My brain is a bit of a mush pile right now.

I'm sick, I'm tired, and I've been going near non-stop today. It's been really productive, but I'm ready for bed.

The post from yesterday reminded me of this guy from nearly two years ago now.

He was a ginger kid.

I'm not a fan of ginger kids.

Strike that. I'm not a fan of male ginger kids. Something about it creeps me out.

Anyway, I met him when I was still dating Darkeyes, at the tail end of our relationship. We were living together in a cute little apartment I found, trying to make things work.

And this guy, who I am going to call "Ginger" and hope that I don't associate it too much with Gilligan's Island, was introduced to me by one of my best friends while at a club.

I assumed that, because this particular friend had introduced us, Ginger was an okay guy. Just initially creepy. So I was friendly and chatty and mentioned I had a boyfriend straight off the bat to counteract any attention he might float my way.

You see, in my silly world, when someone has a significant other, you don't pursue them.

He continued to unnerve me all throughout the evening, but I was convinced in seeing the good in this person that was a friend of my best friend, who had left the club early.

Due to meeting Ginger, a new social group at the club was opened up to me. I suddenly found myself in the midst of all these people who were quite friendly and fun to be around, people I hadn't really talked to before, but had seen at the various clubs.

So when they said they were going to drive over to Fred 62's (a cute little 24 hour diner in Silverlake) post-club and Ginger invited me to join them, I agreed. I'm always up for new 24 hour diners, as sometimes I don't want to sleep and would rather be out at a diner reading until 4AM.

Sign number one that I dismissed:

When I asked Ginger for directions, he said he'd drive me.

I told him no, I'd drive myself.

He insisted that he would drive us.

I told him again, no.

But, really, he should drive. I don't know where I'm going, it's just easier, get in the car.

If I had been younger and less experienced, I would have submitted to this rather than cause a scene.

I balked like you would not believe. There was nothing on the planet at that moment that would get me to give up access to my car.

This is a major rule of mine: always always always be in control of your own transportation. If you aren't, you are at the mercy of others. Your time is not your own, which means your body is not your own, nor are your desires taken into account.

With a disgusted grunt, he gave up and told me to follow him to the diner.

By this point in the evening, I had made sure to bring up my boyfriend in conversation multiple times, just to lay extra groundwork. This relaxed me, made me feel like he got the point that I was inaccessible. My work here was done. I could enjoy my evening, free from worry that this guy would try anything.

So we parked at the lot across the street, walked over, and since there were so many of us there we had to sit outside at a large, round table.

He chose, of course, to sit next to me, legs brushing, until I moved away.

Then I noticed my hair was all over the place from dancing, knotted and tangled, so I stood to go get my brush out of the car.

He stopped me, insisting that he had a brush in his car and he would go fetch it for me, and trotted off down the street.

Which was... odd.

But not disturbing.

What got me, more than the car thing, more than his flirtations at the club, more than him insisting he buy me drinks (I hate that), more than his faux-accidental touches, was what happened next.

He came back and I brushed out my hair.

That taken care of, I realized I was still wearing dark lipstick that would immediately begin to look odd once I started to eat, as I was wearing a sealant on top of it. This causes it to rub off in patches, which makes me look like my lips have leprosy. Having a bottle of water at the club has no effect on it, kissing barely moves it, but eating an entire meal... not so much.

So I grabbed a napkin and started scrubbing at it, taking condensation off the outside of my glass to moisten it, checking it every few seconds to see if red was still coming off.

Finally, I asked the girl across from me if I still had lipstick on.

She said that I did, and pointed at a spot on her lip to indicate where it was.

So I scrubbed at that spot, checked with her again. Still there.

Repeat.

By that time, there was a conversation going on about that particular sealing product, with me making jokes about how long it could stay on and how little would budge it and how moronic I felt to be sitting outside a diner coming up on 4AM scrubbing at my lips with a paper napkin that was falling to pieces.

Ginger, Ginger decides he wants to play the hero.

He reaches for my face.

I jerk back. "What are you doing?"

"I'm going to get the lipstick for you."

"I've got it, thanks."

He reaches again, his thumb going for my lip. "It's cool, I'll get it," I tell him.

"You keep missing it. I'll get it."

"No, I've got it."

"No, I'll get it."

"I'm fine."

"Just let me get it."

Finally, I submitted. I didn't want to cause a scene. He was the friend of my best friend. I'd deal with it.

So he leaned over to me and scrubbed at my lip with his bare thumb.

And I took it like a little bitch, uncomfortable, but still naive enough to believe that because he knew I had a boyfriend, he wouldn't try to seduce me.

When I mentioned I was good at Scrabble, he offered to get coffee with me and challenge me to a game.

I took him up on it, telling him I'd have to check my schedule with my boyfriend, but it should be fine.

The next week, we met up for Scrabble. And it was fine. I kicked his ass, like I knew I would. We grabbed pizza and talked. It wasn't awkward anymore, he wasn't hitting on me. It was okay.

That night, Darkeyes and I broke up.

A week or two later, he asked if I wanted to go see a movie.

I agreed, but then asked my best friend what was going on with this guy. He was creeping me out. Why did he like Ginger? It didn't make sense.

My friend tells me he barely knows Ginger, he just introduced him to be polite. That he's just an acquaintance that he talks to once every few months. And, by the way, did I hear that he bullied one of our mutual friends into sleeping with him just a few months ago?

Oh.

I decide that I don't want to go out with Ginger the next day, so I IM him to tell him I'm just not feeling up to it.

He throws a fit. He wants to know why. He needs that explanation. He demands it.

And I'm sitting there, staring at my screen.

You see, at this time of my life, I was a bit of a nobody. I could dance, but I was a zero on the social screen. In the club scene, I had very few friends. I'd go, I'd dance, I'd leave.

I desperately wanted to be one of the club kids again, like when I was younger. I wanted to fit in and be social and go to the parties. Have friends to talk to when I was cooling down from dancing.

I did not want to piss this guy off. He was a gateway into other people.

So I tried to tell him that I was not feeling comfortable going out so soon after a break up. That I wasn't looking to date right now, I just wanted friends, but I needed to get my life together.

It wasn't good enough. He kicked, he screamed, he demanded his pacifier.

He would not take no for an answer.

So, instead of telling him I thought he was a pushy, creepy douchebag with no respect for women and crazy bug eyes, I told him that his coloring was unattractive to me.

That all ginger coloring on men was unattractive to me.

Trying to exclude, rather than reject.

That wasn't good enough either.

He had to know what it was about his coloring. What right did I have to have such a reaction? What feelings did it instill in me? How dare I?

My explanation, which was honest and polite, just a gut reaction to something unusual (which, when he demanded an elaboration, I told him it was like when you first see a person born with only four toes on one foot- they can still walk, it just makes you double take for a second)... yeah, then he freaked out and accused me of calling him physically disabled and that I was prejudiced against the handicapped.

It was a weird conversation. I wish I had logged it.

In the end, when I called him by his nickname instead of his given name, he cut me off, saying that only acquaintances called him by his nickname, and that true friends called him by his real name. So I wasn't really a friend. And it needed to stay that way.

Which left me staring at my screen with a bemused "WTF?" expression on my face.

But his parting gift, the cherry on my sundae, was a link he sent me.

Not trusting it, I asked him what it was.

He told me it was a BDSM checklist, illustrating his various kinks, so that when I found myself a Dom, I'd know what I was missing.

Even now, looking back on that, my eyes glaze over.

I was so lost. We went from me having a boyfriend to no boyfriend to suddenly this man is passing me a list of how sexually great he is and how much I'm going to regret passing up an offer he never made.

This, this is not the worst example I could give about trying to compassionately reject a man and having it blow up in my face.

Not at all.

I called my friend and would-be lover, Wolfboy, after that. I told him that this ginger kid had creeped me out and I needed down time and cuddles to get back to my baseline. So, after work, I drove over there, told him the story, and he had yes watch the ginger kid episode from South Park. Which was amazing.

Fast forward a few months and I'm on a first date at a coffee shop on Sunset Boulevard with a guy I'm getting along with quite well. In the middle of the date, he gets a phone call.

From Ginger.

Yeah.

In one of a series of acts of revenge, Ginger got one of his friends who I had never met before to ask me out to see if he could sleep with me or at least get some sort of juicy gossip.

When neither happened, they made their own up.

I went out on another date with another guy from a completely different scene. We sat down at this restaurant in Manhattan Beach and this guy told me he had two motives for asking me out. One, purely sexual. The second, he had seen my picture before due to Ginger and wanted to let me know that Ginger and his friends had been spreading particular rumors about me around the club scene for several months.

Which explained some things.

So I'm sitting there, just staring at this guy because I can't believe that Ginger is still waging war against me.

Around this time was when I picked up my copy of The Game.

Which led into books on body language, seduction, social dynamics, and evo psych.

I was not going to let this happen again. I was going to use methods within these books, within my own intelligence, to get at a higher social level than this man and turn his rumors back on him.

And I did.

Seduction one-on-one, I had down okay.

It was the social net-making I was unsure on.

It took me about four months to get where I needed to be, slowly undermining his pillars by raising my own, meeting the right people, playing the right roles. Each time I went out, each phone call I made or email I sent was another stitch in what I was weaving.

It wasn't all mercenary. I enjoyed the people I was meeting, enjoyed the socialization, being out under the lime light, coming into my own. I was able to do it because I had a reason.

Our last extended encounter was at a birthday party. I was invited by a friend who was given permission to bring more girls if possible. You know, one of those invites.

When he walked in, I took one look and thought to myself, "I'm going to own him and he's going to know it."

I spent the entire party quite happily putting my newly acquired skills to use. He watched me, he knew what was going on, he just didn't know how to stop it. He knew I was doing something, that I was the reason he was wedged into a corner and either being ignored or glared at by the other twenty to thirty people there, some of which had been his friends.

But he couldn't do anything.

After near an hour of this, he left in disgust.

I've barely seen him out at clubs in the last six months, ever since I cleaved off the important half of his social group by befriending a particular man and making sure that I was not only my adorable, teasing self, but highly sexually desirable. With that man, a series of people dominoed away from Ginger, leaving him very high and dry.

People don't speak well of him.

But it doesn't matter anymore.

He's gone, and if he comes back, I'll make sure he's uncomfortable.