April 1995

I got jealous of Krafter sometimes, when we talked about doing things together or at BBS parties. We college students had to make time for homework and he had none. He went to work and came home; his day was done, and he could do whatever he wished. We went to school, came home, and spent our evenings doing homework! Ugh! It made it hard to plan anything, because we didn't always know if we'd have tons of reading to do that night.

In probably March or April, my friends told me Phil asked Astrid's roommate Chloe to breakfast on a Saturday. I believe this was before April 21. Before the meal was even finished, however, she got so annoyed by him that she made him take her home.

In probably April or May, Sharon and I found a preacher on TCB--the same preacher who taught Mike, Randy and me in Intro to Christianity! He posted messages in the forums, especially the religion forum. He posted a message once about not liking to teach college-aged students. I said to Sharon, "Hey! I was in his class!!" Sharon replied to his post with a remark about his prejudice.

Some favorite songs, usually alternative: "Starseed" by Our Lady Peace, "She's a River" by Simple Minds and "December" by Collective Soul. "Lightning Crashes" by Live was beautiful with an unusual, haunting video. It depicted a mother dying in childbirth and then becoming a bald angel, and made you want to cry. Though many videos of the time had already turned derivative and boring, this one wasn't. As Cugan and I picked up Tatiana in M--, just a short distance from My Parents' Basement, for an SCA meeting one Sunday, she sat in the backseat (which had to be cleared for her) and said she and Nadine just stared at the screen when they first saw it.

"Down by the Water" by P.J. Harvey was lovely and strange. "Can't Speak" by Danzig was both a cool video and an excellent metal song. White Zombie had a new album, which Lima praised in the music forum, and the debut "More Human Than Human" was wonderful (except for the opening, which I hear is a woman in childbirth, played backwards--but it sounds like a woman moaning during sex, and always makes me cringe).

Soon, shire business meetings would be held every week because of the upcoming Mermaids event, which the shire had held each May for the past two years. This was Mermaids III. Cugan was the Autocrat, or the one in charge of the event--and the one most frazzled. I went to the meetings with him, even though Mermaids was on graduation weekend and I wouldn't be able to attend or help out, except with cleanup. (Sometimes, I may not have gone to these meetings, since I wasn't going to be at the event and had to do laundry.) I even got to see the site, a campground near M--, which had a lake, trails, cabins, a few large, grassy areas for tents and archery and fighting, and real restrooms in the big lodge with its fireplace, main hall, and kitchen. There was also a dormitory building with showers. It was modern convenience mixed with camping out. Mermaids sounded like a lot of fun and I longed to go, but couldn't, promising myself to go the next year.

Otherwise, meetings were on the first Sunday of each month. I probably went to one on Sunday, April 2nd with Cugan. This was at a different house. Once, as I went down a flight of stairs to the outside, I heard Ayesha say to probably Donato, "Elspeth and Cugan!" (At the time, I wanted my SCA name to be Elspeth, though later it became Nyssa when I discovered a popular person in our region had the SCA name Elspeth.) She sounded happy that we were together.

Probably at this same meeting, Cugan turned over the Chronicler's (newsletter writer's) office to someone else. Cevante went up to him, put her hand on his back, and said, "See anything different about him? His back is so straight now that the burden is lifted!"

Probably on Sunday, April 9, Sharon's birthday, we held a surprise party for her. My 7th grade science teacher used to sing a certain song whenever somebody had a birthday. It had depressing but funny lines, such as, "You're one year closer to your grave." I discovered now that this was a popular song in the SCA. I warned Cugan not to sing it for Sharon, however.

When it came time to get Sharon to the restaurant we planned to take her to, I don't remember how my friends got her in the car, but I think they told her they were taking her somewhere else. She was suspicious even before they blindfolded her, and was a bit miffed because she saw me sitting at the computer while everyone else was going to what she figured was her birthday party. This just got her off the track, however; Cugan picked me up later and took me to the party. Charles and Krafter also went.

Krafter started talking about a recent TCB user party; Nobody got into trouble there, just as he often did online. Krafter said, "If I tried to explain this to somebody who didn't know about Nobody, they would be very confused to hear, 'Nobody was there, Nobody was causing trouble at the picnic, Nobody was mouthing off.'"

On the 13th or 14th, Cugan took me to his parents' house for Easter Break. I had the flu. It had made the rounds in the apartment; for days I watched my roommates get depressed as the flu dragged them down. Now it was my turn. By the way, I took a flu shot back in the fall.

Cugan told me he used to live in Florida until he was about 11 or 12; they left because of the humidity and to be with his mom's family. Oh, yeah, and don't forget the oversized bugs. Cugan's grandmother and aunt still lived in Orlando.

We got back, and I realized we shouldn't have gone on the walk, or at least not such a long one, because now my throat was sore. Cugan apologized, and made me some hot chocolate. He was a mother hen over me the whole weekend while I was feeling miserable because of the flu, and I thought that was sweet.

We went to Illinois, near Chicago, to see Cugan's aunt, her Filipino husband, and Cugan's cousins. One girl was about my age. Sara was a senior in high school. The boy was the youngest. The girls were gorgeous, with their mix of Filipino and German. In 2006, I found a picture of the eldest girl, who was with one of her children; she was dressed up, and looked like a supermodel. I said to Cugan, "I'm glad she's your first cousin and you couldn't marry her!"

I'd heard a bit about these cousins; Sara was much like Cugan, and he loved to talk with her. Once, I found Cugan talking with her in her room. I joined them, since I didn't want to keep sitting with a roomful of strangers. I had a lot in common with her: we'd both taken French, we liked Christian music, and we were intellectuals. In other ways she was a lot like Cugan: she'd say, "Things are going really good, so something bad must be about to happen."

Cugan's parents had two cats and a big, white dog named Snowball. I believe she was a white Siberian husky. Snowball kept barking at me because I wasn't family. The little black cat, Shady, was supposed to be Cugan's, but he'd moved to an apartment that didn't allow pets. The other cat, Zucker, was white with dark and light patches, like brown and white sugar mixed together (hence the name, German for "sugar"). Shady was nervous with strangers, but Zucker--typically a cat who didn't like anyone to touch her except for Cugan's mom, except when she was in the mood--loved me. She kept coming up to me and wanting me to pet her. Cugan said that when he went back to his parents' house the next time, she was probably going to look up at him as if to say, "Where is she?!"

In time, these things happened: Zucker got friendlier, letting people (especially me) pet her, as long as we kept to the proper "zones," especially the face. Snowball sat near me one day, and I started petting her. She let me pet her for some time. Then she suddenly looked up, realized it was me, got up and ran away. She started barking to reinforce that I was not family.

Back to Easter weekend. I'm not sure when I found out that, while I was out of the room, Cugan's parents told him he shouldn't have a girlfriend while looking for a job. (He'd recently lost his job.) Cugan disagreed, and they argued. But after that, he began acting distant and easily upset with me. I knew I couldn't possibly have done anything, yet whatever I did was wrong. I'm not going to "throw him under the bus" like Dr. Phil's wife supposedly did with him in her new book, so I won't give details.

On Monday afternoon, Cugan drove me back to Roanoke, stopping to get some fast food, which we ate in a S-- park. We had a long conversation; I remember seeing deer off in the distance as I shocked Cugan with accounts of the abuse I'd suffered from Phil.

I told Catherine about it on probably Wednesday, and said I feared he was going to break up with me. She waved that fear aside. She told me to make a little card for him, and I worked on it that night. I covered it in Celtic knotwork on the front, including a yellow snake with a knotwork tail, and colored it with marker.

Around dinnertime Thursday afternoon, Cugan showed up. We were to get dinner at a fast food place. I went out with him to his car and gave him the card I'd just made; he sat there reading it. He later told me that card made what he was about to do, so much harder. (I was glad to hear that.) He then said he was breaking up with me because we were too much alike, we had too much in common. But the way he treated me afterwards was far different from the ways Peter and Phil had acted: He was actually nice to me. So I knew he was different--which made it even harder to have to say good-bye to him.

He said, "I may change my mind: I'm always second-guessing myself," and to call him on Monday, when he got back from an archery trip to Canada with Donato. He would be gone all weekend. No guy had ever told me to call him after a breakup. If anything, they didn't seem to welcome my calls, or want to hear anything I had to say, even though I had a right to say it.

We finally parted. I took my food inside to the study room, where I had a hard time eating it. I called Catherine and left a message on her answering machine. I needed to talk to someone, and asked Sharon to come talk to me. I had a hard time getting anything out, though my tears had abated, and I think I had this weird feeling like things weren't so bad. Before I could say much, I heard the phone ring from the bedroom: Catherine.

Mom was mostly cheerful, it seemed, with the attitude that it wasn't hopeless and she didn't think this breakup was going to last. Dad seemed to have a similar attitude. When I told him Cugan said we were too much alike--which to me was odd, because Phil and Peter had said, "We're too different"--he said, "I've never heard of people being too compatible."

Incidentally, the date was April 20. The day before was the two-year anniversary of the fire in the Branch Davidian compound, in which David Koresh and his followers were killed, and also was the day of the Oklahoma City bombing. I don't remember if I knew about the bombing; I may not have been watching the news that day. Two years later, April 19 was our wedding date, not realizing that it was the anniversary of these two things. We didn't realize when we set the date that April 19 had any such meaning at all. We just wanted an April wedding, the pastor gave us two choices for dates, and we picked that one arbitrarily. How's that for irony? When I first discovered it was the two-year anniversary of the bombing, I wondered if it was a sign not to get married, along with the terrible snowstorms that kept hitting whenever we tried to go to Indiana to get wedding preparations done. (Once, we even had to stop in Germantown, stay with Cugan's parents overnight, and reschedule the next morning's premarital counseling for the week of the wedding.) If these were signs, we ignored them, and so far our marriage has been a happy one.

But back to the breakup. I had Chaucer class with Catherine the next morning, Friday the 21st. As soon as she had the chance, she said to me, "Guess who called me right after you hung up?" It was Cugan. I won't say what they talked about, just that it was encouraging.

I don't think I cried all that often. I was upset and sad, but hoped things would be different this time than they were the last times I went through breakups. I have never understood the male aversion to women using letters to fix relationships, but I didn't want to deal with yet another guy getting freaked out by the very sight of paper in his mailbox. I still started work on a list of things to say, since Cugan actually allowed me to call him.

As I worked that afternoon, Phil came by and hung around by the circulation desk while Astrid's roommate Chloe and I worked there. He put his books and Big Slam Dew on the counter and said Persephone had been trying to get him to go here and there. I forget where. I thought it was strange, especially since they were not dating anymore, and I didn't know why she'd care where he was. He kept talking and joking with us. I realized just how annoying his jokes could be. But in a way I welcomed him being there, because he was a distraction from sadness over breaking up with Cugan. I didn't want Phil back, even though at the moment we were both free; I wanted Cugan. Phil was just a distraction in the library.

Chloe kept making pointed barbs, and I made a few, too. The Roanoke play for April 20 to 22 was "Hedda Gabler," which I didn't see. Phil was in it. He and I debated if it was "GABE-ler" (which I got from my World Lit teacher, the hot Wesley) or "GAHB-ler" (which Phil said).

Over the weekend, Friday or Saturday night, I went on America Online (AOL) to forget my problems for a while in the Christian Fellowship chat room. First, there or in some other chat room (probably Starfleet Academy), some guy kept IM'ing me, or sending me instant messages, while I was trying to answer other people's questions in the chat room. I didn't know who he was, but he kept telling me to call him on the phone. I didn't want to call him, and his persistence made me wonder if he was an Internet stalker. He gave me his number as proof that he was okay, but it still didn't convince me. I also didn't want to call some stranger long-distance in the wee hours of the morning. Because his IM's kept delaying my replies to other people in the chat room, they told me to do certain things to block his IM's. But before I could decide whether or not to do this, I found my connection cut off. I'd heard of AOL users doing this to new users, and I wondered if the IM'er had done it. I re-logged on, and stayed online this time.

That night or the next, the Christian Fellowship Room seemed pleasant for a time. I hoped these people could cheer me up, though some of them seemed to say a few too many "praise Gods" for me and seemed a bit unreal. But I liked it there, and figured it was the best place I could go.

Then some Internet trolls came in and began to stir up trouble. They were non-Christians, or more like anti-Christians, trying to get a rise out of the Christians. One of them said he listened to devil music--alternative--including Nine Inch Nails, what do you think about that? I typed in that I listen to Nine Inch Nails (NIN), and I identified with the line of the current song "Hurt" which said, "Everyone I know goes away in the end." This guy typed back, "My gosh, you do [listen to NIN]."

One guy came in and was merciless. It was very late now, and the number of people in the chat room dwindled. He was verbally abusive, and when I gave him no reason to be upset with me, he made one up. I don't know why he had it in for me. As well as I can remember, here's what happened:

One person I'd already met online before was in there, Cybrmonkey, a nice guy. Someone thought this name meant he believed in evolution. This guy was more liberal than many of the people in there, but he believed no less fervently than they did. I liked talking with him.

Apparently some question about current events came up, and I must have made a comment that I hadn't heard about that yet. The Abuser said I should just go look at my neighbors' newspaper. Considering it was late at night, my neighbors wouldn't have a paper outside their door no matter if I lived in a dorm or in the suburbs, so this made no sense. Probably for safety reasons, I didn't want him to know I was on a college campus, so I simply said my neighbors probably didn't have a paper anyway. (Unless they bought a USA Today from the box outside the Campus Center, it was unlikely they would have one. There were papers in the library for anyone who wanted to read them, and there were even foreign newspapers, such as German and Chinese ones, so the Asian and Bulgarian girls in the next apartment might not even bother having their own subscriptions. But if they did, I wouldn't be able to read those, anyway.)

The Abuser said, "You probably don't even know your neighbors," and went on a harangue about how awful I was to not know them. Considering I lived on a college campus, knew one of the girls next door, had plenty of friends, and my neighbors changed every year, this was silly to me. I don't remember if I said much of anything about it, though.

The Abuser liked Cybrmonkey, probably because he was more liberal, but hated me, probably because I was more conservative. Someone asked a theological question, and I gave a possible answer, which I thought was very intelligent and well thought-out. The Abuser wrote, "Go to bed now, Estrella."

The Abuser cried out at one point, "I can't believe you have the same name as my sweet grandmother!" I had no clue why he talked to me this way. He didn't know me, and I hadn't ridiculed him, harassed him, or in any way treated him bad.

I finally went to bed, long after he told me to, disgusted with this guy and wondering why in the world he would want to harass anyone like he did me. That's when I began to learn that there are many creeps in cyberspace. I didn't learn until later that they're popularly called trolls, or that the best way to deal with them is to not respond to them at all.

Though I was sad that weekend, I wasn't as depressed as other break-ups had made me. This may have been for four reasons: one, I was still stunned; two, we'd only been together for a little over a month; three, there was a very good chance that on Monday he would want me back; and four, even if he didn't, there were others who would.

The Three Musketeers, the recent Disney version with Charlie Sheen, played on Lake-TV at three p.m. on Saturday. (This was the movie I planned to see with Phil on our first date, until he showed up too late and we had to see Cool Runnings instead.) Though I was sad and didn't enjoy it as much as I would have, especially the romantic parts, I still liked it. (I had no idea that I would later see it with Cugan, and it would become one of our favorite movies.)

I had seen a poster around school advertising SEEK, a temporary employment agency. I asked Catherine about it, and she said it was a good company, where she worked herself a few summers before. (I had no idea that she'd worked as a temp at Wilson Mutual Insurance Company, and that I myself was going to work there in the summer. I would get that job as a temp-to-permanent position through SEEK.) I didn't know much about temping, so when I was accepted by SEEK, I thought my job situation was secure and I would have all the money I needed to support myself in S--. I didn't know that job assignments could be sporadic.

On Monday the 24th at 9:30 a.m., Catherine drove me to the tiny SEEK office in a white house in S-- to take tests on typing (I think I got to about 70 words per minute) and other skills, such as proofreading. Afterwards, I was given an interview by the branch manager/office specialist. She assigned jobs to the temporary workers. She said I did remarkably well on the tests. The proofreading test had, I believe, maybe one or two things wrong, if anything, and most people didn't do so well as that. She noted that I was quiet and would probably prefer a job in which I could sit quietly behind a computer and work.

It took me a lot longer to take the tests than Catherine expected, however, so we got back to Roanoke late. (I guess I'm just slow and careful to avoid mistakes. It could very well be an NVLD thing.) I hurried to the library and explained to librarian Flora why I was so late. She didn't care. They were very laid-back about such things, but I think the fact that I told her and it was because of a job application made her even more lenient. After all, work-study bosses aren't like real-world bosses, and don't care if you're out looking for a job to replace your present one when the school year ends.

On Mondays, I had no classes and worked until 4 p.m., so it was either late afternoon or early evening when I called Cugan as he had asked me to. When he said hello, I said, "Hi, Cugan," just as I usually did when I called him. He got very quiet for a moment. I had no idea that he was thinking how good it was to hear my voice. I thought he didn't really want to talk to me. I asked him to come over so we could talk. He said, "I guess I owe you that." Wow, Peter and Phil had not been so fair or reasonable. The conversation was short, and we soon hung up.

We sat on the couch and talked. I won't repeat everything, just say the outcome was better than either of us expected: we got back together. We made a date to go to an English country dance practice in a nearby shire on Wednesday night.

Over the next few days or weeks, he explained that our time apart showed him what I meant to him, what he really felt for me. He also got sick from the same flu I had; he brooded and felt miserable all weekend. Once or twice over the next few years, I teased him that he got sick as a punishment for breaking up with me, and deserved it.

He was in the car with Donato for long periods, of course, and the subject of the breakup came up. To my surprise, Donato told Cugan the very same thing I wrote in my diary at 1:31 a.m. on the 21st: that if it comes back, it's yours, and if not, then it never was. I was shocked to hear that someone had said that to the dumper for once and not just the dumpee. I mean, after all, the dumper is the one who would go back to the dumpee, not the other way around.

Wednesday, April 26. Since I didn't have a morning class on Thursday, I could manage the two-hour drive to the next shire with Cugan for dance practice. Around 4:30 he came to get me, going first to dinner, probably Burger King or Hardee's. It wasn't a garb night, or night to dress in medieval clothes; that only came every first Wednesday of the month.

At the dance practice, I met such W-- shire people as: Abigail--who was from the hippie generation and still believed in/practiced free love; she once offered to take away Cugan's "innocence," but he refused. Jakob--her boyfriend at the time, now husband, who used to belong to a small SCA household called Weasels, and would hit on anybody, man or woman, though Cugan hoped that when he called him cute he didn't really mean it that way. Cronan--a short young man with very long, brown hair who was very sweet and easygoing, and whom I often talked and dance with). Hillel--who was in Abigail and Jakob's general age group, and used to be a DJ on WAPL, a classic/modern rock station in Appleton.

The group was lively and happy to see a newbie, so I felt like the favorite of the night. Jakob taught me some of the steps. Cronan probably led the group, as he did for at least a few years after. The music was on tapes played on someone's portable stereo. On these tapes, a man named Calvin would say a dance's name, then the music for that dance began to play. The W-- dancers usually said, "Thank you, Calvin," having heard him announce every dance for who knew how many times. (Cugan had been going to these dance practices for a couple of years already.) The dances were not actually "period," but English Country dances from a bit later. Cugan even recognized one of them in a Jane Austen movie, probably Emma. There were Road to the Isles (my favorite), a twirling dance; Hole in the Wall, a kind of line dance with couples exchanging partners and switching places; Trench Moor, which I thought was Trench War, and certainly looked like a war with its pandemonium; and a dance involving foot taps and twirls. There were probably other dances as well.

From Wednesday, April 26 through Sunday, April 30, my day planner read "Thesis--type." The first draft or two had now been written and reviewed by Dr. Nelson. I had to fix it up and, on Monday, give it to the teachers I'd chosen for the review committee. Though some teachers wanted a thesis to be about fifty pages, Pelton set my minimum length at about thirty pages instead. I don't remember why; maybe he wanted to eliminate the padding that students often do to fill long papers.

As I sat at my word processor, typing and proofreading, the TV-movie Joseph played on TNT. It was an excellent movie. I had my TV on in the study room so I wouldn't miss it. I didn't have to come up with new ideas, after all; now that I'd already written my first few drafts, the rest was easy. The thesis I'd feared for so long, turned out to be not nearly so bad.