’t, and voila, you’re an expert. I know that I’d certainly listen to what the person had to say, if only to get some ideas.

That being said, this guy does sound like an idiot. There is no single right way to propose, but he seems to be offering one. Advice should start with questions about him and her and be more in the form of “Maybe you should consider…” or “Maybe something along the lines of…” rather than “You should … You shouldn’t …” Some girls love the idea of being proposed to in a very public place. That sort of thing would horrify my wife.

One such example is something that Logtar says:

I now see that step in a relationship more logically and think it should be a decision made by both and not a surprise… I remember somewhat being pressured to propose on my first marriage, and we all now know it did not work out.

I disagree. I think that surprises along these lines are a good thing. Sure, hint around it, try to make sure you’re on the same wavelength… but once you think that she’ll either say “yes” or at least won’t blow up at the proposal, make it a shot in the dark. But that’s how I wanted to go about it and how I think that the significant significant others would have been on board with. I have difficulty contemplating going about it any other way, but presumably it was just what the doctor ordered for him and his wife.

The other comment is that pressured proposals aren’t necessarily a bad thing. If she wants to get married and wants the relationship to be headed there, I don’t think that she should just wait for him to get around to that mode of thinking. I know a lot of time lost by women being too passive about fishing or cutting bait. It often brings to light issues that could have laid semi-dormant for very long periods of time.

An article in the Wall Street Journal about a cookie that I’ve never heard of called the Hydrox:

“This is a dark time in cookie history,” wrote Gary Nadeau of O’Fallon, Mo., last year on a Web site devoted to Hydrox. “And for those of you who say, ‘Get over it, it’s only a cookie,’ you have not lived until you have tasted a Hydrox.”

Still reeling from their loss, Mr. Nadeau and other “Hydrox people” have yet to accept their fate. Some have started an online petition demanding that Kellogg bring the cookie back. They have collected 866 signatures. Others in recent months have reported Elvis-like sightings — and tastings — of the defunct product. {…}

Eating Hydrox was “a badge of honor,” says 54-year-old Charles Clark, who processes records for U.S. Army reservists in St. Louis. He remembers receiving a package of Hydrox cookies on his sixth birthday and sleeping with it under his pillow. “Oreo had all the advertising, but those in the know ate Hydrox.”

Hydrox eaters tend to be independent-thinkers, favor underdogs and be skeptical of corporate marketing, he says.

I’m not sure I’ve been witness to people identifying themselves by what foods they eat. The closest that I’ve ever come is when my friend Clint and I would make a big deal extolling the virtues of obviously unhealthy manufactured foods. We’d talk about how the breakfast burritos “transcended the genre” of breakfast foods because its eggs weren’t quite eggs, it’s sausage not quite sausage, and where one ingredient ended and the other began is a delightful mystery. We also had something going about Easy Cheese being a scientific marvel (“It’s not solid, it’s not liquid, and yet somehow it’s cheeze or something comparable to it!”) and how we were supporting the scientific community by indulging.

Those are mostly jokes rather than any sort of posturing. It seems to me that when it comes to food, most people posture not by what they eat, but by what they don’t eat. They don’t eat meat or they don’t eat inhumanely grown meat or they don’t eat at fast food restaurants or chains or anything with corn syrup or 100,000 other things. That’s how people set themselves apart.

The Hydrox people are sort of doing that by not eating Oreos, of course, and I suppose with Hydrox gone they too will join the ranks of at-least-I-don’t-eat-_______.

On a sidenote, is it me or does Hydrox sound more like a toilet cleaner than a cookie?

Spungen writes on what she hated most about not having money… and it wasn’t the lack of stuff:

The problem with a lot of people who promote the downscale, simple lifestyle is that they assume it’s all about decreasing consumption. They assume that being poor is merely about living without luxury goods. That’s never what I hated about not having money, though. No, it’s the people you have to be around, and the lack of insulation from them. People who have always been around other functional, educated, upper-income people just don’t get it.

Given that Spungen’s backgrounds are in modest in nature and that she’s had to live around less desirable folks, it’s no surprise that you see that as one of the big benefits.

Thus far I have not really used my resources to insulate myself from the undesirables for the most part. I live in a poor black neighborhood right now, lived in an immigrant community in Colosse, and lived among poor (and largely criminal) whites in Deseret. In Deseret we finally did move in part because of how un-safe we felt where we were living, but that was much more the wife’s issue than mine. On the other hand, if we had kids my attitude likely would have been very different.

Which sort of gets to the points of it. Though for a variety of reasons (thriftiness, convenience of location, etc) I choose to live where I do and when I have kids I can choose to live somewhere else. My situation is different from someone stuck here.

The biggest advantage for money to me is also not so much stuff, but rather security. Making the sort of money that we do and being as relatively advantaged in the job market as we are means that we can stockpile some money and if we have to go a little while without a job, we don’t get desperate and don’t have to take the first job that comes around. That right there is worth a heck of a lot of stuff. I’ve lived without stuff and I’ve been fine. I’ve never lived without security (if worse can to worse I always had my folks house to go back to) but the security that the money has bought me is extremely valuable.

For Clancy the biggest thing that money buys her is independence. When she got her full-ride scholarship to the University of Koroa, more important than the money was the fact that her parents couldn’t hold anything over her. Her career path buys her a degree of autonomy at work because of the nature of the medical profession, but the money she makes also buys here the ability to have more choices that fewer people have any control over. She doesn’t need to worry as much about satisfying the government for Fannie Mae, she can afford to pick up and relocate if she doesn’t like her job at any particular place or we don’t like our neighbors. The only person she has to work with on these decisions is me (and, as we’ve come to discover, the various state medical boards).

My primary use for money and Clancy’s primary use for money aren’t all that different in the greater scheme of things. That’s one of the things that makes our marriage work. One of the more alarming things about Julie and I back when we dated was that she loved her stuff. It was an issue with Eva, too, though she liked money for doing stuff and giving stuff to others.

None of this is to say that I don’t like my stuff. One of the better things about having money is that I can get stuff that I want without having to worry too much about it most of the time. My Pocket PC breaks? I can get another. The car stops running? I can fix it or if I have to start putting money down on another. I can do these things without having to worry about being financially devastated. That sort of brings me back to my security thing (I am insulated from the sound of my Pocket PC breaking) and Clancy’s independence thing (we don’t need to ask anyone for money).

Though I only proposed to one woman, I’ve planned scenarios for proposing to three different people over the course of my life. The first was Julie. I hadn’t figured out the specifics, but I was going to go into another conversation about how averse I was to the term “girlfriend”. At first she thought that my aversion was a cute personality quirk, but after one, two, and three years it became cause for alarm. She feared that it was a lack of commitment on my part. There were commitment issues involved, though that wasn’t indicative of them. Anyhow, I would start the conversation about how I didn’t like that term and that I preferred the terms “fiance” and “wife” and then I’d sandbag her with the ring.

As Web pointed out, Prudence’s column from last week didn’t seem to demonstrate the Dr. Lauraesque hostility of some of her more recent works. Web and I both zeroed in on this one:

I was reprimanded once because my boss overheard my conversation with a co-worker about my girlfriend. She poked her way into our conversation, asked me some probing questions, and left, then later confronted me in private. She was disgusted that I was talking about my inappropriate and immoral relationship. She said that because I mentioned my “girlfriend,” she could only assume I’m a pedophile, because a “girl” is a prepubescent woman. As the rules of the office stated, what mattered was that she was “impacted.”

I don’t know if this letter is real or not (I have some doubts), but whatever the case it’s true that if people want to find a reason to be offended they will. This is true of both liberals (“I don’t care what the dictionary says, ‘niggardly’ is a slur and you’re a racist for saying it”) and conservatives (“What, you say ‘happy holidays’ because you hate Christmas and Christians?”).

What was a bit head-scratching is not that someone would be offended by the term “my girlfriend”, but rather that the “girl-” part was what was deemed offensive. I would have thought it would be the “my”. The “my” can imply ownership. When I say “my car” it’s assumed that I have ownership or control over it. I don’t own “my apartment” but I am renting it with my wife. Mine, mine, mine!! It’s not always meant to imply ownership or control (I have little or no claim to “my hometown” or “my country”), but given the long history of male-female relationships wherein the woman was considered property, I could see someone wanting to be offended pouncing on that.

Of course, we talk in possessive terms about regular friends all the time, so that doesn’t make sense, either. Also, anthropological male-female relationships as they pertain to property don’t understand my equal aversion to the term “boyfriend” except there I envision a shrew demonstrating domination over a whipped guy.

In retrospect, my biggest problem with the term “girlfriend” may have been that I never had one and my problem with “boyfriend” is that I never was one.

Yet even when I got my first really serious girlfriend Julie, I still didn’t like the term. I was with Julie for over four years and I maybe called her my girlfriend half a dozen times. A lot of that was a holdover to the whole possessive thing, though the loopy logic there had dawned on me by that point. My rationale shifted from possessiveness and towards another rationale: referring to someone as your girlfriend or boyfriend reduces someone that you presumably care about to a position in your life.

That doesn’t make any sense, either, though. When I call my father my father I’m no more reducing him to a title than I am assuming possession of him. It’s a title, in a certain way, but it’s more of an immediate identifier. I don’t have to say “Bill Truman, military economist” or “Bill Truman of Ouchita”. I call him “my father” and people get a marker as to why he matters in regards to whatever it is that I’m saying about him. Is it somehow less respectful to refer to him as “my father” than it is “this guy I know”? Why would “girlfriend” be any different?

In retrospect, my problem with the term was really that I had gone so long hating the terms that I needed to find reasons to continue hating them.

Eventually that logic began to wear so thin that I couldn’t logically keep it together. I’d gone nearly five years without referring to Julie as my girlfriend and though Evangeline spared me of that whole quandary by keeping our relationship maddeningly ambiguous, the notion that I had and would continue to have people that I date exclusively on a regular basis meant that I needed to stop positioning myself as the romantic outcast. But I still don’t like the term and did not once refer to Clancy as my girlfriend while we were dating (not hard, we were engaged in pretty short order).

So with all logic on my previous two rationales sent out the window, what reason do I give? Ironically, the same reason as the dyke. I haven’t dated a “girl” in an exceptionally long time. Prior to Clancy, I dated women and not girls. Boyfriends and girlfriends, now that I was finally ready to admit that they were pretty useful terms, were no longer remotely accurate. As it turned out, Clancy felt the same way. We settled on “this guy/woman I’m dating” or more frequently “my lady friend” and “my gentleman friend”. I’d introduce her name in pretty short order so I could avoid that awkward phrasing.

I generally enjoy the Dear Prudence column in Slate and the videos showing on SlateV. She’s sometimes snarky, but she often gets letters that warrant it.

Today I got caught up and she came across as unnecessarily harsh on a couple of emails.

The first was from a self-described food snob complaining about her husband’s meat-and-potato preferences. I was all set to side with the husband, but for the most part she was just asking him to be a good sport and he wasn’t. My food tastes are much more like his than hers, but Prudence’s advice to be more flexible really seemed more to apply to him than her.

The second was from a single mother that has three strong romantic prospects and wants to know how to choose between them. Prudence gives pretty good advice here, but then in the middle of nowhere tears into her writer for sleeping around and exposing the kids to the men in her life. Maybe the mother was being irresponsible, but there wasn’t any indication in the letter. Then, after this little diatribe, she then gave some more good advice.

What do y’all think?

Bob wants to know why tattling should be discouraged in kids if we want people to come forward to the authorities as adults. Dizzy suggests that we don’t want adults to report rule-breaking, either.

It seems to me that it depends largely on what rule-breaking we’re referring to and, perhaps more importantly, who is engaging in the rule-breaking and who is being hurt by it. We don’t want anyone to tell on ourselves, but we do want people to tell on other people at least some of the time.

We love our whistle-blowers. Sherron Watkins became nationally known and admired for being a “whistle-blower” at Enron before that ship went down. So much did we need some sort of hero that we largely invented one out of someone that wasn’t. Watkins never went to the authorities and only really made noise within the company in the context of legal liability and not moral imperative. But our need for a “good guy” and our admiration for whistle-blower converged and she became famous and admired based only on the appearance of tattling on the crooked bean-counters.

We also want witnesses to step forward when crimes are committed and the authorities try to protect them when they do, though such things require more resources than we are willing to spend.

Other times, though, people who come forward are condemned. For every Sherron Watkins there is a Linda Tripp. Words like “snitch” and “tattler” are attacks on people whose only crime is telling the truth. So what gives?

The question I think that runs through most of our minds is whether we are more likely to be hurt by someone tattling on us for doing something of equivalent severity or more likely to be hurt by the person doing whatever it was that that the tattled-on person was accused of doing. When people told on bullies in junior high, those of us that were pestered by bullies did not see any problem with that while bullies and their friends were critical of such telling.

When it came to Enron, Watkins is alleged to have told on big, powerful mean people that were screwing over there employees. We have a lot more in common with the people getting screwed than the folks screwing them over. Yay Sherron! Boo Enron! On the other hand, if a coworker turns in another coworker for coming in half-an-hour late last week, we see ourselves as more likely to get chewed out by the boss than we do being hurt by someone coming in late some morning.

People want the ability to get away with as much as they can. They don’t want to live surrounded by potential informants ready to report their every infractions. For the most part people hate speed cameras trying to catch speeders because we have more a fear of getting a ticket than we do of someone going 7mph over the speed limit getting into an accident with us.

Of course, we also want protection. We want the drug dealers down the street hauled away in handcuffs. We want anyone that witnessed a murder to step forward. We want anyone accused of doing something worse than anything we would do (or would be in the power to do, a la Enron) to get hammered to the wall. Witnesses and informants make that happen and we’re all for them.

Wouldn’t it be preferable, though, for witnesses of all infractions to step forward? If we were forced to enforce all of the rules, we’d have to get rid of the bad ones and the good ones would be enforced. What’s wrong with that?

In an ideal world, that might be the case. Sometimes, though, rules are really meant to be broken. Or I should say it doesn’t matter so much of the rules are broken some of the time. As a pirate might say, it’s meant more as a guideline than a true code. It doesn’t matter if I’m not in my desk at 8 in the morning, but you have the 8:00 rule to make sure people are there by 9:00. You have an understanding that traffic, trainstops, faulty alarms, and all that happen from time to time, but if it becomes a problem the rules are in place to put the hammer down. Tattlers throw a big, giant wrench in that productive general understanding.

I got a nice little email from my ex-girlfriend Julie asking how things were going. Julie doesn’t usually email me out of the blue unless there’s something very specific that she wants to talk about, but this email contained nothing urgent nor any questions. It was an update of what was going on with her (mundane stuff, no new job or boyfriend) and a question at the end asking how things were with me. I would bet $1,000 that if I write her back, she will not respond unless I ask her specific questions, in which case I’ll get a concise answer and a promise to write more later, which she never will.

The only times she writes when she doesn’t have anything urgent are cases where, for whatever reason, she wants to re-establish that we are still friends. Actually, “whatever reason” isn’t accurate. She has a very specific reason for this need.

To test my theory, I shot an IM to my friend Tony and asked if he’d spoken to Julie lately.

“Yeah, actually, we got the car title stuff taken care of.”

I asked how it went, he replied: “She showed up, pulled out the papers and I signed them. She obviously wasn’t interested in any banter, but I tried to remain friendly and asked her how she was doing and such. She was brief in her answers, I told her it was nice seeing her again and said ‘okay’ and left. Probably lasted less then a few minutes.”

Julie hardly ever talks to Tony anymore. She never even told Tony about Ohki’s death, even though Tony was Ohki’s step-dad for longer than I was. Sometimes something arises, though, where they have to talk. Such was the case with the car title debacle (which I’ll write about at some point). Also, from time to time, Tony will email her to hoping with futility to mend some fences to subconsciously convince himself that he’s really a good guy at heart despite hurting her.

Whenever she is forced to talk to him, Julie starts talking to me. She used to do this because she pined for him or was really angry with him, but she’s mostly past that now. Now she does it to justify my anger. Julie doesn’t want to think that she’s the kind of person that can’t stay on good terms with her ex-boyfriends. She likes to think she’s above the anger and pettiness that accompany heartbreak, but she’s as flawed as the rest of us are.

So she emails me I think as some sort of subconscious reminder that “See? I can be friends with exes. Tony is just a doodoohead.” As long as she and I remain friends, that means that she is not the problem when it comes to the fact that she and Tony never talk anymore. She can attribute their breakdown as something unique rather than that she’s human and talking to a man that she loved devotedly for 5 years still hurts after nearly three years apart.

Despite the fact that I know that she won’t respond to anything I write back, I’m still going to shoot her an email. She’ll read it, her virtue will be validated, and I will have served my function.

Several years ago, she did something similar for me. After she and I broke up and she and Tony got together, I embarked on a pretty rocky path dating Evangeline, being rejected by Evangeline, being dumped by her, trying to date other people and failing, dating other people and getting dumped, and so on and so on. That’s not to say that I was some pathetic mess, a victim of mean women, because I gave as good as I got. But it was those times when I was getting dumped on that I most needed Julie’s services.

Whereas Julie emails me periodically as an affirmation that she can be a good ex-slash-friend, I needed affirmation that finding love was possible. By keeping in contact with her, despite the fact that we didn’t really have all that much to say to one another, I was reminding myself that I dated this beautiful girl for nearly five years and that I could have married her if I hadn’t left her. I didn’t want to go back to her or still be with her, but I needed to know that whatever option had just been closed off wasn’t the only option I’d ever had.

It sounds pretty melodramatic, but at that point she was the only serious girlfriend I’d ever had. She was the only proof that existed. It wasn’t even a conscious thing that I was doing. I learned of my motivations in retrospect, reading over some of the emails, remembering how I felt, and remembering how being in contact with her helped me feel.

Julie indulged me as I now indulge her. The emails more-or-less stopped when I met Clancy. Clancy was never jealous or anything like that, it was just after meeting Clancy my pointless conversations with Julie were finally completely bereft of point, consciously or subconsciously. Though I continued to try to keep in contact for a little while once Clancy entered the picture, when Julie didn’t attend my wedding I shrugged it off completely.