Stalking and the Thirteenth Fairy

I am conscious when I write in my blog, that my spelling must look odd in some cases to my largely American audience of bloggers. Language is funny like that. Yet there is at least one Australian blogger who will take me to task if I fail to write in the so-called ‘King’s English’.

Suddenly I become self-conscious. What are these thoughts and why bother to write them down? Self-doubt, I tell myself, is the enemy of the written word. Self-doubt paralyses. Do not pay it any heed.

I emailed an old friend recently and he has not emailed back to me. It leaves me in a quandary. Do I send another email with the thought that he no longer wants to have anything to do with me? Do I persist in making contact with someone who presumably has better things to do with his time than waffle on to me?

I have written letters before the days of email that went unanswered. Unanswered letters always trouble me, especially the long letters, the ones I went to some trouble to write, the ones I filled with my deepest thoughts.

I think of these letters lying dusty and yellow on a post office floor somewhere, or worse still lying unopened in a rubbish bin, or destroyed by now because they did not reach their destination or because the person to whom I wrote did not want to hear from me.

I have been thinking about such attempts to reach a person who may or may not want to hear from me in the context of ‘stalking’. The word seems to me to be a relatively new one.

Stalking, the notion of following someone, intruding upon them unannounced and refusing to accept the first of many rejections. It is such an easy thing to slip into.

I sit here and agonise over whether another email to this friend who did not get back to me would be seen as an unwelcome advance and therefore how long before it becomes a case of stalking.

Stalkers to me are like clinging babies. The more a mother pushes her baby away the more the baby clings. For some people it seems it is the only way to have a passionate and meaningful contact, contact only with someone who does not want them.

The Internet is rife with opportunities for a type of stalking, made worse because so much of it can go undetected, and therefore seemingly made safe for the stalker.

These days we do not need to be told about a person from another we can simply Google said person and voila, we can find out all manner of things.

I Google people almost out of habit these days as if the Internet is my street directory, my address book and one that contains not only the location of a person but other details as well.

And people, some people it seems want to be stalked like this. They want others to ‘follow’ them, as in blogdom. They count the number of times someone has visited their site, their webpage, their blog.

Is this not a way of facilitating the process of stalking and all those unwelcome spam comments, all those visiting ‘trolls’, are they not like stalkers, too?

This reminds me of the Thirteenth Fairy. You know the story? A variation on Sleeping Beauty.

The king and queen for years had wanted a child but were unsuccessful. When finally the queen gave birth to her baby daughter they were overjoyed and decided to hold a party for the entire kingdom. They invited every single person in the kingdom, right down to the lowliest. They sent off courtiers throughout the kingdom to make sure that not a single guest remained uninvited.

During the celebrations, the fairies of the kingdom all stood up in turn to offer the baby their many gifts. The one offered health, the other happiness, another offered beauty, until finally the twelfth fairy rose and raised her wand in readiness to offer the baby her gift, when out of nowhere the Thirteenth Fairy appeared.

She was furious. Why had she not been invited? She leapt in front of the Twelfth Fairy and brandished her wand.
‘I wish the baby death.’
Then she disappeared as fast as she had arrived. The people were devastated. What could be done?

The Twelfth Fairy stepped forward again.
‘I have not the power to undo the damage inflicted by the Thirteenth Fairy but I can reduce its impact. Therefore, on her sixteenth birthday the princess will prick her finger on a spindle. She will not die but she will sleep for one hundred years and wake only to a prince’s kiss.’

No doubt you know the rest of the story, how it unfolds. What preoccupies me here, and what I have pondered often is the role of the Thirteenth Fairy. She would have been invited presumably had she not hid herself away.

Is she the one who represents envy? Is she a variation on the stalker, the one who attaches herself to others, only through malice.

But can this be? Stalking has to be different from envy.

Stalking derives from possessive or misguided love, love that is unrequited. To me stalking, as I said earlier, is more like the behaviour of a clinging baby. Envy is something else entirely, and something we all suffer from to varying degrees.

Could it be that the one who rejects is envious of the one who is open and welcoming in her approach, and the envious one cannot bear to be touched warmly therefore she pushes the other away.

I seem to be going around in circles here with such vague emotional constructs.

I think of them now in the context of my unmet email. How to proceed?

I shall stop blogging now and try one more time to contact my friend. I shall be sure I have the right address, and if I do not hear from him, I shall accept my lot and mourn the loss of another good friend.

For such is the nature of friendships, they come and go. And sometimes there is little we can do to stop the process for it involves another and we cannot get control over another person’s desires for us, however much we might try.

Olive trees are like camels.

The power went off during the night and all the clocks have stopped, the ones that operate on mains power. There must have been a power surge, which is ironic given the fact that it’s New Years Eve.

Even during the holidays I like to know the time. I woke with a start to a blinking digital alarm that flashed 12.09 at me repeatedly and then went in search of the time. My wristwatch still works.

I had intended not to sleep too late in order to find space to write before my 10.30am appointment with the physiotherapist. Later today my husband and I also have our annual check up with the eye doctor.

My husband thinks he needs new glasses. He hopes he does because his lenses are scratched and he wants to justify replacing them. I think I’d be happy to keep my glasses as they are, but if I need new ones then I will go for it. I love to be able to see clearly.

A message just now on my mobile phone from my third daughter to let us know she is on her way home from Adelaide, or ‘Radelaide’ as she jokingly refers to the state next door to ours. She is leaving now.

I will worry subcutaneously all day long until I see her safe and sound at the end of the day. It is an eight-hour drive and she travels with her girl friend, the two of them share the driving. Long distance driving is always dangerous, but they made it there, as she messaged me two days ago, a good trip except for the locusts.

The locusts are out in plague proportions in various parts of the country because of the recent rains. The drought had kept them in check until now. It is terrifying for the farmers and can be dreadful for our crops.

I have finally begun work on my tax, another annual event, which I despise and next week I have my two yearly pap smear at the doctor’s. For me the Christmas holidays become a time for annual events, physical check ups, house cleaning and reconciling my accounts.

I put off these things until the end of the year and get straight into them the minute the last bauble is off the tree. I have already returned our Christmas decorations to their boxes till next year.

It is too early I know but the olive tree we keep in a pot and brought inside to decorate this year was beginning to look dry even though we watered it periodically during its confinement indoors.

To me olive trees are like camels, they go on and on without water, but I am not sure how a camel would fare indoors and I am sure olive trees need sunlight, not shadow twenty four hours a day.

My children are old enough now not to fuss too much when the last of the Christmas cheer disappears.

They are forward looking, the young. Already they are in New Years Eve mode. Not me and my husband.

We joked last night over dinner that it has been some ten years since we last went to a New Years Eve function and then at the millennium, and ten years again before that. When we were young we would not have been seen dead not going out for New Years Eve but these days we prefer to stay at home.

At midnight we will go out to the front of our house and stand in the middle of our street, which is normally busy with traffic, and look over the crest of the hill towards the city and the fireworks that go off in the distance.

Every New Years Eve our neighbours, a widow and her thirty five year old daughter who stays at home because she has chronic fatigue syndrome, come out onto the street and we greet one another, hugs all round for the New Year and we watch the fireworks and ooh and aah at their splendour until the last light fades over the horizon.

Then we retreat indoors again and start the climb into the next year, which is an odd number this year, 2011 and as I have said elsewhere, I do not like odd numbers. The year 2009 was a poxy one for me. I hope 2011 fares better.

I have been struck once more by the artificial highs and lows that erupt inside of me during my time in the blogosphere, the degree to which I can feel so captivated by events in the lives of my fellow bloggers that I am brought to tears in some instances or alternatively driven to states of annoyance or great laughter elsewhere.

The Internet is such a powerful medium for drawing us in. No wonder some people lose themselves in it. I imagine that the experience in blogdom is one step away from the experience that some people enjoy within second Life.

I had tried to go there once – for research purposes, I reasoned – but something scared me off, something of the virtual and limitless sense of space and ‘freedom’ it seemed to offer. I felt a bit like a potential addict walking into a gambling casino, terrified at the thought that I would soon become hooked and then I would no longer have time for anything.

I have my blogging tendencies under control by and large but any further forays into alternative realities and I fear I might never come out into the light again. I would be like our Christmas olive tree trapped indoors forever more. And that would be the end of me, I fear.

I would dry out and lose my leaves, my branches would crumble and I would become a wandering waif lost forevermore in the ethereal life that is the Internet.

Pardon the mixed metaphor. Trees do not wander.