winterbadger | a day for regret

At some point this morning (I think when I was putting on my socks), I paused to think , "Hmmm, five years ago, I was getting ready to get married." *sigh* What a long, strange trip that turned out to be.

Then, this afternoon, I was reminded of a friend, the Lioness, I made about a year before that, someone I never met in person because she lived out in Washington State. She was cool--smart, funny, self deprecating, exciting, geeky in just the right way. We had a lot of interests in common, and a lot of things that she was into that I wasn't were still very neat (like art metal-smithing and SCA fighting). But I was always going to be the sort of guy friend that one can talk to about anything because you never think of him "like that". Partly because I was far away, sure. But also because she seemed to have a knack for finding just the right asshat to fall in love with--the sort of guy who's going to be all charming and just a little bit of a bastard--until you get to know him really well, at which point you find out that he's actually mostly bastard.

I've run into a number of women who seem to have an instinct for finding the guy who is going to hurt them and picking him out of a field of other guys who are much less likely to but, I guess, also don't have some kind of edginess, some element of "devil may care", some bravado that turns all the switches to 11. At least long enough for the woman in question to lose her heart. A length of time that also seems to be bad boy's attention span, or boredom threshold.

I miss my friend the Lioness. :-(