Reasonable? I don't think so.

When I was eighteen, I was in a play. Actually it was one of many. But I met three boys painting sets there while I rehearsed. Could I ever have known the impact they would have on my life at that point? Hardly.

The first took my virginity and made a joke out of it. The second did a real tap dance on any self-respect I may have had, which admittedly wasn't much. I married the third, the rest of which is, as they say, history.
This chance meeting happened over a decade ago. And why am I thinking about it tonight? Well, while on myspace.com, looking for someone else entirely, I stumbled across Number One and Number Two, within minutes of each other.

Neither appears to have changed that much, not at least judging from what I saw on their pages. It utterly freaked me out, though. What on Earth was I thinking??? So maybe I have changed more than I thought I had. It just threw me for a loop to see that Number Two had listed in his lifetime accomplishments that he had "dated a girl way out of [his] league and held onto her for a year before [he] dumped her." He used those exact words ("out of my league") to my face ten years ago..and then he dumped me. LOL There is no doubt in my mind that it was me he was talking about, unless he has made a pattern of that particular relationship train wreck. And if he has, God help him. But..

Wow. There's a side of someone I never wanted to see, even ten years and a lifetime later. Hurting someone as a lifetime accomplishment...

It made me sit and think for a few minutes. The first thing that came to mind was that .."wow".. above. And following close on its heels was "How godawful sad.. and not for me."

It made me question for a moment how much of this whole strange relationship dance in my life was influenced by people who didn't deserve to influence it. And how much predetermined beliefs and strangely bent perceptions cloud my thinking now.

Wouldn't a reasonable person be able to jettison the high school trash a long time ago? Why does it fascinate and amuse me to discover by accident what I should have seen coming ten years ago from a mile away, and still never saw?

I make the same mistakes as everyone else. If everyone else beats themselves up the way I do when they make a mistake, or a bad judgment, or don't see the oncoming train, a lot of people must be walking around black and blue on the inside. I know this.. but the paranoid little JW girl who still lives in a corner of my brain is still looking for solutions to all of the riddles of my life, even the stupid high school ones that really weren't even all that hard.. just to make sure that I never make the same mistake twice.

Or three times. ;-)