Clarissa the Great

I'm tired of constantly mocking myself and Kriston, so I've decided to spread the love around, and start publicly mocking my friends and loved ones. Now don't get all huffy and indignant and ethical, you voyeuristic bastards. You know you want it.

I have a very dear friend. We'll call her "Clarissa." Clarissa is a source of endless amusement to me, and better yet, does not know that I have a blog. So, perhaps she will become a source of endless amusement to you too. Does this make me a blog pimp, now that I'm selling my friends out for a laugh? Eh, I leave that to the philosophers. Onward.

I have known Clarissa since the fourth grade, but our official friendship did not begin until seventh grade. Because she was tall and blonde and had elephantine breasts for a young lass, and because in the social hierarchy of elementary school, this is a golden ticket to the elite caste, she did not deign to be my friend until the ravages of junior high and an unfortunate foray into Western wear had shed her of her reputation. She had joined the losers, our twitchy pile of humanity at the end of the lunch table lurching around with crippling neuroses and insecurities that caused us to compensate by hairspraying our bangs to ever higher heights. (I would just like to have a moment of catharsis and tell you that Honest To God, I once walked out of the C Hall bathroom (hello? the eighth-graders hall?) with a line of toilet paper stuck to the bottom of my shoe. And per the cliche, yes, it was pointed out to me by an eighth grade boy on the basketball team. These things happen, and they happen to people you know. We'll save the onset of menstruation and implications thereof for another post.)

But back to Clarissa. Clarissa has been trying to get married since, oh, I'd say 9th grade. By that time she was a worldly 14, she'd been through the whole dating thing, and she was more or less ready to find a nice soulmate and settle down already. At some point I started calling her the ringwraith, and it just keeps getting worse. I was reading the other day about a tribe in the Amazon that has no distinct word for the concept of "one." Instead, they have a word that indicates "a relatively small amount." The absence of the discrete integer "one," renders them unable to count. I believe dear Clarissa can relate, because she found "The One," by my count, approximately five times. And in this, the first of possibly many Clarissa installments, I present them to you:

The One #1:

He was a new kid in highschool, two years older, and he listened to the Dead Milkmen. He drove us around in his van that had the back seats artfully ripped out. He lived in a gated community, but he wore his ripped-up t's even to the country club, so serious hardcore. Clarissa turned into an Alterna-teen, and I just jumped on board for the Flaming Lips and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. He taught us to drink coffee. He took us to flop-houses for addled itinerant young crackheads who put on house punk shows in East Dallas. He claimed that he could talk to cats and see the auras of trees. We believed him because, well, we were idiots. It was true love for awhile, but then you know, sic transit gloria. While they were breaking up, I went to go hang out with him at the movie theater where he worked and he tried to hold my hand. I was totally freaked out and felt dirty and awful and I never told Clarissa. I think he subsequently might have become gay-ish.

The One #2:

Total hippy. Dead Milkmen was gone, Grateful Dead was in. He drove a VW bus. Clarissa threw out the knee-high alterna-teen socks, chucked the Jesus Lizard tapes, stocked up on hemp and flax, started buying cigarettes in singles because she hadn't worked her way up to a pack, stopped shaving her legs for nine months, and told The One #2 that she had actually never shaved her legs before. The One #2 and I didn't get on so well. This was to be a trend. He left for Europe (Amsterdam, natch) and she dumped him. I think he also became gay-ish.

The One #3:

Another hippy, which was convenient, because Clarissa had already blown a wad on a new wardrobe. The One #3 and I really didn't get along. I was a square. He was a free spirit. He was making my best friend a big turd. They followed Phish and went to Amsterdam. She contemplated a VW bus of her very own. It was true love forever, until college happened, and the ambition this implied was too much for the relationship to bear. Poof. He didn't go gay, but he did move to Alaska, learned how to blow glass to sell on the streets, and got some big gnarly dreds.

The One #4:

Oh my God. This guy was such a complete waste of human flesh that I did not allow him in our house. The One #4 met Clarissa at a point when she was a accomplished senior in college, taking LSATs and on her way to Law School more or less on a whim, as she really was not interested in practicing law. But that's another issue altogether. The One #4, on the other hand, had been kicked out of college for low GPA (an impressive feat at our merciful public institution), was on probation for DWIs and therefore without wheels, and had recently been fired from his job at Blockbuster Video. He sat at his house all day waiting for Clarissa to pick him up and buy him things. He liked to tell Clarissa she was stupid, which was pretty rich indeed. Never was a boyfriend hated like The One #4. I shall never forget the look of horror that came over the faces of our circle of friends, when Clarissa announced she might invite him to join us for tubing. We will drown him, we warned her. Drown him DEAD. But, she eventually had to move away to law school. When he told her that he wasn't interested in moving with her, she considered screwing off of law school, but some gleam of sense must have intervened, because she went anyway, and left him in the Dustbin of History, which believe me is a Ritz Carlton suite compared to what he deserves.

The One #5:

When Clarissa told me she had met a great, nice guy, I knew one of two things to be true: 1)He was another worthless chump like all his predescessors; or 2) He was a nice guy, and therefore I needn't bother learning his name because he'd be gone in two weeks. Lo and behold, something was rent in the fabric of time, and it came to pass that Clarissa had truly found happiness with a lovely human being. I like him. She likes him. He likes her. We like us. It's almost too much to bear. So it seems The One has been whittled down from Five to a manageable single, solitary unit. Stay tuned for future installments of The Hitching of the Ringwraith. Girl's got plans.