Dieting, and an August 5, 1987 card

I had a little book with lists of food and the calories they contained. This was back in the days before everything you ate had nutrition information and there were no digital means to track your fitness or eating. Every morsel that I put in my mouth was written down in a notebook with a calorie total next to it. If I wavered in my devotion to this irksome task, a picture of myself at my most rotund had been pasted into that very same book as well.

After two years of this sort of recording, I started to relax a bit in my eating, but not in my exercising. I had started to play racquetball for up to two hours with whatever willing opponents I could find and allowed for the occasional pizza or cheesecake to creep into my routine. I did this less because I couldn't bear banishing these treats from my life than out of a desire to be a "normal" person who ate these types of things. I managed to do this and still continue to lose weight, though I did panic when I got sick and couldn't burn more calories with copious amounts of exercise.

I had an eating disorder during my childhood and young adulthood, and I swapped it out for a different type of disordered behavior in college. Instead of compulsively eating, I started compulsively exercising as fear of not continuing to lose weight and to eventually be physically rejected by Tito when we finally met face to face gnawed at me.

I wrote this card from a Pizza Hut and it wasn't the first or last time that I talked about what I "indulged" in and how I was going to rein myself in later in compensation. I often felt that I had to prove to him that I wasn't going to return to my former weight by explaining such adjustments.

Being Organized, and a July 30, 1987 greeting card

At some point around my 20th birthday, my mother bought me a file cabinet. It wasn't like a typical office cabinet as it only had one compartment on top for files and a shelf below it. The top held hanging file folder and was beige. The bottom was dark brown and was where I could store random books or other items that were too bulky to be stored in file folders. It had a locking top, though I rarely felt the need to secure it.

I doubt many young adults wanted a file cabinet for their birthday, but I did. I became very organized from a young age which helped a lot when it came to my expanding and expansive KISS collection. I had more posters than my walls could accommodate and had a system for keeping the extras in tubes in a manner that allowed me to easily locate the ones I wanted when I was ready to "redecorate" by swapping them around.

Despite my high levels of organization, I sometimes lost track of things. I think this was down to having more volume and less about a failure on my part to keep things in order. The card that I'm sharing today was one of those things that I lost, then found again. It wasn't unusual given the staggering amount of correspondence that I produced for things to be set aside and forgotten, then discovered and completed.

Linda, and a July 29, 1987 greeting card

Aida once told me that communicating with a friend who you loved was so good that you just wanted to "inhale" him or her. Since childhood, that was how I felt about a few of the children of my father's booze buddies. Being with them wasn't just a matter of passing the time, it provided a sense of completion in those moments which was otherwise absent from my life.

Linda was one of those types of friends for me for several years. She and I did more sleepovers than any of my other friends and I remember setting up a small tent and camping out in our front yard so we could giggle and talk well past our bed time. We had also had an experience during one of her previous nights spent at my house which encouraged us to get out of the house.

My parents had come home drunk and noisily had sex while Linda was there. We were watching T.V., but it couldn't drown out their squeaky bed. Afterwards, my mother came downstairs and asked me to remove a splinter she'd somehow gotten into her toe. Linda tried to suppress her titters as my mother slurred her words and remained oblivious to just how much we'd (unwillingly) overheard. Both of my parents were too dull and self-absorbed to think about how they may have just embarrassed themselves when a guest was in our home.

When we were teens, we used to spend hours at the mall in the biggest nearby town. This was when arcade games were a big deal and we'd waste a lot of quarters playing "Space Invaders" or "Dig Dug". When Linda ran out of money, I promised her a dollar more to continue playing if she'd pick up a bunch of random flyers lying in a pile on a bench and hand them out to people. She gamely did so until the stupid joke wore thin and I gave her the cash. As we walked back to the arcade, we saw a scattered pile of the same flyers on a distant bench where people who'd taken them from her abandoned them once out of sight and we both burst out laughing.

Linda's family rowed in the same socioeconomic boat as mine so she wasn't as put off by the squalor we lived in. I knew that she didn't spread our (literally) dirty secrets as some other kids did after seeing how we lived. She was also the only person who I knew who defended me in school when other kids made fun of me.

Linda was two years younger than me and said that, one day while my class was outside playing softball during gym, hers was sitting in an English class. I was horrible at sports due to my weight and Linda told me that the other kids in the room were laughing at me as they watched from a distance as I struggled to hit the ball and run to bases. She told me that the English teacher told them to cut it out and that I was smarter than them and read books. He said that they would do well to follow my example. I think Linda told me this to make me feel better, but it only further clued me in on the fact that I was being mocked and bullied not only by the kids on the bus and in my grade, but by the whole school.

As the years went by and I went to college, lost weight, and got a job far from home, Linda and I saw each other less and less. I tried to hold the friendship together, but she became too busy with her own life. After she married my class's biggest loser and had a baby, she didn't have time to spend with me. It wouldn't be accurate to say we grew apart, but our lives did.

Linda was the last in-person friend from my hometown who I "inhaled." Then, Tito came along, and I could draw him in day and night, and I did. When a fresh supply of tapes showed up in my mailbox, I was filled with joy. When the mailbox was empty, I played the old ones again and again. He was the air I breathed and provided a sense of completion found in another person that I hadn't had since childhood. This happened even before we got into our long distance relationship, and this was something I tried to communicate in the card pictured with this post.

Patience, and a July 28, 1987 greeting card

I was six years old and crying in bed when I was supposed to be going to sleep. My mother walked in and asked my sister what was wrong with me. She said, "She's upset because she wants that doll." I had discovered a black Barbie doll named "Christie" and I felt that I had to have it immediately or that it would be the end of the world. That was the first and last time I can recall sobbing in desperation and impatience for a material object that I felt I would never have. Several months later, my mother did get me that doll for me despite the relative expense. She was my first and only Barbie. I remember being so happy to finally get what I wanted and was in love with that doll for quite some time.

I have never been a patient person as indicated by that anecdote from my childhood. I literally felt pain when I had to wait for something I desperately wanted. While I have managed to expand my ability to wait as the years have gone by, I was less capable of managing my feelings at 22 when I got into my long distance relationship with Tito than I am now at 55.

Part of the ying and yang of impatience is that it can be highly motivating as well as emotionally draining. My way of managing it was to analyze the circumstances I was in and to construct as many emotional bridges and connections to Tito as I could. Much of my early correspondence reflects this, and much of my later correspondence reflected my resolve crumbling and reforming.

Imagining, and a July 26, 1987 greeting card

"We think of ourselves as floating outside of our bodies...big heads just floating outside," said Mary. She stood at the front of a graduate school classroom in chunky heels and layers of old-lady clothes. She was chubby, talked a lot, and loved to tell embarrassing stories about her clients when the students laughed. I found her sharing stories about clients with substance abuse issues urinating themselves while their mortified family pretended nothing was wrong as part of her comedy act in poor taste and questionable ethically.

What Mary was trying to say in an inelegant way was that we often perceive ourselves as a conscious entity that exists separately from our body. The real "me" isn't locked into a meat sack, but exists in the ether. When we think about being loved, we want people to love that body-less self—what some might call a soul.

I spent most of my life feeling separate from my body because it was something that I mentally wanted to push myself away from. It was a prison that I was trapped in, not "me." When I fantasized about being loved by someone, I couldn't put myself in the picture. I had to inhabit another role, another body, another person. I was an actor playing a part in my own fantasies because I couldn't bear to see "me" as being with the body I was in.

I wondered if Mary, who was physically unattractive, talked about this mind-body disconnect because she also wanted to distance her sense of her consciousness from her physical body. I had read her book in which she had had a meltdown because she was in love with her partner in her therapeutic practice and he didn't want her back. She spoke with disdain about a woman "in a sparkly tube top" who interviewed for a clerical role that this man fell in love with. It was clear that she felt he loved a body, and not a person because she would have been his choice had he been less shallow.

Given my experiences with Mary in the class that she was teaching, I think she overestimated her appeal on a psychological level. She admitted she had attention issues, and she did. When she was in the room, she had to be the one speaking and the center of attention. She was also prone to crying and having mini-fits any time a student disagreed with her and had one big meltdown in front of us. With that sort of emotional manipulation and lack of control, I'm not sure her partner would have found her appealing spiritually either, but Mary imagined she was much better than "the woman in the sparkly tube top," who she felt was unworthy of even having a name and Mary reduced to an object.

When I lost weight and felt more in tune with my appearance—though I never entirely got there—I felt more aligned with my physical presence, but I still struggled to imagine myself in the picture as a corporeal entity. It didn't help that the "me" that Tito fell in love with at a distance was actually pure personality. Unlike most relationships, he really did fall in love with my conscious self as I did his.

Once we declared our feelings and made a commitment, I had to make purposeful efforts to align my thinking with the idea of being physically in the relationship as well. This was the hardest part for me given my body image issues and fears about physical rejection. It was an act of will to see myself as a (relatively) "normal" person in this way since every "relationship" I'd ever entertained in my mind to that point was my mind in an imaginary person's body living that person's life.

This card was a part of the process of pulling the physical "me" into the relationship with the conscious "me." (Note: this previous note pages on Calvin Klein stationary were included in this card, which is why every square inch isn't scribbled all over with words.)

Hugs, and a July 25, 1987 greeting card

I was sitting on the bleachers in our school's gymnasium. It had been converted into an "auditorium" by pulling the seating, which could be pulled out and pushed back like the bellows of an accordion, away from the walls. My class of 1982, which had exactly 82 graduates after the drop-outs and failures, was waiting nervously for commencement ceremonies to start.

Valerie walked up behind me and embraced me around my shoulders for a warm hug. A short time before this moment, I'd awkwardly given her a silver identity bracelet as a graduation gift. It had been a "hit and run" present because I lacked the social skills to remain present with gratitude. I sat there feeling like I'd successfully escaped any emotional displays when she hugged me.

Val had been my best friend for the last three years of high school. She was beautiful with long, straight, brown hair and big brown eyes. Her figure was nearly perfect in a voluptuous way with large breasts and hips and a small waist. Her physical attractiveness wouldn't have been so remarkable if she hadn't been so kind to me. Most of the pretty people didn't want to have anything to do with me, but she talked to me when few others would. She also gave me the first hug I could remember.

While I'm sure that my parents likely hugged me on occasion as a very small child, it happened outside of my conscious memory. No one in my family was comfortable with any sort of touching and my father was especially resistant to showing physical affection to his daughters. As a result, when Valerie embraced my shoulders from behind, I was frozen in shock and didn't know how to feel or respond. I didn't react, and she wandered away to continue her preparations for the ceremony.

Tito had told me that he loved hugs more than anything and would take a hug over a kiss from a girlfriend. Though I had rarely had such experiences, I wanted them, and I was sure I'd welcome it when we finally met. This is the card that I sent to express that desire.

Obession, and a July 25, 1987 greeting card

A heavy wooden side table was next to my mother's favorite chair. It was a chunky thing that could have supported the weight of an adult man. While no one ever stood on it, it was the resting place for my mother's flotsam. This included stacks of open and lightly skimmed junk mail, empty mugs that once contained Nestea instant tea mixed with hot water and powdered creamer, and stacks of cheap romance novels.

My mother was obsessed with paperback bodice rippers. The covers were always the same with minor variations. Manly men and womanly women who dressed in clothes that revealed their well-appointed bulges graced every tome. If you looked at their posture, there was always a sense that these strapping men were both protecting and dominating the women next to them.

I occasionally glanced at my mother as she spent hours reading these types of books. Her face registered more emotion while engaging with them than it ever did when dealing with her husband or children. She'd smile. Her eyebrows would arch. She'd look engaged or excited. She'd frown, which was the only expression from her that we shared with the books.  

The books were my mother's obsession because they allowed her to live in a fantasy existence. She needed this to survive the harshness of her reality. If she was given the choice between living with poverty, an alcoholic husband, and the squalor of our home and envisioning herself as the comely servant woman who the handsome and wealthy lord of the manor fell in love with, she'd choose the latter.

I never read those romance novels because I spent my time weaving my own fantasy worlds to escape reality. When Tito came along, I became obsessed with him and he became my default thought any time I wasn't occupied with work or other tasks. Our long distance relationship was where I imagined a better life. The main difference between my mother's obsession and mine was that mine carried the hope of turning into reality.

This card was written a week after Tito and I committed to our long distance relationship and details very well how preoccupied I was with him.

Reception and Transmission, and a July 24, 1987 greeting card

One of the many things I learned during my relationship with Tito was how reception of what you say shapes what you transmit. I wrote a lot of letters and made many tapes in which I poured my heart out to him. I was incredibly vulnerable and admitted things I would never have said to anyone else. With one sentence, he could have curtailed this tendency by making me understand in ways subtle or gross that such things were not welcome. But, he never did. He was so emotionally available that I could tell him my joys, my sadness, my fears, and my pains, and he'd take it all in.

This experience was enlightening in a way that I would never have imagined. The contrast between how I formed a friendship and later relationship with him was so stark that it made me reflect on my other relationships in ways I would never have done so otherwise. When everything works the same way, even if it works poorly for you, you think that is the way of things. When something comes along and works so much better, you start to question what is wrong with everything else. Over time, I also considered how my reactions were limiting how other people talked about their lives to me. It was transformative on both sides of my relationships.

My nosy mother may have wished for a more emotionally intimate relationship with me, but the way in which she reacted shaped the limits on our relationship. Every time I talked about a hardship in my youth and she said, "You think you have it hard, you have it easy compared to my problems," she let me know that she didn't want to hear about my pain. Every time she belittled my accomplishments by telling me that my grades meant I was "book smart, but lacked common sense," she let me know that she didn't want to hear about my success. One invalidating remark after another formed the boundaries of how intimately she could be involved in my life, and she didn't realize she was the one hammering in the posts in the fence I built  around myself.

As I post more of my written correspondence, there will be a lot of emotional revelation, because it was what I was experiencing and Tito welcomed it. It may seem a bit much for my readers as they may feel discomfort with so much emotion and self-analysis. For me, having one person in my life with whom I could tear down all of the walls was liberating and it made Tito and me closer than most people will ever be.

Memory, and a July 22, 1987 greeting card

One of my friends remarked to me that he felt bad about how little of his childhood he recollected based on how much of mine I remembered. While it is true that I have a lot of memories that are quite clear and well-developed, and my sister confirms the ones that are shaky, a big part of how much I remember comes down to three things.

One is that I reinforced those memories by writing them down a long time ago, often multiple times. I had about 20 pen pals by the time I was 17 and I didn't have a kaleidoscope of experiences to relate to them on a regular basis. It wasn't uncommon for me to relate the same stories again and again to people.

I believe the second reason was that I grew up in an era with far less media saturation so I was less distracted and more engaged with my world, troubling and troublesome as it could be. I wasn't spending my days distracted by Netflix, surfing the web, or playing video games. The norm for me was being present in the world and observing closely. When you live in a state of hypervigilance, this is necessary, not just a product of curiosity.

The final reason is that I'm a very emotional person and the feelings you have at the moment a memory is formed are encoded with the details of an experience in your brain. Strong emotions and detailed memories stick out like mountains in the memory. People who aren't present live life in a blur because they're not reacting. The memories are plains of indifference.

All of that being said, without my enormous stash of correspondence from the time of my long distance relationship, I wouldn't have the details required to write my book with any sense of accuracy. It comforts me to have such granularity to my story because I value truth and complexity. Many of my cards and letters to Tito were about detailing my history and reactions in a way which I wouldn't otherwise recall in such detail.

Limerence, and a July 24, 1987 greeting card

I follow a community on Reddit which talks about limerence and how some people are enslaved by their feelings for someone who doesn't return them. One of the questions that often comes up is why some people are limerent. This question is proffered as a way of figuring out a "cure."

Many people think that it's a spin-off of OCD since part of experiencing it is obsession with someone who you believe you are in love with. I can certainly see this connection as I experienced it when I was infatuated with "Henry." I don't feel that the compulsive part of OCD really fits the experience though. For me, fantasizing about or being preoccupied with the object of my desire was too mindful to be a compulsion.

Based on my experience of falling out of love with Henry, I believe that limerence is a way of dealing with a sense of incompleteness in your life. This seems to be especially so when you've grown up in hard circumstances or have low self-esteem. I used fantasies of being loved by a kind person and living a normal life as a way of creating a positive narrative in my life when one was entirely absent. It was a way of surviving everything that hurt me by imagining another possibility.

If I were to get metaphysical, I would say that I was born to be limerent because the way it made me tick set the stage for having a long distance relationship with the person I was destined to be with. I was already practiced in weaving realities of a relationship in my head with someone long before Tito came into my life. I was also used to sustaining myself emotionally with hope when no tangible reality was at hand.

Many of the cards, letters, and cassettes that Tito and I exchanged were about sending the threads of those cloths into the gap between us to integrate the bond I was fabricating with him. It was easier at first because it felt more real.

Gift duplication, and a July 22, 1987 greeting card

I had pen pals all over the world, but most of them were in the United States. At the highest point, I had 20 people who I kept up regular correspondence with. The core was a smaller number and this group engaged with me more as a friend than just a fellow KISS fan. I'm still in touch with a handful of them to this day, but mainly through Facebook.

With so many of them, one might expect that birthdays would be a cornucopia of presents. I had little to complain about in that respect. Some people would send me a KISS picture. Others would send me items which were more oriented toward who I was as a person.

More than one of my pen pals paid attention to my saying that I liked impressionist paintings and responded by sending me a gift of note cards with said paintings on them. One of them was from Dina, as mentioned in a previous post. Another was from Jo. They were identical boxes of blank cards. This happened despite the fact that Jo lived in Pennsylvania and Dina lived in Alabama.

This happened because shopping in the 80's was a more uniform experience than it is in the current culture. I've remarked on this before, but our cultural touchstones were far fewer than they are now because we all had access to far fewer people, places, and things. We had three TV networks and PBS with a handful of other channels that ran re-runs of ABC, NBC, and CBS shows. It was much easier to have things in common and talk about shared experiences then because we all shared similar ones.

Stationery was a popular gift choice among our pen pal network for obvious reasons. If we wanted to get something, nearly every one of us went to the local Hallmark store at our respective malls. Unsurprisingly, they didn't carry a vast array of note cards with Impressionist paintings so both Dina and Jo bought me the same gift. It was for this reason that Tito ended up with two cards with the exact same design in a short period of time. Well, there was that and the fact that I'd forgotten which of the four designs in the box I'd already sent him.

Comics, and a card from July 21, 1987

In 1987, pop culture was a more unifying force across generations and classes than it is now. Considering how tribal people are in this day and age, that may seem hard to believe, but, hear me out. Imagine your grandma, your aunt, your dad, and every classmate in every grade of your school reading the same comic strip every Sunday that you read. That was the power of the Sunday funny pages in the pre-internet age.

Neither Tito nor I were huge comics fans, but we both were familiar with the big guns of the newspaper "funnies." He knew them and liked them better than me because his family subscribed to the local paper and mine couldn't afford it. I only initially knew them second-hand through newspapers I ran across at work or at my maternal grandmother's house. When I got older, I spent more time at the local public library where I'd kill time on occasion by reading popular comic book collections (e.g., Peanuts, Garfield, Cathy, etc.) while my mother did something boring.

Many of the greeting cards that I bought and sent to Tito featured the comics that were popular in that time. The reason I chose the designs that I did wasn't because I had an affinity for those comics, but because they expressed something I felt at the time. This Cathy comic was especially relevant in the early days after our relationship started and I was getting love via expensive telephone calls.

Privacy, and a second July 19, 1987 greeting card

It's hard for me to imagine what levels of privacy people who didn't grow up in my home possessed because I so rarely had any. What little I had was constantly being interrupted by surprise guests or people who my parents decided should spend the night for whatever reason. In the card I'm posting today, I mention a surprise visit from my cousins who were going to stay with us for three nights. This wasn't especially unique except that these were the "good" cousins who had never stayed with us before.

The "good" side of the family was the maternal one and the "bad" was the paternal one. My mother's relatives rarely visited and never had their children stay with us because of the state of our family home. We were beneath them, and that was always clear. The reason my aunt's kids stayed with us was an emergency health situation with their father and no one else was willing to look after them for an extended time. So, they were too good for us, unless they needed us.

This card was written one day after Tito and I talked on the phone and started our long distance relationship. It seemed all too common that my privacy was yanked away from me at the most inopportune moments. It's no small wonder that I felt like fate was sitting around chuckling at my misfortune. Even in the best of times, things could be difficult or tricky. My privacy was taken away right when I most wanted to celebrate my new status as a partnered person.

Being a "bitch", and a greeting card from July 19, 1987

When I was younger, and far fatter, I was always the "nice" girl. Even when I gave kids my lunch, helped them with homework, and was unfailingly friendly and kind to them, many kids bullied me and treated me as if I was dirt that they wouldn't even deign to walk on. I had to be "nice" all of the time to keep whatever scraps of kindness blew my way.

After I lost weight, people started treating me like a normal human being. I discovered that I didn't have to constantly bribe people by letting them walk all over me. I wasn't mean to people, but I definitely started to push back on occasion when people treated me poorly. To me, having any boundaries or self-worth was "being a bitch." That's because all of my life, I'd had to sublimate my needs and hide my reactions in order to not be treated even worse than I already was.

I sent Tito this card, which fit who I saw myself to be, but wasn't who I actually was. Of course, it took me years to realize that not putting up with other people's crap constantly didn't make me a "bitch."

"Rockin' Fred", and a July 9, 1987 greeting card

I tried to begin most of the cassettes that I made my pen pals with a song. I had what I would now regard as one of the world's biggest collections of awful hair bands. History has proven that they were also quite forgettable. Groups like Cinderella, LA Guns, Riot, etc. saw much more airplay than they deserved thanks to my talk tape habits.

Playing these groups for friends was about showcasing my "coolness" to them. I liked the kind of music that I should like in order to fit in with a bunch of KISS fans. Long before it became common to talk about one's "tribe," I belonged to this one.

Since Tito wasn't a KISS fan, I was not obliged to play only my "tribal music" to him. I was free to be a "me" which would could alienate me from the other heavy metal and hard rock members who I tended to correspond with. One day, I played an unusual record and wrote on the label "Rockin' Fred." It was something I never played for anyone else.

Tito got my tape and, before listening to it, he talked about the label for a brief time. He then paused in his recording and popped the tape in to listen. When he came back, he said, "Shari, you're weird!"

Tito had told me that he was one of those people who struggled in the mornings to reach consciousness. This was, no doubt, due to his late-night habits messing up his circadian rhythms. I didn't tell him that though because I wasn't judging. I did send him a song that I hoped would "assist" him though. It was Mr. Rogers singing a "wake up" song. "Come on and wake up! Come on and wake up, now."

The weirdness didn't end there. It cropped up from time to time in cards and letters. This was one of the earliest examples.

My commute and a July 7, 1987 greeting card

I got up at 6:00 am and crawled out of bed. This was more than a little precarious because, though I was 22 years old, I still slept in a room with bunk beds with my sister and I was on the top. My sister's bed was starting to fall apart and my dad had nailed both beds to the wall in order to grant us some stability. The risk of my coming crashing down and killing her was still there, but relatively minimal.

Besides our beds having a pretty creaky infrastructure, there was a hole in the thin plaster wall next to my sister's bed. It had started as a crack and had crumbled more and more over time. The hole led to the stairway to our wet, dark, and mouse-infested basement. In the winter, cold air bled through the hole and we had to be sure to cover it with a plastic trash bag.

After dragging myself out of the top bunk, I'd sit in front of a make-up mirror with two wings with rows of lights. It was a small thing meant to resemble the sort of glamorous mirrors actresses planted themselves in front of as they prepared for stage performances. It was dingy and my mother had picked it up at a yard sale some time ago. It helped me get my contact lenses into my bleary eyes.

In the dim early morning, I used this to carefully put on my face for work. I'd line my eyes, put on some shadow, and mascara. I never used foundation because it made my skin itch, but I didn't need it because I had beautiful, pale, blemish-free skin. I also eschewed any sort of lip make-up because I'd long ago given up on attempting to enhance my small, thin-lipped mouth.

After applying make-up, I'd get dressed and hustle out to my Chevette and drive an hour to work. I usually drove too fast and whipped around curves at somewhat unsafe speeds. I would have done the same for the hills except my puny, little car could barely manage them. This speed seesaw didn't keep me interested in the drive enough to stop my brain from occasionally kicking into beta mode. Sometimes, I'd make this long commute and arrive at work with no memory whatsoever at having done so.

This speedy trip was even faster on the way home from work since I was more anxious to leave work than to arrive. Knowing that I'd received correspondence from Tito only made me drive faster on the way home. I never got a speeding ticket, but this was no doubt courtesy of my underpowered vehicle rather than any prudence on my part.

"A Listening Box For Humanity", and a July 4, 1987 greeting card

Our guest arrived at 2:00 pm. She was a fellow student in graduate school. We talked about many topics of interest including gossip, complaints about classes, and the future. At her departure around midnight, she was still talking animatedly as she was when she first  arrived. As she stood in the doorway as I tried to get her to go home, she finally paused in her speaking about herself and said, "how are you." That was the first question she'd asked me in her 10 hours in my presence. During her entire visit, she did nothing but talk about herself.

When Tito and I were pen pals, the thing which made the relationship so different was that he didn't just talk at me. He asked me questions and listened to my answers. I told him that one of the reasons my relationship with him was so fulfilling was that he interacted with me like a person he was interested in and everyone else treated me like "a listening box for humanity." I recognized this difference in the following greeting card:

Dina, and, a May 21, 1987 greeting card

(Click on any embedded image to load a larger size)

Dina was one of my three pen pals from Alabama. She was 5' 6" tall and slender with huge eyes and long eyelashes. Her lashes may have been augmented by Max Factor, but there was no denying that she was the prettiest girl in our entire network of correspondents. She dreamed of being a model and once sent me a set of professional black and white pictures of her posing in various ways. One of them showed her full body profile with her posterior to the camera and her twisting around to smile for the camera. She had a great figure, though was probably too short to be anything other than a catalog model.

Her beauty likely informed her personality difference among those in our network. She was confident, strident, and outgoing. Most of the other women I corresponded with were fat, unattractive, or socially incompetent. Some were all of these things. Dina was definitely the most popular of us with men. She had more boyfriends than all of the rest of us combined.

Despite being pretty and popular, Dina was warm and kind to her fat friends. This wasn't my usual experience as most people dismissed me or treated me as unworthy of attention if they knew my weight. Dina was also different in that she paid attention to what I said and liked. Most people gave me gifts that they wanted to receive rather than thinking about who I was and what I liked.

In my early college years, I took an art history class. This was when I was an "undecided" major and flirting with several options including art, math, chemistry, and psychology. I didn't end up studying art, which was probably wise considering the lack of career options though I doubt psychology was a vastly more profitable option in the long run, but I did find that I liked impressionist painters.

Dina took note of this and sent me a box of greeting cards with four impressionist paintings on the front for my birthday around 1985. I was delighted with the glossy printing and blank interior. When I wanted to send a pen pal a special note, I used one of these cards.

The first card I ever sent Tito was on one of these cards. I've since learned the proper use of "literally," and, since I'm clearly still alive, it's obvious that I was incorrect in my wording.