Jean-Pierre Deriaud, on circumventing French laws: "It is forbidden, but possible."
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I spent some time yesterday reading the forum posts of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Christmas bomber (links at http://www.switched.com/2009/12/30/attempted-bombers-story-comes-to-light-via-online-forum-posts/). What was going on in his mind, like the reasons for his trip to Yemen, is so different from what we're hearing on the news about his reasons and experiences. I wonder what the truth is. People too often tell tales for their own reasons, to achieve their own ends, without regard to the truth. I don't know who to believe.
I have plenty of experience with that. Many times in my past I have been seen in places I'd never been, in the company of people I'd never met, and ascribed motives I never had. I've had people stand right in front of me and tell me they saw me do things I never did. But they KNOW I did it, because they SAW me.
How do you answer that? How do you deny it? What's even stranger is that I have always been rather unique in appearance, very short, with distinct facial and physical features, so it's not likely they mistook someone else for me.
It's one of the things that made me not very social. The less contact I had with people, the fewer stories there were about me.
One time that it happened, I at least got the full story much later.
I was 21, teaching in a small town in Pennsylvania, and married to Ex#1, who was in the Army, and stationed in Germany. It was the beginning of summer school break. There was a pool hall next to my apartment, and one evening my friend Ruby called and asked me to join her and her brother Joe and another guy for some billiards. So I did.
After a while, Ruby and the other guy decided to go next door to another bar. It was raining, and Joe wanted to go home to his wife Donna, so Ruby asked me if I would give Joe a ride to his home. I shrugged and said ok, I'd help her out with the new guy. I dropped Joe off at his front door, without incident.
(I think I'll give you my viewpoint first, and fill in what was going on behind the scenes later.)
About a week or two week later, Joe's wife Donna called me, and said she wanted to talk to me, and I should come to their apartment immediately. She sounded angry and wouldn't explain why, so I called Ruby. Ruby said not to go, that Donna was flat-out crazy. However, Donna happened to be my landlord's only child, so I figured it would be better to go. I called my other friend Jean, and she went with me.
Donna and Joe's apartment was what they call a railroad flat - the second story of a house, with a stairwell and hallway open to the stairwell, a kitchen across the back of the house, and then a series of rooms opening onto the stairwell hallway and also opening to each other.
The evening ended with Donna chasing me with a knife from room to hall to room in big circles, me trying to get to the stairs and her trying to trap me, and she, I, and Jean screaming our heads off, while Joe sat unhappily at the kitchen table drinking beer, and the town police, whom Jean had called, standing on the porch at the open front door with their arms crossed, watching us run in circles, and laughing at us.
Donna had accused me of messing around with her husband, of having been out with him here and there and wherever, and Joe sat there and confirmed it!, right in front of me, and when I denied it, said that the only time I'd been anywhere with him was that evening with Ruby, and that had been the first and last time I'd ever been in his presence, with his sister Ruby!, that's when Donna attacked me. Because she KNEW it was true that he and I had been messing around for months!
I finally made it down the stairs. The police said they couldn't go into the house because they had not been called by the resident. If they saw her stab me, then they could go in. Donna screamed down the stairs that if she ever saw me on the sidewalk when she was in her car, she'd run me down. I wanted the police to arrest her for threatening to, and trying to, kill me, but they wouldn't because they said it would just make her madder.
I was afraid to go home for several weeks, until the real story came out, because Donna, being my landlord's daughter, worked in his stationary store under my apartment. During that time, I slept on the floor in a friend's car lot office.
This was one of the few times that I found out what had happened.
Donna had seen me drop off her husband that evening a few weeks before. She was angry because he was late. He said nothing was going on. She didn't believe him, and started asking her friends what they knew.
Well, coincidence reared its ugly head.
Joe's ex-wife's first name happened to be the same as mine. Donna had made a bunch of calls to her female friends, several of whom told her that they had seen Joe cuddling with [my first name] here and there and everywhere over the past few months. I guess nobody clarified with last names. Now, Donna was crazy jealous of Joe's ex-wife, so confronted with the "evidence", Joe chickened out and went along with Donna's assumption that it was me he'd been with. I guess he figured that was a safer option for his own skin.
I don't know if he really was fooling around with the ex, or if it was just chance friendly and platonic encounters in public, but anyway, by the time of the knife chase the entire town KNEW that Joe and I were having an affair. Even the cops knew all about it, and that's why they were so amused. I was probably the only person who didn't know.
What really kills me is that even Ruby believed it! Sheesh. Joe was a rather stupid, thick, sloppy drunk hick with greasy hair. I was insulted that anyone who knew me would seriously think I'd be involved with him.
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Stuff like that happened to me all the time. Stories like that about me. It seemed sometimes like everyone, even my best friends, were ready and willing to believe the worst about me. I never did figure out why.
And when Donna finally found out the truth, when Ruby told her she should apologize to me, Donna's response was that she hated me anyway, and she'd still kill me if she saw me. Why? I'd never said anything bad to or about her. I didn't understand at all. (Actually, I guess it should have been Joe who apologized and corrected the rumors.)
Of course, Donna didn't correct the stories she had spread about me, which just made it easier for the town to believe I was sleeping with one of my high school students (a kid not in my classes, and whom I didn't know) when that story started up (started by the kid himself).
I hate small town gossip as much as I hate winter. You can't fix either of them. All you can do is move away.
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