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6:51 p.m. - 2012-02-05
french blog and nancy
I finally succeeded in getting a genuine "blog perso" on a genuine French (ie in France) blog web site!! I had found a couple of blog sites i liked on google.fr but i couldn't get the account confirmation e-mails on my US gmail account, so I finally got a got a new gmail.fr. account and said I lived in france, and I was able to get an account confirmation email and start a blog. I was suprised this worked, but it did.

Now I can be narcissistic AND do something constructive (work on my french) at the same time!!

My friend Susan called me (and I missed the call, but it woke me up) this afternoon when the kids were at Matt's and I was sleeping face down sprawled across Marley's bed -- I meant to take a break from cleaning for just a second -- and I woke up from this long and very vivid dream about Nancy, my French prof/advisor/friend/??? from a long time ago... for a long time my primary feeling about Nancy was, well, flat-out confusion. This happened to me a lot at that time in my life, late-teens-early-20s, and I think now that I am older and wiser that what I thought were intense, undefinable friendships were, for the folks on the other end (with one exception, much older and originally mentor/teacher/parent types to me) probably romantic/sexual, or inevitably headed that way.

And Nancy was one of those. Sometimes I toy with the notion of what would happen if I got back in touch with her, now that we are long removed from professor/student ... I talked with her on the phone a few times when Marley was a baby, four or five years ago, and we didn't particularly connect, but we didn't see each other in person or talk that much either.

In my dream -- it had something to do with a summer language course at the college, or something -- I was there, as a grad student or something, with not only my kids but a bunch of my nieces and nephews as well, and I was trying to keep track of them and keep them all diapered and go to class, and Nancy was in a different cottage on the grounds, which she shared with her MOTHER, who had altzheimers or something (or else was just as damned crazy as nancy always described her). She was chasing her mom around and I was chasing the kids and we were both trying to get to our classes and we would see each other in passing but never really have time to talk at all. In the dream, I desperately wanted to talk with her and would follow her with my eyes while I was chasing diaperless kids around -- I wanted to be with her more than I had wanted anything in years, I realized in the dream.

By "be with" I don't mean anything sexual, although perhaps I do because I still haven't figured out what "anything sexual" is -- in real life, Nancy always made my heart flutter and I thought about her all the time, and I wrote down and memorized nearly every moment with her, even the way she squeezed fruit in the grocery store (which drove me nuts). I thought about her all the time.

At the time I was quite certain that we were both heterosexual and that I just had close friendships with other women; she apparently thought it was more (and that that was "inappropriate")... for about five years my only thought was a befuddled "huh" but for the last few I have wondered ... if? What if, free of our male components and the old teacher-student restriction, we had dinner again and she didn't draw whatever line she drew and I, never one to draw a line when adventure beckons, were to go with whatever happened? Or maybe if I, always one to nudge things in the direction of adventure if I have the opportunity, were to nudge?

I'm 32 and I've never had a lesbian relationship, not so much as a lesbian fling (messing around out of pure curiousity with a hetero girlfriend when drunk does not count) and I've never made the effort to have one because I don't like lesbians!! I'd just as soon date your average joe schmoe with a beer belly who hangs out at the bowling alley as your average dyke; I'm just not into homosexual women. It's ostensibly straight women who have always fascinated me, but they've never been much interested in me, or else our "friendship" has been quite private and something SHE would not want to be public... and heterosexual men are the ones who pursue me, thus I date, screw and marry them. There's a lot to be said for being able to share a house and hold hands in public.

But if I had a chance to have a relationship with one of the women who once fascinated me... nah, my mind says. Because I've always been fascinated by women who are more than a little bit crazy -- like I should talk, but crazy in a way that actually put me in sort of a protector role (probably what I find attractive althoguh I find THAT disturbing). Nancy probably spent half her income on her shrink and she would get on these crying jags and cry and cry and cry and say she didn't know why -- and I would hold her, which at the time was new for me but probably would have gotten old. I wonder if she has gotten any internal toughness, any sense of self-worth and any ability to laugh at herself in the past 10 years? I know that I have, and I am a lot less naive, and I have a lot less patience for my own inner angst and other people's as well.

Anyway after I woke up from that dream I went back to reading "Memoroires d'une jeune fille rangee" and suddenly noted the writing, "m, pour feter tes 20 ans, n" -- tiny letters in blue marker, Nancy's-- I didn't realize she had given me that book. she gave me a lot of books, most varying degrees of disturbing, but I hadn't realized she gave me that one. How ironic, since all of what I've read so far -- 100-plus pages -- is about what a nauseatingly wonderful and happy childhood Simone de Beauvoir had. how contented she was with herself, her family, her looks, her relationship with her parents, her sister and god! N and I both profoundly hated ourselves as kids and were objectionable in many ways to the people around us and very unhappy; how bizarre, and why, did she give me that book?


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