Cat's Stuck on the Roof

The roof is wet tile, not hot tin. Luckily, Case's brother Travis has a hole cut in his screen, and he was out, so I was able to let Kozmo in. However, I cut myself on the metal blinds, so I'm sucking on that a little.

I'm also searching for more Blogspot blogs I can follow, so I can at least see what some of my friends are doing. The two that I have so far haven't updated in weeks.

I just finished a fairly intense psychological session. I was the psychologist, even though I've never taken a single psych course. To be honest, it doesn't take that much to become a psychologist... you just have to ask the right questions, and get your subject to think about what he or she is doing.

My subject was a fourteen-year-old girl, with the alias of Haley23. I know her real name, and I've even found her incomplete profile on Facebook, but of course I'm staying anonymous. As far as I can tell, she's a pretty normal teenager in real life - pretty, bubbly, lots of girl friends, a religious background. Now that I think about it, she reminds me a little of my cousin Lindsay; Lindsay was all those things, from what I remember, and unfortunately she tried to push religious stuff on me back when I was a teenager, at a slumber party, which fouled up my opinion of her (and of religion) quite a bit.
But back to Haley. As normal as she may be in real life, she is almost batshit crazy when she's online in the chat room we share. My opinion of her has been really low, almost to the point of complete disgust. Most of that came from the fact that she lied a lot about who she was. Her age switched around a lot, and she could be anything from fawning to vitriolic. I'm a little ashamed to say that I wasn't always kind to her. It was hard for me to see past any of what she was showing us. But I was curious, I suppose, to see if there was any way to stop her from being so obnoxious to everyone.
So I talked to her. She realized that what she was doing was playing for attention. She felt like people wouldn't pay attention to her if she just talked normally, so she did obnoxious things so people would react; I suggested that she just talk about stuff that interested her (music, books, etc). She told me that some people just made her really excited, and that the environment (i.e. keyboard, anonymity) made it easy for her to go all out with the excitement, more so than she would if we were all people around her in real life. I can sympathize with that, at least with the whole train-of-thought thing... I know I write better here, and in chats, than I talk in real life. But I tried to convince her that the ettiquette of a chat room isn't that much different from school, or the mall, and that obnoxious behavior was just as intolerable in chat as it was in those kinds of places. I advised her in how to handle people who were being annoying - ask them politely, then either mute them or call a mod if they start getting abusive.
Another talkative person, Railfun, was a little obnoxious himself while I was working with Haley, but when he realized that she sincerely wanted to change her behavior, he encouraged her. That made me really happy, that other people cared about her, and I think she was glad too. When I was about to log, she started to do her whole "don't leave!" thing, but said she was kidding. I warned her that she should be careful with that sort of behavior - that I knew she was joking, but other people would interpret as her old behavior, so she promised to be careful.
I also warned her, during the discussion, that getting people to realize she changed, and accept that she changed, would take time, and that there would be people who would still treat her like her old self. I encouraged her not to let that get to her, although I told her I understood that words could hurt. Of course I understand that... regardless of what social position one holds in high school, there will always be hurtful words. And it wasn't that long ago for me, was it? Just a little over eight years since I felt depressed almost towards suicide, when I wrote that article yelling at my own peers, when I had to deal with someone obsessed with me... just remembering makes me quiver a little bit.

But that time is way past. My worries are a little more substantial, and financial... but like everything else, I will get through them. And maybe, in the work I managed to do tonight, I brought a little peace to that little microcosm that is The Singularity. Maybe I can be a big sister after all. That's a comforting thought, since my future sister-in-law is ten months younger than I am, and already has a house and a daughter - kind of missed out on the big-sister train there.

And there are no cats stuck on the roof now... they're all curled up into furry balls, sleeping... as I should be. Buona notte.