Please tell me there are occasional Nuns & Gigolos parties to complete the set. I want this to be true.

I have multiple exes, but only one worthy of this thread. First, the stuff that's not exactly bad, just signs we were not going to be good together:

* Got a free trip to Venice and Rome as part of his college's choir, proceeded to never leave the hotel room for anything but performances and once to buy me a souvenir.
* Wanted to get married immediately on graduation, then move back to Fresno and buy a house, wherein he and his wife would have two children. Two, because he liked his older sister but not his younger sister, so clearly two was the right number for child harmony.
* Offered, when I pointed out I was not into this plan, to fund a summer of the two of us backpacking across Europe. When I pointed out he hated travel and didn't like seeing new places anyway, said it'd be fine because it'd make me happy. This was both sweet and worrisome, given context above.
* In fact, he was generally willing to go to great expense and lengths to do things I was into to give me company, despite having no interest in those things himself. This was, again, both sweet and not a lot of fun for either of us.

The actually bad:

* Would tell me about his Struggles With Porn Addiction, with implication that if I made out with him more he wouldn't be so into porn. When I said I didn't care if he watched porn, he would explain that it was evil, and I should be upset.
* Spoke to me passionately about how nice it was to meet a girl who wanted to wait until marriage for sex. (I was down for that!) Complained to me about people and fictional characters who got all hot and heavy before marriage. Complained to his sister, my best friend at the time, that I was uncomfortable when he wanted to make out, while I was under the impression I was virtuously keeping us from being led into temptation.
* Would be very smug about how nice it was that I didn't wear makeup, and how no woman ever should. (I did not tell him I went without makeup because I was lazy, clumsy, and cheap, not because of any objection to it as a fashion statement.)
* Borrowed my laptop. Dug into my files. Found my embarrassing half-written fanfic, never posted. Confronted me about having written stories in which people were implied to be about to have sex.
* When we finally broke up, gave me a dramatic letter to read, with the middle portion stapled together in case I wasn't ready for the things in that part. This is how it came out that when he talked about his struggles with porn, he meant he hung out on forums where other people posted child porn, which somehow had never been part of the "I should stop watching porn because God disapproves" discussions before. He spoke dramatically about how terrible it was, assured me he wasn't into that stuff anyway--it just always popped up if someone went looking for porn on the internet! honest!--and when I asked him if he had reported it to the authorities, claimed that of course the FBI was constantly monitoring those places anyway because they were so easy to find by accident.

My biggest sign of my own emotional growth during college is that I had the sense to break up with him before graduation.

I thought that there were only a few fertile really hot women in the Citadel, and the Warboys were the product of all the other fertile women from the crowd who weren't pretty enough to be in the harem. After all, the crowd doesn't seem to have many children in it, but they're all sticking around, so I figured that all the healthy-ish male infants were being swiped for Warboy indoctrination (or given up--at least you know your kid will live a few decades that way!) and so forth.

All the serial killer stories sort of blend together, honestly. The memorable one was the story of a man reading backwards through his diary, while sobbing, while he went to mail it to his ex-girlfriend. It was a tedious sequence of drugs and sex and staring into each other's eyes, and she had broken up with him by sending him a letter explaining how he was just too good for her but she'd always treasure their time together. After we'd soundly criticized that one--unlikable protagonist! unrealistic love interest! too much crying!--the writer said it was pretty much autobiographical.

Awkward.

But the serial killer ones? I honestly can't remember any of them except for the "...so were they having sex, or was that murder?" one.

Huh. I guess it was just the Creative Writing class that I was in where everyone ended up writing about serial killers, then.

Seriously. Every single time there was a new round of stories to read in class, at least one of them was about serial killers. One time we read a story about a really awkward nervous shop teacher in high school who hits on a new colleague and invites him home, and we all said we liked it except that at the end it wasn't really clear if they were having sex or if the protagonist was murdering his colleague.

Turns out it was murder.

I honestly can't tell if this is a parody of the #GamerGate flowcharts or one someone has been sharing as an actual serious argument.

Which I guess gives me a warm fuzzy feeling about how little respect for the OMG CORRUPTION people I have in all this. Yay! Go me!

I still can't figure out if that's better or worse than my history textbook (made for super-conservative religious people homeschooling their kids! like, so super-conservative it made my parents uncomfortable, and my parents were ACTUAL MISSIONARIES) that brought up MLK and then went "Also, he cheated on his wife. He totally cheated on his wife. We should talk about this so that you should know to be really wary of people everyone says are really good people and who everyone admires because did we mention he cheated on his wife?"

...I guess both versions suck lots. That's a safe conclusion.

Seventh Grade: I'm attending a public junior high for the first time ever. We have also moved from near-tropical climate to the frozen land of Northern California. I have just discovered that my "unique" first name is shared by half the girls in my class. One of those girls asks me where I got my amazing jacket, because she wants one just like it. I tell her--proud of both the thrift and the opportunity, the way this makes it one-of-a-kind--that we got it at a thrift shop.

Approximately ten seconds later I realize she's mocking me. I spend the rest of the semester reading intently during all lunch breaks. I pretend to be spacey and distracted and don't react when people call my name, because either it's not me or they're just going to make fun of me again.

Fifteen years later, I tell this story to my therapist, and she asks me if maybe that girl was asking an honest question, and was complimenting my jacket sincerely. I realize this is the beginning of the end of that professional relationship.

I tried to read the books as a child, and was bewildered because they were so different from the movie. But that one scene, where the baby has forgotten where she came from, and someone notes that Mary never forgot, is the ONE SCENE that has stuck with me all these years later.

Much of this is good advice! Some of this I am side-eyeing a great deal. A publisher that pays its authors in books, not actual money, does not seem like a legitimate press to me. A publisher that asks people to do professional design work and then pays them "eventually" is not a business but a hobby.