Steaming Cup of Quirks

I used to steal the clothes off my sisters� Barbie dolls so that I could test them out on GI Joe. I�ve never really had a fetish for cross-dressing, but there�s definitely something to be said for muscular thighs escaping skin-tight, army issue short shorts, leading to big beefy calves stuffed into the equivalent of 6 inch bubble gum pink high heels. I don�t know what, but something�s to be said about it. Without ever being told explicitly, I sensed that this fascination would not be shared with as much enthusiasm by my family and the boys in my class, and so I never did say anything about it to anyone.

Somewhere around the age of 9, I realized that the pink high heels, let alone muscular thighs and beefy calves, sadly just weren�t in my future. The disappointment I felt was nothing compared with the growing sense of solitude that ensued, and the increasingly urgent need to seek out others whom I could say such things to. One would hope that this might lead to the development of a personality, an eagerness to please that would lead to quick friendships � preferably the kind of friendships where the deepest darkest secrets in your heart find themselves being whispered out over tea at a corner table of some gorgeous caf�. I had hoped that large brimmed hats would be involved, the kind that not quite deliberately hide your eyes at the instant of truth when you�re still unsure of how you�ll be judged.

Unfortunately I found that I looked horrible in hats �especially the kind of enormous hats I envisioned with feathers or veils or fruit, and, unable to find an acceptable substitute, my caf� dreams were forcibly scrapped. The solitude lead not to the development of this quirky yet lovable personality I had hoped for, but instead quickly turned into what passes today at best as a mild obsession, a compulsion to keep searching out suitable substitutes for that caf� and the rows of hats not lining my closet shelves.

In the quest for the caf�, I have lived in the South, the North, the West, and the East. I�ve lived in the mountains and the plains, desert and humidity, country and city, but never have I found the exact right opportunity to sip and whisper of footwear. Without my chosen hat to conjure the eccentricity I desired, I found myself groping for just the thing that might accomplish the same goal. Smoking was a good start, and I found a great deal of common interest in others, but the hacking and coughing made my whisper raspy and difficult, not to mention breath so bad that no one would care to be close enough to hear me. The need to quit led directly to knitting so I could have something to occupy my nicotine stained fingers, but left me with little more than large, uneven afghans with cigarette burns in random patterns that seemed to signify both my efforts and my failures.

The search continues as each day I greet the dawn with a �hmmmph�, turn to SP and redeclare that life really sucks. If only I could find that place, that accessory, that certain something that will make life bearable again. Although the overwhelming likelihood is that I am just deeply in need of drugs and/or therapy, I�ve decided upon a more mature and much easier approach� leaving the country.

Deciding that I�ve tried the four corners of this one, and seeing as how it just gets scarier and scarier � especially now that we�ve got yehaw in the White House trying to turn the constitution into a document of hatred and bigotry once again, I�ve started begging SP to help me learn French and take me to a land where everyone wears hats in caf�s and everyone hates Bush. I can clearly envision myself now, Je deteste le president americain, I�ll whisper through the steam rising out of my tea cup, mais j�adore le GI Joe�