OCD, the Dude, and Me - By Lauren Roedy Vaughn Page 0,46
think you are going to, try to make it to Jacob’s lap.”
“Ha! Good plan. Thank you.”
Talking to Daniel on the phone made it look like I had a friend. I saw Sara do a double take when she saw me on the phone laughing, and I realized it didn’t just look like I had a friend. I actually did.
*ME-MOIR JOURNAL* 4/13
Jesus, can’t social skills class just go away??!!!
No, it cannot, according to my mother who says these classes have “yielded some fine results. Look at your friendship with Daniel,” and so I have to keep going because it might get even better. I told her I don’t need it to get any better. This is good. I have a friend. Social skills class—a success. “Not so fast,” she says.
When I’m forced to do stuff against my will like this I want to be destructive and ruin environments. I want to fully turn on my impulsivity spigot so that all the inappropriate words I have stuffed in my head flow out. If I actually loosen this spigot in social skills class in an effort to show my mother how bad this class is for me and punish her at the same time, I realize I will probably just end up in some other group I can’t stand or have to go for an evaluation to see if I have Tourette’s syndrome. (If I had to have a syndrome, I think I would like to have that one, but Daniel said I’m being very shortsighted with that view, that Tourette’s is nothing to shout about. He’s funny.) So I went to class tonight, and I swear, if it weren’t for Daniel, I might gouge my eyes out with one of Lisa’s brooches (like Oedipus, thank you very much) right in front of everyone, and they could just send me to wander into the desert of Los Angeles!
Tonight we had to do what Lisa calls a “social autopsy.” We had to each talk about a social situation in our lives that we didn’t think went well, and Lisa took it apart and analyzed it like doctors do to dead bodies. I think the analogy is morbid and hopeless. A social autopsy? Really? Like we’re all dead on arrival in any social situation. That is probably true, but how messed up for Lisa to use this language. Some of us in the room get the deep, dark, penetrating meaning.
Daniel saw the schedule for tonight online where Lisa posts everything for us. I just ignore it, but Daniel gets off on checking it out and mocking it. He’s more evolved than me, clearly. Anyway, he saw that we were doing social autopsies tonight and he came in dressed as a cadaver. A stroke of genius, totally. He put gray makeup all over his face that made him look plastic, and, well, dead, and said he came prepared for his autopsy. It was fantastic. We all laughed, and I have to give it to Lisa because instead of acting all offended and superior like she usually would, she laughed, too.
For his autopsy Daniel told a story about being slammed up against his locker by a football player at school, and how the incident drew a crowd. He couldn’t fight back, and there were a bunch of people who just saw him slide down his locker onto the floor and wipe snot and blood off his nose. He just started singing “Who Let the Dogs Out?”, which I thought was a brilliant maneuver in this situation, but it got him further pummeled.
“Analyze that situation, Doctor,” he said to Lisa.
At first, I didn’t know if this really happened to Daniel or if he was just using it to make Lisa struggle at her craft. Lisa asked if Daniel had done anything that might have instigated that assault (not that anything would justify that behavior she said); she was just asking. Daniel said he didn’t have the slightest idea what he had done.
I could tell by the way Daniel said it that he knew exactly what caused the football player to go crazy, but he wasn’t going to tell Lisa. I had a feeling then that this was a true story. I don’t remember what Lisa said to Daniel. I don’t think I was listening at that point because my mind started drifting off and thinking about how Daniel has had it rough, too. I wasn’t the only person in the room whose life had been marked by pain