Which Witch

I think every child gets a rude nickname at one point or another. 

I’ve had a few over the years, though the one that really stands out to me was “Witch Girl”.  

Now, this all started before Harry Potter, so I couldn’t really play it up like “YEAH BITCH.  I’m goin’ to Hogwarts!”  

Nope.

When I told my father about the name, he didn’t have the “oh, they’re just jealous” response.   

Instead he said when I was old enough, I could get my nose fixed.

Like…

Thanks, Dad.

He meant well.  He assumed the problem (and was wrong) and just kinda ran with it, desperate to fix everything for me. 

Mind you, I did need my nose fixed in order to BREATHE but...

No, I was called this name based on shit I totally had control over, and fuck those kids. 

See…

I looked like this:

I had my unbrushed giant-wad of a rat’s nest for hair, I wore all black all the time, I had a necklace made of various keys and keychains (even Donald Duck), I was never standing up straight, and I mostly just wanted to be left alone. 

Quite frankly, my general lifestyle probably didn’t help either.  

I was at that point in my life where I just wanted to feel like I was in control of something.   

Anything. 

So I was absolutely curious about all things occult.  

This is not to be confused with any Wiccan traditions. 

I read up on that too, and that is MUCH nicer than the shit I was actually aiming to get into.

But you know what?  

The kids making fun of me didn’t actually know anything about me.

Eventually, I got fed up enough to explain that I’d start turning people into frogs if they didn’t stop.

That seemed to do the trick, actually.

Now, before that all got settled, I should note that I was still having Halloween parties for my birthday.   

With the exception of the Troll party, they were ALL Halloween Part Two.

To have this particular one be extra fun, my mom thought it would be a good idea to get a piñata. 

Children waving around sticks while blindfolded seemed like a brilliant plan.

Mostly unaware of the Witch Girl problem, she chose an appropriate Halloween-themed thing to whack.

A witch.

I remember just feeling kind of hurt by it.  

I remember thinking, “What makes Glinda prettier than the Wicked Witch of the West?  Who decided what was good and what was bad?” and so on. 

Well, children did as children do and eventually it was smashed open.  

It just seemed so much more violent than any other piñata before.

 

I begrudgingly took some candy, not wanting anyone to know what was going on inside my head.

I didn’t want anyone to feel bad, and I didn’t want to be made fun of either.

After the party was over, my parents threw out the piñata, since it was… you know… garbage at that point.

And I fished it out of the fucking trash like a lunatic.

…

And I hid it in my closet, on this upper shelf area.

I kept that thing for YEARS.

Every now and then, I’d forget it was in there, and find myself remembering enough to feel guilty. 

I did this.

I made this thing get hurt.

This was because of me.

This was because I was the Witch Girl.

It would look out with half a face…  Literally empty.  

In essence, I was torturing myself on and off for a damn long time over a piece of garbage.

...Which isn't a bad metaphor for obsessing over a childhood nickname.

I remember the day my mother finally found it.

She was understandably confused.

She was SO SURE she had thrown it out.  …So why was it- 

…

Oh.

Watching the sad realization slowly cross her face was humiliating enough that it felt like my tiny bedroom was filled with strangers. 

There was a vague lecture.

Vague because neither of us really understood what was being said, or what needed to be said.

The conversation ended with me keeping it a little while longer, as a way to say goodbye. 

Then I threw it out myself. 

I wanted to bury it.  I wanted to give it some dignity. 

I wanted to know that being a Witch Girl didn’t have to be an ugly, bad thing.

Believe me, much worse bullying had happened, but none dug so deep as this strange concept.

Years later, the boy that started the whole Witch Girl thing admitted that he had a crush on me at the time. 

NOT the greatest way to win a date, dude. 

Seriously.

…

…Should've just turned him into a frog.

The Maximoff Drug Twins

One of the places I lived for a year (there have been a bunch at this point) had this crazy drug culture.  

It was so incredibly casual.  

Given that I grew up in a situation where the only person I really knew doing drugs of any kind was SUPER abusive, my sense that any could be done without throwing someone into a violent or manipulate rage was a little beyond me. 

…but I liked this boy and I wanted him to be able to trust me since I’d ALREADY MOVED across the county to live with our shared good friend.  

Basically, I was stuck and had to desperately pretend everything was fine.

Totally healthy. 

Fuck.

Honestly, if I had truly understood what it would have been like before moving, I would have gone someplace else.  

BUT  I didn’t, so then I learned the lingo in order not to feel like I was gonna get killed.  

I was still pretty much ostracized in my own apartment, but I’ve already talked about that plenty.

This town… 

Dealers were everywhere, selling to each other.  I didn’t understand how anyone made any money.    

Meanwhile, I was there like:

It wasn’t all scary though.  There were some good people who may have also just been swept up one way or another, AND there were some neat dance clubs.

One was on a train! 

…actually, I should do a post about some of those…

But first, let’s talk about this super weird experience that probably happens all the time.

This particular dance club was a temporarily set up situation in a hotel. 

Downstairs was a room with space enough to dance, a stage area for the DJ (someone I knew, in fact) and some tables and chairs.  In the back was the bar area.

I was pretty content sitting and listening to the music, watching people groove on.  

Every now and then I’d either get up to dance, or a friend would drag me to dance.  

In retrospect, it was one of the few times in my adult life that I had more lady-friends around than dudes. 

That part, I liked. 

That part did not involve life threatening situations and looking right in the face of a police officer while wondering why he wasn’t helping me. 

(I figured he either A. Couldn’t tell if I was also a dealer and didn’t want to risk ruining my life for nothing so just didn’t get involved or B. Was on drugs.)

At some point I wandered off to get some air and possibly to find a friend of mine?   

Who knows.

I wound up in a classy hall area that had a grand piano, some couches, and these two strange people.

The Maximoff Drug Twins

I call them that because I don’t know if they were brother and sister or dating or just good friends or business partners, and the fact that I can’t tell is a little funky on some level… 

And he was vibrating levels of hyper while she was just super weird.

I got cornered and eventually wound up sitting on a couch with them as though we were having a real conversation.  

They offered me a million types of ways to get high, all of which I declined, and some of which I had no idea what the shit even was. 

Nothing was physically on them (they weren’t that stupid), but they were more than willing to bring me somewhere for it.

I declined for a thousand reasons.

When they learned that I wasn’t just not interested in going to a random house, but I was also not interested in getting high, they had some amazing questions.

First, they naturally assumed I was either loyal to competition, or that I was competition myself.

Then they wanted to know how I DID have fun???  

I calmly explained that I enjoy many things, and I avoid mind altering substances for reasons attached to my childhood, but also because I have bad reactions to things anyway.  

Upon learning that I’m prone to panic attacks, and that I used to have all kinds of hallucinations even as a kid, they became entirely mesmerized by me. 

I felt like I had become the drug.

I don’t remember how I even got out of there.  I probably feigned having to go to the bathroom, and then snuck (sneaked?) back in to the dancing room…

I remember my friends not even noticing I was gone so long. 

But

You know

They were probably on drugs.

The Weddening Part Two: Food

This is the second and last part of the "I GOT MARRIED" posts, but the food-stuff merited it's own thing... So here ya go. 

Due to concerns about allergies, we were pretty unwavering on wanting to know exactly what ingredients would be used in the foods.  We asked to meet with the chef, which is a generally normal wedding thing anyway… 

We were told “Oh, there’s no reason to be concerned!”
So we reiterated that despite that, we would feel a lot better speaking directly to the chef.

The response was, “Do you want to call other people with different allergies who ate here?”

No, we don’t.  We want to talk to the chef about the ingredients and OUR list of allergens.  Like, great that you didn’t kill a completely different person in a totally different scenario?
This went on for months.

It was a clusterfuck of upsetting.

Finally, we got a, “I gave your list to the chef, and there are some problems.  Can we do a meeting?”

The.  Fuck.  

Did I mention we didn’t like our wedding planner lady? 

Have I mentioned (a thousand times) that I’m recovering from a food phobia and I am pretty damn delicate about not wanting to be poisoned from my many REAL allergies?

Just picking the menu was a bigger hassle than it should have been.  She told us to circle everything we could possibly want on the menu, to then edit down later.  

So we did that.  

She panicked and said, “You chose a lot of stuff guys…”  Right.  Like you said.  We were not intending to actually eat all that.  (Also, take the fucking chocolate fountain off of the list for the tenth time, you lunatic.)

The first chef wasn’t a bad guy, and I’d like to say he made great food, but I’ll never know.  

He insisted he would only make a special plate, instead of altering his recipes for the people paying him to cook.  “So yours will be terrible and tasteless”   

 …Right.  

That tasting was a lot of everyone around me explaining how I can’t eat ANYTHING and must be SO MISERABLE ALL THE TIME.  Mind you, I did this to myself in one regard.  

When I listed off my food allergies, I included things that will straight up kill me if ingested, right along with stuff I’m just intolerant to, like things that make me a little physically uncomfortable, thinking that I’d rather not run to the bathroom at my own wedding.  

I included soy on this list though it probably shouldn't have been there.  I used to have a HUGE PROBLEM with soy way back in the day.  Not a hive-gonna-die reaction, but a running-to-the-bathroom-and-praying reaction.  Now, I can generally eat things that contain soy.  I really can.  REALLY, I can.  

I’m still not going to eat a brick of tofu any time soon, but if something is made with soybean oil, I’m totally fine. 

But, yeah.    

I didn’t correct anyone when this was treated like my actually dangerous allergies, because it was a matter of principle and trust.

If I now let this go, what else would they think was okay?  

See, again, we weren’t originally even going to get a tasting of any kind, because we didn’t count as important. 

  

This woman even said OUT LOUD, “We aren’t making the margins that we typically do.”  Like… did she… Did she think we don’t know what that means? 

  

What?

So that first chef, what we have is a super-hip know-it-all who apparently isn’t actually that talented if he CAN make separate food just for me special, but can’t figure out how to make it delicious, so I’ll get a special plate.  

I didn’t want a special plate.  I wanted to feel normal.  For one damn day of my life.  I wanted hope that I might have that feeling more than once.  

I had been dealing with this food phobia for over three years.  

I just wanted to feel like a normal person during my own goddamn wedding.  I just wanted to feel safe AND be able to eat what everyone else was eating without fear.  We didn’t understand why we couldn’t just have what he put in front of me for everyone else. 

We were eventually asked to do a 2^nd meeting with no further explanation where we were introduced to the NEW chef who had no problem making the entire menu without using anything off the allergen list.

And the desserts!  Trying to find a nut-free cake was a giant pain in the ass.  Every place we found that said “nut free” was also everything-else free, and so would wind up using other things that make me sick, if not could kill me.   

Totally unhelpful.   

A lot of those places also seemed to be doing that out of a fad-thing rather than with allergies actually in mind.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Finally, I found a freaking “Living With Allergies” help board online, which led to finding a woman in the area who works right out of her kitchen.   

She was able to provide us with a nut-free cake (bottom layer was chocolate with strawberry filling, the middle was a yellow cake with Oreo filling, and the top was chocolate with a mixture of the two fillings).  

Of course, we were meant to pick up and drive this cake to the wedding, so admittedly that was harrowing.  It was a lot of screaming and “WHY IS THE ROAD BUMPY??” but the cake was perfectly fine.  

Given that this cake was a post-apocalyptic cake… with flowers?  We were a little confused when we first picked it up.  

But I love the topsy turvy shape, and that’s all that really mattered to me in the end. 

This same woman was able to make vegan cupcakes, gluten free cupcakes, AND sugar free cookies for all our guest’s dietary needs. 

 

We had the place make special labels for each item, both here and for the buffet.   

They stated what the item is and what ingredients were used.   Super useful right?  

Except for that one where they totally failed.  

Not entirely getting the point led to our planner-lady interrupting me while I was getting food to say, “OH you don’t want that!”   

At first I was like, “Is this bitch calling me fat on my goddamn wedding day???”  Turn out, there was a last minute change to the menu, and one item had… something? 

Dude, if you can’t do what I asked you to do, just cut it out.  DO NOT endanger people by having the once useful sign now functionally worthless.  

Given my food-phobias that I was really super determined not to freak out about that particular day *BREATHES* I was furious, and scared.  I managed to still eat macaroni, but I didn’t actually eat anything else.  Anything.  Because she ruined it.  She burned my hard earned trust away.  It was gone.

…

Okay, “ruined” might take it a bit far.  The party was still awesome and continues to be talked about as, “The Best Wedding Ever” so suck it!
We even got to dress the bartenders up as mad scientists!  Did I mention that?

Every wedding has those oh-my-god-no moments, and ours went pretty well by the end.

Sooo I would still recommend the venue, warts and all.