Today has been a day of ups and downs.
Ups:
I got the first draft of the pencil 'n' paper roleplaying game out to my playtesters, almost all of whom are fellow noders. If you are interested in joining the playtest, please read the info in my homenode.
I talked to my girlfriend on the phone today. It was good.
Downs:
I'm having trouble with my statistics homework. We're at a part right now that involves a lot of proofs and calculus. I haven't taken calculus in 2 full years. I'll have to go in tomorrow and ask for help on most of it. I've never been very good with mathematical proofs.
Tonight, I received a random IM, which happens a lot, since I share my IM name with a popular video game character from a few years ago. This person, however, did not want to ask me about how I got my name or if I liked the game (both questions I now refuse to discuss).
She wanted to ask me if she should marry her boyfriend.
I was in a rare mood, so I played along with this complete stranger and asked her why she shouldn't marry him. She told me that he wasn't a very nice person. This was enough to make me smell a rat, but I knew better than to tell her that she shouldn't marry her boyfriend because he wan't a nice person. I needed something to latch onto so she couldn't say "Well, he's not that bad." Boy, did I get more than I bargained for.
He "does things."
What kind of things?
Eventually I tease out the fact that he rapes her.
So now I have to convince her not to marry him (that turned out to be easy), but also to gather up her 12-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter and get to a women's shelter.
The boyfriend is a regular evil overlord. He won't let her leave the house without him. He never leaves the house without her (he doesn't work, she telecommutes as a seceretary's assistant). There is only one phone in the house, which he keeps with him and won't ever let her use. I can't even convince her to look for a shelter online and email them, because she's afraid that he might suddenly wander into the room and find her out (he was busy watching the Super Bowl). She's so paranoid that if she got on a plane to China, she would still expect him to meet her in the arrival's gate.
I ask her if she's willing to let her kids get their lives fucked over, too. This strikes the right nerve, although she takes me literally, and wonders if he might be raping their daughter, too. I've got to get her to keep acting on this, because if she thinks about it, she'll get scared or rationalize her situation. So we argue a bit more. I try to convince her to give me her city and state so I can look for a shelter for her with my internet savvy, but that doesn't work.
Eventually, he starts calling for her and signs off. Then she signs back on again about 3 minutes later. He didn't want anything important, but she was able to ask her daughter about this guy, and learned that he was raping their daughter, too. So now she finally agreed that she had to get the fuck out of that house ASAP, but the bastard kept her locked up tighter than Fort Knox. She still wouldn't let me try to contact a shelter for her.
Suddenly, he starts bellowing for her and the kids again, and she's gone...
Only to come back a few minutes later as I'm in the middle of writing this very daylog which you are reading. She's in a panic because he is raping their daughter in the living room while her 12-year-old son watches from the couch as she is telling this to me.
I tell her to "GET OUT OF THE HOUSE AND CALL THE POLICE!!!" She's scared and panicked, and doesn't think that she could make it past the door because "he has a gun somewhere around here" and runs faster than her. I tell her that raping their daughter might slow him down a bit. She's also in shock because their son is just sitting on the couch and watching.
I keep telling her to get out of the house and call the police and she keeps telling me that she can't. Finally, I tell her to "GET OUT OF THAT FUCKING HOUSE BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY!" Which was apparently the magic phrase because she says "okay" and "bye" and is gone.
I'm not trained to handle this kind of situation. My dad's a Methodist pastor and majored in behavioral psychology in college, and I took a semsester of psychology in highschool. I've read a lot of the published books on memetics. I know a very little about this kind of thing, but mostly what I know is that she should have been talking to a professional when she was talking to me. During the last 2 hours I have wished I to be a professional psychologist or crisis therapist or something, anything where I could have felt like I had the slightest bit of authority in what I was talking about.
But I had none, and she was talking to me, and I was her line to the outside, and FUCK IT, I didn't ask to get involved in this!
But I hope she makes it.