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Warning for decent people: VERY LONG RANTING POST! Sorry about this, guys. I'm trying to get something painful out of my system. I figured Apolyton might be at least a relatively literate place to do it.
I was reading the vasectomy story in the second post in this thread here, and it reminded me of something very similar to something that happened to a (former) friend of mine. Unfortunately, he doesn't have the picaresque ending of that story and it has made me and a lot of my circle of friends very pissed.
So this one guy - let's call him H.K. - I've known since I was a teenager. We literally met each other on a bus in the middle of a Chinese desert west of Beijing in 1994. He had an Atari handheld, I had a Game Boy, and we played video games to pass the time. I also had some Spellfire cards and we played those.
Since then, we're like... well, probably siblings is the best way to put it. We used to thrash each other on Street Fighter, and I was the one who introduced him to American computer RPGs (Ultima, Baldur's Gate, even his one great love - pen-and-paper RPGs like DnD etc.). Even last year we did a fair bit of multiplayer nonsense on Gamecube and PS2.
So we're close, and like any brother of mine, I don't want anything bad happening to him. Sadly, over the course of the last year and a half, he's demonstrated such bad judgment with this one girlfriend that I and pretty much all of his other friends have more or less disowned him.
Last August he met this woman who looked a little older than him, whom I'll call BPW. Not by much, but she looked like she was in her early-thirties, which is a bit of a gap for a guy who's in his mid-twenties.
At first, she was good looking and a fun person to be with. She'd come up with activities to do and knew all the best places to hang out. She had a knack for getting her way with the service staff. We thought she was a nice enough person.
Then I actually had to spend time with her over a meal. Face-to-face, BPW was a mass of hidden insecurities, thinly-veiled belligerence, and worst of all, she dominated my friend and nagged him like he was her kid. At restaurants, she would browbeat the wait staff and peek over my friend's shoulder whenever he was ordering food, putting her oar in with such gems as "Honey, don't you think that's a bit too rich for you?" or just plain "Don't get that, honey, it's not good." We realized that her ability to get people to do what she wanted to was clearly a mixed blessing - she had no qualms about trying it on us.
The first evening she left her purse at a club near where I lived after an evening out together. Despite the fact that we'd all dispersed to go home, when she discovered, hours later at 4 a.m. that she'd lost her purse, she called my cell phone asking me if I could go and retrieve it from the club - which by that time had closed. When I decided it was too damn early in the morning to answer a call that disturbed my sleep, she called back again, and again, and again. (Four times in total, and after that I turned off my phone.) That's the sort of person she is.
We started to avoid her when possible, though we were left in the uncomfortable position of somehow keeping in touch with H.K.
One time we had agreed to meet with her to go for food at about 7 p.m. one night, and she was in a shoe store trying on shoes. Now, don't get me wrong - like any gal, I'll testify that shoes are important in a way that guys just don't understand... but we literally did not get out of the shoe store until 9:30. She had to argue with the service staff, and spent the entire time wedging her feet into and out of shoes while complaining that she had delicate heels. Meanwhile my friend is sort of just standing with an embarrassed look with my boyfriend in the corner, both of them behaving as though their boss' dog had just laid a massive turd in the middle of the room but nobody had the balls to say anything about it.
Eventually I resolved the situation when she went to the bathroom and I followed her and mentioned offhand that he restaurants would be closing soon and if that happened, I was going to go home with my boyfriend. Sure enough, the restaurants we wanted to go to were all shut that night but we found someplace small and then pretended it was the object of our evening's plans.
She also was very nosy as far as family went. Within two weeks of meeting him she was complaining to us about how HK never showed her pictures of his family. Within a couple of months, she was dragging him to her hometown to meet her parents.
Perhaps the most extreme example of how BPW has my friend under her thumb is when he wanted to go back to Taiwan. Now, his family lives there and he'd planned for a trip back since July 2006, before he met her. The trip took place in November, and it was just a chance for him to go back and see his parents and sister.
Turns out she had different plans. Without telling anybody until about a week before her departure, she had booked her own flight to Taiwan and back - a day before and a day after my friend's. It's like she couldn't let him out of her sight for even a few hours. She turned up in Taipei about 20 hours before he did. I have no idea how his parents reacted to this development. She claimed they loved her. The rest of us reserve our judgment.
Matters progressed. She pestered him to move out of his apartment and into hers. We all told him not to do it - if he had any doubts about whether he liked her enough, he should stay in his own place until he was sure. Drawing on my own knowledge, I let him know in no uncertain terms that once you move in with somebody you lose so much privacy and autonomy just as a matter of course... and it looked like BPW had particularly strict standards to which she wanted to limit his autonomy.
HK meekly nodded and hemmed and hawed distractedly every time we discussed this, and reassured us he'd be firm... and then he'd do exactly the opposite of what we suggested.
He moved in with her in March or so, which now meant that even having a phone conversation with him with any degree of privacy was completely impossible. In the middle of some conversation about game design or rock climbing or whatever, she'd chime in, loud and obnoxious, suggesting we do something together. Our "politely declining" responses quickly became reflex, and that included the deflection of her pointed inquiries why we couldn't make it. She established herself as the sort of person who would take any excuse and scrutinize it aggressively for any weakness, and upon finding one, immediately assume that her plan was fine after all and that we could conform to her wishes.
My boyfriend didn't know HK as long as I did, but he seemed to view this as a challenge of kinship, to rescue a fellow guy from a bad relationship. This became even more imperative after we found out BPW's true age - she's 41, not 30-something, thus 15 years older than HK. Sadly, although HK seemed to show occasional flashes of lucidity in conversations, admitting that perhaps life wasn't entirely sanguine being BPW's lapdog, he never fully seemed to muster the balls to stand up to her. The last we could do was to tell him that he could crash at our place if he wanted out, and we'd keep her away. Then we more or less reduced contacts. Of a circle of maybe nine or ten friends, we were the last ones to leave him to his own spineless arrangements.
The single redeeming feature was that she was due to rotate out of the country for her work in mid 2008. We figured maybe HK would come to his senses after she was gone. He might finally get out of his podunk dead-end job and do that MBA program he had been talking about for years.
In late October my boyfriend and I got a phone call out of the blue from them ask if we wanted to meet up for dinner. Right outside the restaurant, HK said to us that BPW was expecting a baby, conceived "by accident when her pill didn't work properly" in August. She hadn't wanted to tell anybody until the first trimester was over, because the baby's chances were much better then.
My boyfriend and I were completely aghast. We staggered to a nearby restaurant, feeling in need of a drink, while HK started talking to us airily about Street Fighter fighting game tactics, like the unconcerned dumbass he is. BPW was in fine form, complaining of the food odors that made her nauseous and mandating two table changes before things were to her liking. We just sat there feeling slightly sick as BPW took out little precious photo lockets showing ultrasound pictures of the fetus and regaled us with stories of her visits to the OB/GYN.
Individually, my boyfriend and I took it in turns to try to talk some sense into HK. Clearly, BPW had gone off the pill intentionally to conceive - at her age, it's an understandable enough concern. I even saw that, from a certain viewpoint, it was a remarkable feat for a woman of her age to conceive the child she wanted so badly. But HK kept asserting vaguely how he was going to be okay and do the right thing and be there for his kid.
He even said BPW had levelled with him and told him he didn't have to stick with her if he didn't want to. (To me, that smelled like an admission of sorts: she had gotten her seed from him, and although it was nice to have a servant around, she felt the pretense didn't have to go any further unless he wanted it to.) He was going to quit his job and move to a certain Southeast Asian country with her when her job rotation took her over there next year.
We pointed out that there were minor flaws with this plan. He didn't speak the language, he didn't have any legal right to work or reside there, and he sure as hell wouldn't be able to get an MBA there. Worse still, he'd be entirely dependent on BPW... at which point she would already have given birth and he would in likelihood be supplanted in her somewhat-dubious attentions by the baby.
He muttered "Yeah, I know - it'll work out, don't worry."
At that point, my boyfriend said something to him which summed up how we were all feeling about him. Sadly, neither of us can remember exactly how he phrased it, but the words were something to the effect of: "You've spent the past year and a half lurching through life, guided only by the pinball-flashes of what passes for dim consciousness in your brain." He also said something like "Each time your friends have tried to give you advice, you've rejected it out of hand as if you were just asking them to check some box on a checklist." He then said straight out that he was tired of being a check box, and that HK should not talk to him again unless he was actively seeking to sever ties with BPW.
A little more vitriolic than how I would have phrased it myself, but it neatly summed up the feeling of utmost exasperation we all had with him. This seemed to be a surprise to HK. His face changed like he was slowly grappling with a new realization, as if this was a new and unexpected development. He muttered something in a small pathetic voice about how we were his best friends and he wanted us to still be part of his life.
Unfortunately he then spoiled that somewhat by wondering aloud whether there was any legal way he could abort the fetus without BPW's consent. You don't have to be a law student to know this is entirely illegal and probably would result in a fairly long jail sentence.
I looked at him like the two halves of his brain were two dogs fighting. "No," I said. "There is no legal way to abort a woman's baby without her consent."
"...you frickin' moron," interjected my boyfriend.
There was a little coda, of sorts, after this. HK called me on my phone a few weeks after that conversation, fairly upbeat. Talking as if nothing had happened, he told me he wanted me to be present at the ultrasound later that week, when they would finally find out whether the baby was going to be a boy or a girl. Apparently he had forgotten our earlier assertions that we wanted no part of this unholy union between him and BPW.
He even had the temerity to try a little emotional blackmail on me. He said "I really want my little baby to have a cool auntie Allie Cove in his or her life."
At that point I lost my patience entirely and told him he was free to march his own life off a cliff if he wanted to, but others like me, my boyfriend, and the handful of friends who used to comprise our group now have to take prophylactic measures to insulate our lives from the miasma of unremitting failure that he has made of his life. I told him I had no interest in maintain contact with any unit that involved him and BPW, and that the addition of a little bastard child did not change the calculus in any way to his favor.
It's been about two months since last contact. About two weeks ago, I was talking with my housemate (also a guy, not the same person as my boyfriend) about HK. He put it rather well, I thought:
"HK is a complete tool. Not just in the pejorative sense, either... he's willingly allowed himself to be used by another person purely to facilitate their selfish ends."
I think the Russians have a term of abuse that roughly translates to "hammer" in English. Maybe "HK" should stand for "Hammer Kid"?
What a complete and utter goddamn mess.
I was reading the vasectomy story in the second post in this thread here, and it reminded me of something very similar to something that happened to a (former) friend of mine. Unfortunately, he doesn't have the picaresque ending of that story and it has made me and a lot of my circle of friends very pissed.
So this one guy - let's call him H.K. - I've known since I was a teenager. We literally met each other on a bus in the middle of a Chinese desert west of Beijing in 1994. He had an Atari handheld, I had a Game Boy, and we played video games to pass the time. I also had some Spellfire cards and we played those.
Since then, we're like... well, probably siblings is the best way to put it. We used to thrash each other on Street Fighter, and I was the one who introduced him to American computer RPGs (Ultima, Baldur's Gate, even his one great love - pen-and-paper RPGs like DnD etc.). Even last year we did a fair bit of multiplayer nonsense on Gamecube and PS2.
So we're close, and like any brother of mine, I don't want anything bad happening to him. Sadly, over the course of the last year and a half, he's demonstrated such bad judgment with this one girlfriend that I and pretty much all of his other friends have more or less disowned him.
Last August he met this woman who looked a little older than him, whom I'll call BPW. Not by much, but she looked like she was in her early-thirties, which is a bit of a gap for a guy who's in his mid-twenties.
At first, she was good looking and a fun person to be with. She'd come up with activities to do and knew all the best places to hang out. She had a knack for getting her way with the service staff. We thought she was a nice enough person.
Then I actually had to spend time with her over a meal. Face-to-face, BPW was a mass of hidden insecurities, thinly-veiled belligerence, and worst of all, she dominated my friend and nagged him like he was her kid. At restaurants, she would browbeat the wait staff and peek over my friend's shoulder whenever he was ordering food, putting her oar in with such gems as "Honey, don't you think that's a bit too rich for you?" or just plain "Don't get that, honey, it's not good." We realized that her ability to get people to do what she wanted to was clearly a mixed blessing - she had no qualms about trying it on us.
The first evening she left her purse at a club near where I lived after an evening out together. Despite the fact that we'd all dispersed to go home, when she discovered, hours later at 4 a.m. that she'd lost her purse, she called my cell phone asking me if I could go and retrieve it from the club - which by that time had closed. When I decided it was too damn early in the morning to answer a call that disturbed my sleep, she called back again, and again, and again. (Four times in total, and after that I turned off my phone.) That's the sort of person she is.
We started to avoid her when possible, though we were left in the uncomfortable position of somehow keeping in touch with H.K.
One time we had agreed to meet with her to go for food at about 7 p.m. one night, and she was in a shoe store trying on shoes. Now, don't get me wrong - like any gal, I'll testify that shoes are important in a way that guys just don't understand... but we literally did not get out of the shoe store until 9:30. She had to argue with the service staff, and spent the entire time wedging her feet into and out of shoes while complaining that she had delicate heels. Meanwhile my friend is sort of just standing with an embarrassed look with my boyfriend in the corner, both of them behaving as though their boss' dog had just laid a massive turd in the middle of the room but nobody had the balls to say anything about it.
Eventually I resolved the situation when she went to the bathroom and I followed her and mentioned offhand that he restaurants would be closing soon and if that happened, I was going to go home with my boyfriend. Sure enough, the restaurants we wanted to go to were all shut that night but we found someplace small and then pretended it was the object of our evening's plans.
She also was very nosy as far as family went. Within two weeks of meeting him she was complaining to us about how HK never showed her pictures of his family. Within a couple of months, she was dragging him to her hometown to meet her parents.
Perhaps the most extreme example of how BPW has my friend under her thumb is when he wanted to go back to Taiwan. Now, his family lives there and he'd planned for a trip back since July 2006, before he met her. The trip took place in November, and it was just a chance for him to go back and see his parents and sister.
Turns out she had different plans. Without telling anybody until about a week before her departure, she had booked her own flight to Taiwan and back - a day before and a day after my friend's. It's like she couldn't let him out of her sight for even a few hours. She turned up in Taipei about 20 hours before he did. I have no idea how his parents reacted to this development. She claimed they loved her. The rest of us reserve our judgment.
Matters progressed. She pestered him to move out of his apartment and into hers. We all told him not to do it - if he had any doubts about whether he liked her enough, he should stay in his own place until he was sure. Drawing on my own knowledge, I let him know in no uncertain terms that once you move in with somebody you lose so much privacy and autonomy just as a matter of course... and it looked like BPW had particularly strict standards to which she wanted to limit his autonomy.
HK meekly nodded and hemmed and hawed distractedly every time we discussed this, and reassured us he'd be firm... and then he'd do exactly the opposite of what we suggested.
He moved in with her in March or so, which now meant that even having a phone conversation with him with any degree of privacy was completely impossible. In the middle of some conversation about game design or rock climbing or whatever, she'd chime in, loud and obnoxious, suggesting we do something together. Our "politely declining" responses quickly became reflex, and that included the deflection of her pointed inquiries why we couldn't make it. She established herself as the sort of person who would take any excuse and scrutinize it aggressively for any weakness, and upon finding one, immediately assume that her plan was fine after all and that we could conform to her wishes.
My boyfriend didn't know HK as long as I did, but he seemed to view this as a challenge of kinship, to rescue a fellow guy from a bad relationship. This became even more imperative after we found out BPW's true age - she's 41, not 30-something, thus 15 years older than HK. Sadly, although HK seemed to show occasional flashes of lucidity in conversations, admitting that perhaps life wasn't entirely sanguine being BPW's lapdog, he never fully seemed to muster the balls to stand up to her. The last we could do was to tell him that he could crash at our place if he wanted out, and we'd keep her away. Then we more or less reduced contacts. Of a circle of maybe nine or ten friends, we were the last ones to leave him to his own spineless arrangements.
The single redeeming feature was that she was due to rotate out of the country for her work in mid 2008. We figured maybe HK would come to his senses after she was gone. He might finally get out of his podunk dead-end job and do that MBA program he had been talking about for years.
In late October my boyfriend and I got a phone call out of the blue from them ask if we wanted to meet up for dinner. Right outside the restaurant, HK said to us that BPW was expecting a baby, conceived "by accident when her pill didn't work properly" in August. She hadn't wanted to tell anybody until the first trimester was over, because the baby's chances were much better then.
My boyfriend and I were completely aghast. We staggered to a nearby restaurant, feeling in need of a drink, while HK started talking to us airily about Street Fighter fighting game tactics, like the unconcerned dumbass he is. BPW was in fine form, complaining of the food odors that made her nauseous and mandating two table changes before things were to her liking. We just sat there feeling slightly sick as BPW took out little precious photo lockets showing ultrasound pictures of the fetus and regaled us with stories of her visits to the OB/GYN.
Individually, my boyfriend and I took it in turns to try to talk some sense into HK. Clearly, BPW had gone off the pill intentionally to conceive - at her age, it's an understandable enough concern. I even saw that, from a certain viewpoint, it was a remarkable feat for a woman of her age to conceive the child she wanted so badly. But HK kept asserting vaguely how he was going to be okay and do the right thing and be there for his kid.
He even said BPW had levelled with him and told him he didn't have to stick with her if he didn't want to. (To me, that smelled like an admission of sorts: she had gotten her seed from him, and although it was nice to have a servant around, she felt the pretense didn't have to go any further unless he wanted it to.) He was going to quit his job and move to a certain Southeast Asian country with her when her job rotation took her over there next year.
We pointed out that there were minor flaws with this plan. He didn't speak the language, he didn't have any legal right to work or reside there, and he sure as hell wouldn't be able to get an MBA there. Worse still, he'd be entirely dependent on BPW... at which point she would already have given birth and he would in likelihood be supplanted in her somewhat-dubious attentions by the baby.
He muttered "Yeah, I know - it'll work out, don't worry."
At that point, my boyfriend said something to him which summed up how we were all feeling about him. Sadly, neither of us can remember exactly how he phrased it, but the words were something to the effect of: "You've spent the past year and a half lurching through life, guided only by the pinball-flashes of what passes for dim consciousness in your brain." He also said something like "Each time your friends have tried to give you advice, you've rejected it out of hand as if you were just asking them to check some box on a checklist." He then said straight out that he was tired of being a check box, and that HK should not talk to him again unless he was actively seeking to sever ties with BPW.
A little more vitriolic than how I would have phrased it myself, but it neatly summed up the feeling of utmost exasperation we all had with him. This seemed to be a surprise to HK. His face changed like he was slowly grappling with a new realization, as if this was a new and unexpected development. He muttered something in a small pathetic voice about how we were his best friends and he wanted us to still be part of his life.
Unfortunately he then spoiled that somewhat by wondering aloud whether there was any legal way he could abort the fetus without BPW's consent. You don't have to be a law student to know this is entirely illegal and probably would result in a fairly long jail sentence.
I looked at him like the two halves of his brain were two dogs fighting. "No," I said. "There is no legal way to abort a woman's baby without her consent."
"...you frickin' moron," interjected my boyfriend.
There was a little coda, of sorts, after this. HK called me on my phone a few weeks after that conversation, fairly upbeat. Talking as if nothing had happened, he told me he wanted me to be present at the ultrasound later that week, when they would finally find out whether the baby was going to be a boy or a girl. Apparently he had forgotten our earlier assertions that we wanted no part of this unholy union between him and BPW.
He even had the temerity to try a little emotional blackmail on me. He said "I really want my little baby to have a cool auntie Allie Cove in his or her life."
At that point I lost my patience entirely and told him he was free to march his own life off a cliff if he wanted to, but others like me, my boyfriend, and the handful of friends who used to comprise our group now have to take prophylactic measures to insulate our lives from the miasma of unremitting failure that he has made of his life. I told him I had no interest in maintain contact with any unit that involved him and BPW, and that the addition of a little bastard child did not change the calculus in any way to his favor.
It's been about two months since last contact. About two weeks ago, I was talking with my housemate (also a guy, not the same person as my boyfriend) about HK. He put it rather well, I thought:
"HK is a complete tool. Not just in the pejorative sense, either... he's willingly allowed himself to be used by another person purely to facilitate their selfish ends."
I think the Russians have a term of abuse that roughly translates to "hammer" in English. Maybe "HK" should stand for "Hammer Kid"?
What a complete and utter goddamn mess.
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