Correspondence July 11, 1987 (cassette tape - tape 2)

Before I became T's pen pal, he had had two other girlfriends. Both of those were long distance relationships (LDRs). The first one was J, and there is a long and complex story associated with how they got together and broke up which I will cover in the book that I'm writing. To provide context for this snippet of a tape that I'm transcribing, I'll say that T lived in California and J lived in Pennsylvania. They came together through a friend who T knew in person in California who was a pen pal of J's at that time.

After listening to J's tapes through this friend, T started to tape J on his own. Through time, he developed a lot of affection for her and wanted to meet her. They eventually met in person and took part in a LDR for about 9 months until T decided to break up with J due to various problems he experienced with the way she handled the relationship. In particular, she played games, lied, and tried to manipulate him.

In this partial transcript, I'm responding to a letter than T wrote me that J had sent him. After their break-up, they had not been friends for some length of time. J had gone off to her next LDR with a different young man ("M") who she viewed in many ways, at least initially, as a better match for her than T. After she and M crashed and burned, she wrote to T and wanted to be friends again. She took responsibility for a lot of the things that went wrong with their relationship in the letter and seemed to be a changed person. T had asked me whether I felt she was being sincere or not and this was my limited analysis:

Select transcript July 11, 1987 (2nd tape):

You read a letter from J that she wrote to you after you broke up (in which) she wanted you to get back together to be friends. You said it was dated Nov. 1, 1985. One thing you said was, "How much of that was a bunch of baloney and how much of it was from the heart?" I don't know if I'd be able to dissect it totally and say, "Well this part sounds like it was sincere and this part doesn't." One of the things I found really interesting was her timing, which was something to the effect that she wrote to you after she broke with M. Now, what that seems to me is that it was real convenient that, while she had M, she didn't need to write to you because her needs were being satisfied by somebody else. 'I'll show you! I have another boyfriend! I don't need you!' That kind of thing.

And then, when he broke up with her, her heart was broken and maybe she started to reconsider how valuable she was as a girlfriend and decided, "Well, T was good to me and maybe he'll take me back or be friends with me at least to help soothe my wounds." I think her timing was very interesting. As far as being sincere, and her admitting she was wrong... In the back of her mind, I'm sure that she was still blaming you and thinking that you were a terrible bastard for what you did. 

By the same token, she never seemed to me to be very pleased with you the way you were anyhow. She didn't like the way you were physically and she would say things like you should go lift weights, and that she was intimidated by you (intellectually), or, those kinds of things. If she felt that way, you would think that in the back of her mind, at least in some small quarter of her mind, she would be relieved that you just shut it off before it became anymore awkward for her than it obviously was. She didn't like the confrontation. If she didn't like the idea of moving to California which you said that you'd move to Pennsylvania... Did you say you'd move for her? She didn't like your smoking marijuana, those kinds of things. If there was so much about you that she didn't approve of then how could it be so traumatic for her to lose you?

I still doubt that you can unconditionally love someone—which is what I call "pure love"—which is the only circumstance under which you should marry somebody—if you unconditionally love them. You love them and you have no desire whatsoever to change (him) and you want nothing more from other than the same kind of love in return. That's what I think perfect marriages are built upon. If you go into it wanting to change, you're in trouble.

To me, it just seems like she was so far away from having that... I don't know. I really don't know.

*****

After getting to know T, and falling in love with him, I felt that neither J nor his second girlfriend A were "worthy" of his attention. J's main issues were that he was too thin and not muscular enough for her on a physical level and that she didn't like his way of directly discussing problems when they had them. She was more inclined toward the silent treatment or dropping topics of contention. She also felt that he was trying to show off his intelligence when he talked about things she was not knowledgeable about or used words that she was unfamiliar with. This was not the case as T was very intelligent, but was not inclined to use his intellect to talk down to anyone. J was very insecure and what she wanted was some buff beefcake that stood by her and made other women admire her and who wasn't sufficiently smart to make her feel dumb.

It's important to note that I also did not feel worthy of T and was not necessarily thinking those girlfriends were inferior whereas I was more on his level. The main difference was how I saw us each as unworthy. I saw J as unworthy in terms of her honesty (as she had so little of it), her values (which were so shallow), and her intellect (which was average). I saw A as unworthy in terms of her appreciation of the attention she got from T during their relationship since she was constantly trying to get him to send her less communication and I saw her as unworthy in terms of her physical affection levels (as she didn't like to be touched and wasn't especially sexual). For myself, I felt inferior in terms of social and economic status as well as my body. I felt that being fat meant that I was immediately of greatly lesser value than T. This was, after all, the mantra that had been drummed into me nearly ever day of my life since about age 10. 

Correspondence July 11, 1987 (cassette tape - tape 1)

The numbers on both tapes were written by T. I slapped my shorter labels over the top of his, but the one that covered side 1 fell off a long time ago revealing his handwriting.

On July 6, 1987, T called me on the phone for the first time. He did this with the help of a little sleuthing as he called me while I was at work and didn't have the phone number. What he had was the name of the city I was working in at the time and the social services agency that had employed me. The call cost him 45 cents a minute. In 2015, that was equivalent to 97 cents per minute. It was a steep price to pay to talk to me in real time, but I was thrilled that he had done so.

My little office in a converted former funeral home did not receive calls directly so the secretary in the main office intercepted and transferred them. She wasn't the brightest bulb and seemed to have some hearing comprehension issues to boot. When she told me someone was on the line for me, I didn't know that it was T despite her giving me a name.

Select transcript July 11, 1987 (tape 1):

Let me begin by telling you how much I really, I mean I already said this, this'll be the third time I said it, I already said it once on the phone, once in a card, and now on tape, how much I truly and sincerely appreciated the call that you gave me at work. I mean now my tone is down quite a bit from when I got the call, but after I got it, I ran down to the secretary and I said, "That was one of my friends from California! Oh my God, I can't believe it!" And then I was so excited that you called that I said, "I'm too excited to work!" So I walked up to the post office and mailed the tapes that I was going to send you. 

I made them all on Sunday and I planned on mailing them on Tuesday when I got off of work. I can leave work sometimes* and walk to stores and walk to the post office obviously or I wouldn't have mailed that one package of yours from (city where I worked). But, I was so hyped that I had to do something so I trotted on up to the post office which is a nice quarter-mile hike there and another quarter-mile back. It's decent exercise. 

The really funny part was when the secretary answered the phone, she must've got your name wrong or the connection must've been bad or something because she said-she buzzed me up in my office... She goes, "T--off" T--olof". I didn't know who the hell she was talking about. If I had known that it was you, you wouldn't have been on hold for about the 20 seconds that you were on hold. I would have got on that phone a lot quicker. I didn't know who it was when I picked up the phone. I thought, "Gee I wonder... " It did flicker through my my mind, but I thought, "Nah, it couldn't be." 

But, I was so happy for you to do that. Nobody's ever done that for me. Very few people have even called me here at my home let alone called me at work. Wow! I know it was no big deal to you... well, I don't know if it was a big deal to you or not. I guess 45 cents a minute should have been a big deal to you. I just want you to know that if you ever feel like doing that again, I'll appreciate it just as much.

In connection with this, people calling people-to me-it's always a very special thing when a pen pal calls or anybody calls long distance whether it be a pen pal or a friend or whatever because they're paying for it and they're paying quite a bit. You can do it on tape all the time and it's just an extra special thing (to be called on the phone). I have a question for you because I'm going to relay an experience. Have you ever called somebody and not had a good reaction other than A? I don't know because, from what you've told me, there have been times when A-I don't know, you say that the calls go well regardless of what sort of mood A is in-so I better not say regardless of A. 

Have you ever called anybody long distance and gotten a really bad reaction like they don't even want to talk to you because I've had this happen to me twice and it's been the same person. (Story about how I called a mutual pen pal and she ended the call or put me off each time.)

...

I don't know how it goes with you and long distance calls, but it's very, very rare that somebody that somebody calls me and I make sure that I end the call because I have something to do. I may at some point say, "Oh, geez, should I cut this short so that your bill's not going to be ten stories high," because I do have concern for that. I know that I didn't have too much concern for that when you called the second time.** Yeah, let's keep him on the line! For the most part, if I'm going to say anything about the length of the conversation, it's going to be out of concern for their financial welfare, but realistically, maybe I shouldn't mention that. It may be in poor manners, but I do care about the people who call me and I do care that they've been on the line with me for an hour and a half. Even though I've been enjoying it tremendously, it's just sometimes difficult when you make a call to end it because it just goes well sometimes.


*Generally, I had to be present at my workplace at all times. One program worker was obliged to be present when clients were in the residential facility. We could only leave if someone else from the office was present to "babysit" the clients. My boss or another worker would usually give me a break for a short walk or a breather during my 24-hour shift so that I could get out for at least a little while each day that I worked so that I did not have to be cooped up in the house for the entire day.

**T wanted to talk to me longer than he could initially because I had work responsibilities, so he called initially then called me back later. There were two separate calls, but the initial intention was for there to be one call.

*****

These days, I've been told that people not only do not appreciate phone calls, but actively would like to avoid receiving them. One of my friends said he rarely or never picks up when people call him and prefers that they text him or leave a voice mail. It seems incredibly ironic that those of us acting at a distance so valued talking with one another in real time that were willing to pay significant amounts of money to do so. These days, people can do it for free and do not want this happy privilege. It seems like we devalue and take things for granted because they are free or cheap and easy.

Correspondence July 4, 1987 (greeting card)

The fact that I was writing T a greeting card on a national holiday reflected two things. One was my as-yet-unspoken crush on him. The other was the fact that I worked my 24-hour shift at the halfway house on Friday and came home early Saturday morning and picked up the mail I'd missed during my work-induced absence. It was becoming more common to find his tapes each Saturday and to spend the day—a day that often followed a sleep-deprived night—listening and taking notes.

As always, click on the image to load a larger version that can be read.

Outside of card:

Inside of card:

Transcript of interior:

Dear T,
     Answer to your hypothetical question: "How would I, S, feel if for one reason or another you taped and said, 'we're finished.'
     Answer: I would be crushed, devastated, and angry as hell. Why? I value your thoughts, opinions, and the "company" I get by spending time with you on tape. Indeed, I have an "emotional attachment" as well as having many "needs being met" by an intelligent, honest, and lovely person. I'll expand on the topic on tape but you'd better not be considering it (I doubt that you are).
     Your tapes arrived at an opportune (spelling?) time and I thoroughly enjoyed the first 12 sides (which is as far as I am right at this moment) and will probably enjoy the rest equally.
     So far, you're very wrong about things "leveling off" and it becoming "only T!" It's still, "oh wow, tapes from T!"
     This is getting disgusting, isn't it? Anyway, you're terrific and I thought I'd tell you so...
     Tapes will soon follow.
     Very soon!

S

Transcript of back:

Quote from Think by Dr. Robert Anthony: "There is brutality and there is honesty. There is no such thing as brutal honesty."

Just a point to ponder...

*****

One of my "problems" was that I was often too honest or blunt for most people's tastes. That went for saying both positive and negative things. I included the Dr. Robert Anthony quote in reference to this troublesome personality trait of mine, but T was rare in that he wasn't intimidated by my particular brand of honesty.

Correspondence June 28, 1987 (notes - part 2)

This is the second part of a post about the types of notes that T and I tended to take when we taped each other. The first part is here.

You'll note that there are two sets of numbers on each page. The number in the upper right refers to the page of notes. The number on the left side is a reference to what side of the tapes that he received that he is taking notes on. Five sides are referenced here. That means that he's responding to a package in which he'd received three tapes from me.

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*****

Note: T was a very good chess player as a child and still excellent as an adult. The "postal game" that he refers to is a game of chess. I could play a bit, but I didn't know about formal things such as opening moves and known strategies.

If nothing else, these notes should give a good idea of the range of things we discussed. They included myself, T, our mutual pen pals and those who they knew and spoke of, and whatever things we were doing or were holding our interest at the time. One of my friends was flabbergasted that we could talk for hours as we did. It's not that we never ran out of things to say, but rather that it took quite some time before we did so.

Correspondence June 28, 1987 (notes - part 1)

With pen pals with whom we had a particular rapport, we often referred to the tapes we received as "marathons". That's because it was often one person talking alone for many hours. For T and me, it was not uncommon for there to be between three and six 90-minute tapes in one package, though he usually sent more than I did as he not only spoke more slowly and with more pauses, but he also was better at asides. I tended to stay more on my "script" or work from notes when I spoke.

The tapes were an attempt on our parts to carry on "conversations" with both distance and time separating us. Distance is something that still can't be solved in LDRs, but modern technology has allowed most people to overcome the issue of time with simultaneous or nearly immediate responses being possible via chat, Skype, or texting. For us, we were lucky if only five days had passed between the last word leaving our lips and the first word being heard by the recipient.

The way in which we attempted to conduct these ersatz conversations was to listen, take notes, and then use those notes to construct our answers. I usually wrote copious pages of notes, including not only what was said that I wanted to comment on, but often notes on what I wanted to say in reply. As I recorded my answers, I would often cross off items then throw away my pages of notes. None of my taping notes survive to this day, but one set of T's do. I still have these because, at one point, we each asked the other to send our notes so that we could get an idea of how we each carried out this particular task. I saved the 7 pages of notes that T took on a set of my tapes (pre-relationship).

It is important to know that tone and context are entirely absent when viewing these notes. Some things were said sarcastically, some as jokes, and some as hypothetical considerations. That's my way of saying not to take too much at what appears on these pages at face value. This is what was jotted down rapidly by someone listening to a young woman from Pennsylvania spout her nonsense for about three hours. 

Note: While I usually transcribe written correspondence for clarity, I will not be doing so in this case since the nature of the notes is so erratic. Also, again, you can click on these pictures to load a size that should be readable and you can increase the size of the graphic using your browser's controls if it isn't big enough once the picture is loaded (control plus +  on a PC or command plus + on a Mac).

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Comments of use: "Gene" refers to Gene Simmons of KISS.

The second part of the notes is here.

Correspondence June 17, 1987 (cassette tape)

On this tape, I do something which was very common for our network of pen friends to do. I inform him a bit about my personal history. With my mothers noisy dog barking at me for attention and her even noisier bird banging on its cage and shrieking in the background, I did my best to let him know who I was at that moment by telling him more about who I once was.

Select transcript June 17, 1987:

As far as me as a child, I can remember certain things, but I don't have a great deal of memory of my childhood. I don't think anybody has a real vivid memory. I remember always having my sister around and me always wanting to do things and her never wanting to do anything. I always wanted to play. My sister never wanted to play anything. I wished I had a sister who wanted to play with me so I always turned to my cousins, but there wasn't a good situation with my cousins either. That's also a story unto itself. It's hard to explain all of the inter-relationships. I can remember that always happening... that I would always wanted to do things and (my sister) wouldn't.

As far as in school, I got D's in first grade. I did not do well in second or third grade as far as grades went. In fourth grade, I started to pull straight A's. In fifth and sixth, I started to vacillate a little bit and get B's and C's. Then, in 7th and 8th, I got A's and B's. And then 9th through the rest of school, I got straight A's and did real well. I don't understand why my performance wavered, but the funny is that I always used to feel that I was stupid and then got intelligent. It was really weird. 

I would not know what was going on and then a door would open and I would understand everything. First, second, third grade, I thought I was really dumb and I couldn't understand things. Math, in second grade, geez, the math teacher hated me because I was so damn dumb that I couldn't get anything. I remember on multiple occasions her trying to make me understand and it never quite getting through. Then, in fourth grade, it was like "bang, bang, bang", it all made sense. It was like it took my brain up until fourth grade to develop any abstract thinking at all. In fourth grade, it was all clear. In fifth to sixth grade, again, it sort of dropped off then 7th it all came back.

In 7th and 8th grade, once more, it went away. In 9th, it came back. It never went away after 9th, by the way. Then, it was okay. I can remember these spurts of growth and (not having) intellectual growth. I remember never having it clear for awhile and then it just all of sudden being crystal and I don't understand that about myself, but it happened enough times that I don't know. I used to think I was really dumb though. Now I know better, but I used to think I was really stupid, especially when I was very young.

As far as social relationships throughout my childhood, I was a very thin child in first grade. I was really skinny and scrawny, but in second... from second grade on, I was very overweight and, as you know, there's a lot of abuse from other children for that. I can never remember a time more or less of not being overweight. By the time I was up to 305 lbs., which was my peak weight, which is the weight that I was at for a long time, through much of my last two years of high school. In my last two years of high school, I weighed over 300 pounds, and through my first three years of college, I did, too. It reached the point where I didn't even feel like a person. I felt like a creature and I didn't feel like a human being.

You asked me some questions about that. How did I change? Well, I feel like a person now whereas before I felt like I wasn't even human and I (now) deserve to be treated like a human because, for so many years, I was treated as less than worthwhile. People snicker and they make jokes. They always torment you and taunt you and I can never remember a time in my life when that didn't happen prior to my transition.* I never, ever felt like I was an attractive person. I tried to convince myself that there were certain parts of me that were rather attractive, but I could never delude myself to that point. I always was thinking, "Some day, I'll do this or that, or whatever," and I never did it as far as losing weight. I want to find the questions that you asked me specifically so I can address that.

What I wanted to tell was that, you have to consider that there's a lot of emotions that go along with being the weight that anybody is at when they're severely obese. You have a lot of anger at the people who are taunting you and anger at yourself for not controlling the problem. You have a lot of self-hate and a lot of hate toward the people who are bothering you. There's a lot of negative things and one of the things that I found when I show people that this is what I used to look like, they say that you looked a lot less happy than you do now. 

A lot of that dissipated, but not completely. I still hate to see anybody judged on appearance. I hate it with a complete passion. It bothers the hell out of me. I really resent that you asked me my height and weight. For me, it's enough that I sent two full length, full body pictures. What more do you want? I'm not going to tell you my weight! It's none of your damn business. If you can't tell what I supposedly look like from two pictures that show me in my entirety except for my feet, I'm going to tell you! It's none of your business!

I hate talking about this, by the way. You said, do I feel comfortable. It's not a matter of comfort. It's a matter of hating to, but doing it anyway because there are reasons why which I'll go into later on.

*****

*This "transition" refers to dramatic weight loss. I'd lost about 140 lbs. by the time I started corresponding with T.

*****

I had sent T two photos of me in my second correspondence to him. Those pictures were me prior to weight loss and after weight loss. I didn't want to show him the "old" me, but I felt that I had to in order to be emotionally transparent and to avoid talking around certain topics. I had fallen in love with him, and I didn't want him to see what I used to look like because I was afraid that it would convince him stop corresponding to me altogether. Fortunately, it did not stop him.

Correspondence June 26, 1987 (letter - part 2)

This is the second part of a scan and transcript of a 5-page letter that I wrote to T from my workplace. The first two pages can be read here.  

In retrospect, some of what I say and how I say it is a little embarrassing, especially the typos and misspellings, but those were days when checking a word's spelling meant finding a book that may or may not have included that word. Things like "meniscus" weren't exactly something that you'd necessarily find in an abridged version of Webster's Dictionary and I'm not even sure a dictionary was kept in the office that I worked in at that time. 

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 Transcript:

...most of my pen pals was that he was able to write about things other than KISS. This was about as common as a rabbit giving birth to an only child when it comes to the pen pal world. Even rarer yet was intelligent male pen pals... perhaps one of the reasons I had low expectations of you as a pen pal was that the track record with males was quite bad. I say "the" and not "my" track record because so many females will concur with me on this. If that were one of my, admittedly, sexist reasons then it was totally unconscious.

By the way, this is all being typed on the back of an instruction form for re-application for welfare funds. We are pretty into conservation of almost everything here. Not a scrap of paper escapes this office without it being written on as much as it possibly can. Just think of paper as a glass of water whose meniscus (spelling?) doesn't fall below the lip of the glass and you'll understand the degree to which a scrap must be utilized before we're supposed to dispose of it. If Webster does a new edition in the near future, he'll put "T.L." after the word "thrifty."

At this point, I have realized the true limitations of taping over writing... that is that you can write almost anywhere under almost any circumstances. After all, Francis Scott Key composed by the rockets red glare, Watson wrote in the sterility of his lab, Freud scrawled in the comfort of his office as one of his hysterical females (hysterical, of course, because of their "wandering uterurses"), and one can only ponder under what conditions Kinsey got in the mood to discuss his subject matter (or for that matter, how many Chippendales playing cares Shere Hite had to have on her desk for any edition of the Hite report). The circumstances under which one writes tend to filter into subject matter and therefore create new points to ponder. In my case, the surroundings tend to permeate all I say. Maybe one of the reasons why I'm incapable of spontaneous conversational babbling is that I need certain stimuli to help me think of certain topics. I guess you can file that under one of those things you might think about if it were more interesting, but you probably won't because it's not all that interesting. 

My sister called me and told me that the plural of uterus is "uteri"... that sounds very, very odd to me, but you can't fight Mr. Webster. That reminds me of a resident we once had here. She was involved in the program for the first two months of my employment here. This woman actually had two sets of reproductive organs. I kid you not! That is, two vaginas, two uteri, two sets of fallopian tubes, etc. I guess she could have been in a pornographic Doublemint gum commercial if Playboy had been interested. "Double your pleasure, double your fun...| I supposed that someone her age (she was in her fifties) wouldn't have made a great model and it would have been too early for an appearance on the Playboy channel when she was of a more photogenic age.

Let me tell you about my plans for tomorrow... I am going to meet a pregnant girl and take her shopping at the most pedestrian of shopping centers. We have discount stores here called "Big Lots". the name says it all ("quality" through size). They get in huge crates of products that won't sell anywhere else and sell them to yobbos here that someone on a $1 a week allowance could afford. The products are far from being famous name brands so you're always "at risk" (of your health) when you buy. Mainly, they deal in polyester fashions, irregular linens, and junk food of dubious origin. For instance, there's a type of chip that tastes like seasoned sawdust called "De-Lites". Any product that touts lower calories and uses the word "lite" in any way, shape or form should be AVOIDED). They have "75% fewer calories per bite than conventional chips." They neglect to say that they also have 75% less taste and 75% more carcinogens. I must admit that I can get some of the more mundane products for daily life there for fewer greenbacks... like makeup remover, shampoo, and cleaning products for the household (I'm big into cleaning products, sort of a pseudo-Joan-Crawford complex). However, one should truly avoid sampling too many of their hair care products since there are such things as "curl removers" and shampoos with idiotic French-sounding names that make your head feel like a hundred lice are loose partying it up on your scalp. Such products smell like the water closet of a brothel.

It's 10:00 p.m. and high time that I make up my bed for the night. I don't anticipate sleep in the near future (as I've already stated), but the closer I get to Mr. Sandman, the easier my transition to sleep waves will be. There's nothing worse than being dead tired and having to make the bed, brush my teeth, and clean my contacts so I try to do these things as early as possible. I might as well explain the work area to you. There's a big desk in the middle of the left side of the room and a set of ugly light grey file cabinets against the right wall. There's a day bed at the end of the far left side and a dresser behind the desk where I am now seated. The typewriter this is being done on was lifted from the secretary's office. I hope that no one will be perturbed that I brought it up here for the weekend (I'll carry it back down to the office it came from when I return on Monday). The "day bed" is where I sleep. It's got an ugly blue and white cover on it that's about as soft as a rose stem and would leave a print like a waffle iron on your body if you decided to sleep on top of it. Actually, the room itself, though rather small, has potential. There's a lovely mantle with a marble (white) hearth beneath an old boarded -up fireplace in here. In fact, the house is quite old and has several old fireplaces. The entire office was remodeled by one of the staff (former coworker's name... I spoke of her on tape) less than 2 months ago. She papered, scrubbed, and begged to have it the way she wanted and did a great job. The "begging" was to get the marble hearth unearthed. She cleaned it with a toothbrush in order to convince them to cut the new carpet around the marble.

Anyway, if sleeping in a house with 8 crazy people weren't enough to spook the average person out of getting sleep, the fact that this place was a funeral parlor before we (Transitional Living, Inc. aka T.L.) inhabited it 15 years ago would do the trick. Believe me, it has the look for it! At least I know this room was too small to be a showing place... it was probably an embalming room. 

This is the end for I have lack of sleep to achieve (rather than "no sleep at all"). Excuse the typos, tape soon!

Cheers,

S

Correspondence June 26, 1987 (letter - part 1)

I sometimes wrote to my pen pals from my office. This was back in the days when PCs were not common and I had to use a typewriter. When I look back at such letters, I cringe at the typing mistakes and skipped words, but such was the risk when you could not go back and change something here or there in a message. My writing has, hopefully, gotten a bit better over the years, but I was still a fairly good writer for my age (22) at the time.

Though I taped to T, I chose to write on occasion because I couldn't easily tape to him from work. This allowed me to be in touch with him any time he was on my mind. By the time this letter was written, I was spending no small amount of time thinking about him.

Note: If you click on the pictures, a larger version will load that should be at a readable size.

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Transcription:

Dear T,

Since you have never been graced with the undeniable wit of my written word, and because I have an incredible urge to communicate with someone intelligent, I am typing to you live from my place of employment. How's that for a long sentence?

I'm not sincerely bored... merely tired and unable to go to sleep. You see (or "ya see", as Bill Cosby says), it's only 8:15 and all of the natives are quietly restless, but not the least bit tired. I had a substantial amount of insomnia last night so I'm already beat and I know these lovely individuals are going to keep me up until 1:00 a.m. (which is their Friday night curfew).

Let me attempt to entertain you with my musings of the evening. This is a day that began with a makeup kit that cost $8.40. We (the illustrious staff here at T.L.) put on of the clients on a true behavior modification program (that means there was a specific target behavior, a monitoring mechanism, and a tangible reward). We wanted to see if behaviorism was as lovely in practice as in theory. The subject was a 42-year-old white female with the I.Q. of a throat lozenge. To give you some idea of how this woman functions, I'll give you a brief case history. 

Norma flunked 1st grade 6 times. At that point, her family and the American educational system called it a day and let her stay at home with Mommy for the rest of her mother's days. When tested for functional level, Norma hit the 6th month of 1st grade as her level. When Norma entered our program, she drew her eyebrows on with a blue liner pencil, wore more base make-up than all 4 KISS members combined, took speed (aka diet pills), ate prunes to help her "lose weight", and would not drink water because it would make her gain weight. If the crystal beauty of Behaviorism's principles can work on her, they can work on almost anyone who comes into the program.

The target behavior was taking medications without reminder. She takes an antipsychotic drug called Trilafon. It is meant to help organize her thoughts. She needs a low dosage because there isn't a Hell of a lot to be organized. Anyway, the monitoring mechanism was a calendar that we put stickers on when she took the medication each day without reminder. By the way, she chose her own reward from a list that included a wallet, dinner with a staff member, a makeup kit, and going to a movie with a staff person. We were quite flattered that she picked makeup over us.

The pristine qualities of Behaviorism worked like a charm for Norma. She is now happily taking her medicine and can go back to painting on her eyebrows in a wide assortment of colors. Actually, I broke her of the blue brows... they're now brown. The one thing I can't seem to break her of is completely shaving her entire face (!).

I wonder what you would have thought about me had we written before we had taped. I am much more fond of writing to people than talking to them for the most part and feel that it is a better form of communication for me. When I'm sharp at it, I'm pretty good. However, I'm not nearly at sarcastic wit as I used to be because of disuse. I had a pen pal in Canada named Clifford to whom I used to compose 10-page novellas rife with cynicism, sarcasm, and innuendo of the rudest sort. He was equally good at returning such types of letters. For reasons unknown to me, he quit writing to me entirely around August of last year. This was after I had sent the dear boy an "Asylum"* promo poster for his birthday. I never even received an acknowledgment that it reached his P.O. box, despite a few attempts on my part to re-open communication after his silence. It also happened after I sent him a picture of my (newer) self. Talk about a blow to the ego... I think I was angrier at the lack of acknowledgement of the gift.

Oddly enough, Clifford was one of the few male pen pals I had ever come to admire enough to even consider some sort of long distance relationship with. He wasn't educated, but he was bright. In fact, he worked in a butcher shop and liked to splatter fake blood on the walls of his house and spray fake cobwebs around his Gene Simmons pictures. Maybe he never wrote back because he ended up getting committed... one can only ponder.

Another thing Dear Clifford (capital "D" intended) had over...

*****

*Asylum was an album made by KISS in 1985.

The second part of this letter is posted here.

Correspondence May 23, 1987 (cassette tape)

My second tape to T was the first one in which I was fully emotionally invested in building a good relationship with him. I talked more and in greater detail. It also included a lot of talk about other pen pal relationships that he knew either because of shared pen pals (J) or those with whom he had a passing familiarity due to the cross connections between our group of KISS fans. In this tape, I talked about H, who was a pen pal of J's as well. I had recently broken off my pen pal relationship with H and T had asked me why I had done so.

This tape was entirely created while I was driving to and from my job. At that time, I was working in a small city about 45 minutes from my rural home. The length of the drive was notable because I could complete almost exactly one side of a standard 90-minute cassette tape during each leg of my journey. Many such tapes were done with various pen pals throughout my two years working at a transitional living facility for the seriously mentally ill.

When reading the content of any of my tapes from that time, it is important to keep in mind that my work was made up of 24-hour shifts in which I spent an entire day (and night) living in the same house as people who had been hospitalized for their condition. These were not people who were capable of functioning in the world at large. They had hallucinations or delusions. Many had tried to kill themselves. Some had tried to harm others. No small number had been functionally impaired either by their substance use or their life circumstances. They were much more damaged, dangerous, and difficult to manage than the average person on Prozac who struggles to get through his or her day-to-day life.

It was my essentially "living" with such people that informed a lot of the comments I made about my job on tape to T in my distant past. It was a life experience that few people have had or ever will have, and it may be hard to fully imagine how difficult it was to work in such a situation. In this day and age, I would not refer to the people I worked with as "crazy" because it would be politically incorrect and insensitive. At that time, however, I was 22 years old and the world had not yet discovered a need for an ever-mutating kaleidoscope of euphemisms in order to de-stigmatize certain conditions. I leave the offensive terms that I used intact because this is a transcript and I do not wish to change the way in which my history is reflected to suit a modern mentality. It should be sufficient to say that I wouldn't speak in this fashion at this time were I to refer to these situations in the present.

Select transcript of May 23, 1987 tape:

When I have something that I want to say, some feeling, I want to say, "I feel this way." The problem is that sometimes when you say "I feel this way, the other person takes it as, "You feel this way and it's my fault, you're blaming me because you feel this way," and that's not necessarily true. And one of my big struggles in life is that I say these things and I try to make people understand at the time that there is no blame to the situation. What I'm feeling may be as the result of a mis-perception, but, "I feel this way." I feel they should know that I feel this way so that the whole circumstance is out in the open.

...

One thing you said was that, if you knew someone obviously couldn't handle what you had to say, then you wouldn't say it. H obviously couldn't handle that. One of the things about the relationship that I had with her was that it was so confined and that was one of the reasons why it was so boring. It became very mundane because there were so many things that we could not discuss for many different reasons. She didn't like conflict so we couldn't discuss religion or politics. If I would bring them up, she'd say, "Well let's not discuss it." 

We couldn't discuss anything personal if we had a conflict because she didn't want to discuss that either. She always took it as a very deep, personal insult if I brought up any conflict we may be having—no matter how carefully I tried to word it. I'm not saying that I had insults and I was disguising them. I'm saying that I had feelings that I needed to convey and she got very, very angry and resentful when I conveyed them. I was resricted in that I had to handle her with kid gloves which is hard for me to begin with.  We had so many things that are out of bounds in the relationship that there wasn't enough in bounds to keep it interesting. That's why it was boring, because there were things that I could not talk about... there were so many of them.

...

What I want out of relationships, and I did write this in the card that I sent, is that they be open. I want them to be interesting, but "interesting" has to be loosely defined. It doesn't mean that you have to have four years of college and be a KISS fan. It doesn't mean you have to be those things. It means it doesn't hurt, but I have a pen pal who is 18 years old and I've been writing to her since she was 15 and she's the sweetest creature. She is so sweet that we have mostly KISS in common, but she's so funny and I love her so much that the whole thing is very, very interesting to me even though we don't discuss theories. We don't even discuss mutual relationships. She also writes to J. It's not that she's not intelligent. It's just that she hasn't had the extra years to mature that I have. Every year—every day—makes a difference in your maturity. You'll never be as mature as you are now. You'll always look back and say, 'That was a really immature thing that I did. I hope I don't do it again. I can't believe I did it in the first place.'

There aren't certain characteristics that I need for it to be interesting, but I need free communication. It's not so I can hurt somebody or say, "Well, there is a problem and I'm going to throw it in your face," but just so that things can grow. If you put a restriction on something, it's going to stagnate and it stagnated with H. That's pretty much what I want and what I didn't get (from H).

...

In my experience, my problem is not getting people to talk about themselves, but trying to get them to stop for a minute so that I can interject a thought, or even stick a question in there to help the topic proceed... to help it develop and move on. But, that's my (work), and in my business, people are always talking at you. I once wrote in our staff log books—we do daily logs where we record what (clients)do and what's coming up in any specific behavioral problems—we had a part for staff in the back of the book and I once wrote that I felt like the listening box for humanity where I had to keep listening and listening and listening and it gets to the point where it is very frustrating. 

I don't mind it, as I'm sure most people don't mind, because by listening to others, you get these new... perceptions... new perspectives on life. It's a different vantage point so it's very valuable, but when you sit there and listen to crazy people talk for hours, which is not all I do everyday—but I bet you I get in a good four hours of listening to crazy people talk a day—it gets to the point where I think, "Please give my mind a rest. Let me talk to someone who I can have an exchange with instead of everybody feeding off of me." 

It's funny because they're filling you up, but they're sucking you dry. I don't know if you can understand this or not, but it's like by talking to you, they're draining you of all of your life. They're filling you with their troubles and you're pumping them up with your energy. As they say, "I want to kill myself. I don't feel that I'm a worthwhile human being. I feel like I'm a crazy person." You're sitting there and saying, "No, no, no, you shouldn't feel that way. You're worthwhile." You send all of your energy into them and they fill you up with their illness and it's very hard sometimes. It just gets to the point where you can't deal with it.

*****

At the time, I didn't realize it, but the way in which both T and I talked about our relationships with others revealed important information about how we regarded relationships in general as well as provided a wealth of information about each other's personalities.What I wanted from relationships was not something that I necessarily demanded of him, but relayed through the failed relationships that I had had with other friends.

Correspondence May 21, 1987 (greeting card)

When I was younger, I was very much into impressionist art and would go out of my way to acquire cards or pictures with the paintings of painters such as Monet. My enthusiasm for said artists waned a bit as time went by, but I had a stash of cards with pictures that I especially treasured. The cards were small, less than the size of a postcard, but they had glossy fronts and high quality color printing. The card stock was sturdy and I can even remember the smell of them as the higher quality cards enclosed in the contained space of the box they were stored in retained a distinctive bouquet of printing fluids and wood pulp.

I used those impressionist cards only on occasions that mattered to me in some way. They were not "throwaways" like some of the more mundane and cheap, flimsy cards that I kept on hand. It's no shock then that I used one of these cards to get back to T after I'd fallen in love with him as a result of his second set of tapes to me. He had no idea that there was any significance to the card nor that I'd suddenly gone from being ready to abandon him after his first correspondence to being passionate about him.

Card front and back:

Card interior:

Transcript:

 Dear T,
    Hi! I’m through w/three sides of your tapes and working on the fourth side. I was sooo impressed at this point that I felt compelled to drop a second note to say:
1.    I was such an idiot for waiting so long to listen to your tapes.
2.    I’m even sorrier for taking so long to get back to you.
3.    I have to work my nifty little 24-hour shift tomorrow so the earliest you’ll hear from me is the week of the 25th... though I am literally DYING to reply to you.
4.    Here are the things I want out of a penpalship (I will expand on this on tape) – a meaningful exchange of interesting conversation, preferably intelligent conversation... which you supplied beautifully.
    Once more I’m very sorry for taking so long to reply. I was terribly impressed by your tapes & hope to get back very soon.
    Take care,
    S

*****

Though I mentioned this in previous posts about correspondence, there was a more than two month gap between my listening to his first tape and his second one. I was trying very hard with this card to repair any damage I may have done to his impression of me by being emphatic in my appreciation of his second set of tapes. It was my fervent hope that he'd give me a second chance despite my slack response.

Correspondence March 3, 1987 ( cassette tape)

The date on this tape is an approximation based on the fact that T received it on March 9, 1987 and my best guess was that it took six days to reach the West coast from the East coast. You can see that the tape has been passed around a bit. The torn off parts of the factory label on the first side happened because each recipient would tear off the original labels at the top and replace them with their own. This tape was T's first tape to me that I recorded over after receiving it. If I could extract the old recording from it, I would love to have it. Unfortunately, that is not possible. However, I can know to a great extent what he talked about based on what I said as I repeated back many of his topics and commented on them.

Some context for the excerpts from this tape are that T and I connected via mutual pen pals (A & J). A, J, and I were all fans of the rock group KISS and all of my pen pals to date were also KISS fans. I sought out pen pals to talk about the band and T was the first person who I'd corresponded with who was not a KISS fan.

I'm posting this out of order. This is the tape that T replied to and pre-dated the tape that I offered a bit of in this post. 

Transcript (select portions):

I can't say that this is the best time for me to be taping, because I'd really say it's the worst time, but, I have the time and privacy now so I'd better seize it. What you're gonna find out is that, for me, the big issue with taping now is getting the privacy to do it. I have this real hang-up about taping anywhere where anybody can hear me because my family is extremely nosy. (In) some families you (can) tape and they don't really pay much attention to you, but mine always think this is kind of bizarre, so I don't like to do it anywhere where I think they may hear me. So, right now, they're all gone. Wow! Usually, extraordinary circumstances have to occur before I can get the house to myself.
...
Like you — you said that you were very organized and very precise — I'm very organized. I'm not sure of how precise I am. It's not something that I ever pay attention to. I think I'm fairly precise also, and also like you, as J and A indicated, I'm very straightforward. Unlike you, I don't really try to taper that too much when I present it because I don't like to beat around the bush. I really dislike it because I think that you're not doing anybody a favor by dancing around the truth. In reality, if you're not being straightforward, that's what you're doing. You're not really "lying," but you're pushing what you really feel aside for a little while so you can save their feelings. When it comes to me, I don't want people trying to do me any favors. I would rather they were just forthright with me, and said, "Hey, I think this about you." And, just get it over with. Don't be mean or vicious. I'm not mean or vicious about it either, but a lot of people can't tolerate that. A lot of them perceive that as being cruel. They either learn to live with it or ultimately they dump you.
....
It's wonderful talking about yourself. It's rare for me to get to talk about myself so I just eat up any opportunity to do so. In my sort of... it isn't really a profession... in the kind of work that I get involved in, you do a lot of listening and very little talking because people mainly need a shoulder to cry on and an ear to talk into which is fine, but when your friendships become counselor/patient friendships, too.
.....
The (pen pal relationships) that exist at present are pretty old, strong sort of ties. They've been around for awhile. That's really rather good because we really are beyond the superficiality of being KISS fans. We can continue to tape for the rest of our lives. Maybe taping you will give me a good enough experience in dealing with that so that when the band breaks up, we'll all be fine. We'll all be able to carry on.
.....
About being a KISS fan, it's just another facet of me. It's just there and it's been there for so long that I think that I only hold onto it because of its familiarity. It's lost a lot of its initial excitement and value. It really has, but I'm sure J has explained this to you, too. She sort of feels the same way. We just all hold onto it, just like it's a little teddy bear that we keep with us and it makes us feel secure because it's an icon. It's just always been there. It's like you look out and there is a tree there and it has been there since you were born and it makes you feel safe and secure because it's always been there. It doesn't matter if it is human and important. It just matters that it is there.

*****

My tendency to be blunt muted as the years went by. One of my coworkers at the time that this tape was made told me that I had a lot of rough edges that needed to be filed off, but that he could see that I had a lot going for me. He was right. Filing off those rough edges took some pretty painful life experiences, however, but I did learn that "blunt" and "straightforward" aren't necessarily the same thing.

Correspondence March 12, 1987 (cassette tape)

This was the second cassette tape that T sent me. It was the first one that was a direct reply to a tape that I had sent him. I was so unimpressed by his first tape that I didn't listen to this one for over two months. This is tape 1 of a set of 2. I no longer have the second tape, much to my chagrin. Cassette tapes were expensive and we did not usually keep them around to reference. We listened to them, took some notes about what was said, and then recorded over them.

I will not be transcribing entire tapes as it would be pointless, relatively uninteresting for people who don't know the context of the conversations, and incredibly time consuming given the volume of taping. I will transcribe select pieces of certain tapes because of what they say about our friendship and how that sort of talk contributed to our future LDR. Note that transcripts will not be utterly verbatim as "ums", "you knows", and other non-essential verbal "tics" will be removed from all such content.

In the case of this piece, it mentions the fact that I had other pen pals, but all of them had been fans of the rock group KISS. In fact, KISS were the reason that I sought out pen pals as I wanted to talk about the band. T was my only pen pal who was not a pen pal and that was part of why I was not especially interested in corresponding with him initially.

Select transcript of March 12, 1987 tape:

Typical to my personality, I got your tape Monday, was it Monday, yeah, I'm pretty sure it was Monday. Monday, I got home from school and I had some things that I had to do. I didn't have any classes that night, but the next day my Fundamental Analysis paper was due and I had things to do for the banking test and all that. But, I got home and I see your tape there and my first reaction was "All right," because I wasn't positive that you would write back. I figured you probably would, but you never get too confidant about those kinds of things. You don't want to be expecting it and then when it doesn't happen, you say, "Gee, you know, I wonder why." I personally don't like to get my hopes up for things. And then, it's just so after they happen, "Oh, good, okay, it did happen." So, I was very happy to see your tape there and I liked the card. I think it's a neat card. It's too bad (name of KISS fan magazine that S. worked for) is now defunct as I understand it is. That was neat.

So, naturally, I've got all these things that I have to do, right? So, what do I do, I go into my room and listen to the tape. I couldn't help it because, I don't know, I was just very curious and also it's part of my personality that whenever I get tapes, I like to listen to them right away. There's some times when that's simply impossible, but generally speaking, I have this impulse to put them in right away.

It's like, "oh, good, I want to hear the latest news, be it from J or A.*" With this tape, it was even more like that because I'd never heard you before. It's like, "Oh, a whole new person. I've got to hear what she sounds like." So, I took the tape into my room and listened to it and I must say that, I was like, "Whoah, this is neat!" I think I'm going to really enjoy talking to you. I think we can have some really interesting conversations because while we're not... our major fields are different and everything, and no, I'm not a KISS fan... you said you never had a successful pen pal relationship with anybody who's not a KISS fan before. My reaction to that, was "Well, there's a first time for everything." I'm not terribly worried about that. 


I think we'll have more than enough to talk about without that. When you were talking about that, you said part of the reason that it hasn't worked before with other non-KISS fans was that, when you're writing letters or making tapes, it facilitates communication a lot quicker, but when you're trying to get beyond the superficiality of just knowing somebody for the first time, then if you didn't have anything to talk about, then you'd fall back on KISS as a way to have something to talk about. You'd get to know each other better and then you could start talking about more things. 

I don't know because, I don't think that's going to be a problem because I do not feel, for some reason, and I don't know why... maybe I should, but I do not feel constrained by whatever bounds are involved in not knowing you very much yet. I've only heard you for an hour or so, but, for some reason, and I may be wrong, I got the sense, just kind of a sense, nothing that you can really put into words too much, I got a sense from listening to you talk that I can talk to you about a lot of stuff and that I can trust you to listen to what I say and... It's a just a feeling that I can talk and I'm not really going to worry about if I say the wrong thing, or, "maybe I shouldn't say that because I don't know her real well." I don't know if you know what I'm trying to say, but, like you say, I suppose that when you do start writing people, there would tend to be a holding back process on one side or the other about certain things because you really don't know the person. With you, I feel like it's different because you have an air about you of "Hey, this is just the way it is and I'm going to say it if that is the way it is, so the hell with it." And, I'm a little like that myself. So, I don't think it's going to be a problem for either of us as far as that goes.

*J and A were mutual pen pals at that time. They were responsible for T starting to correspond with me as I'd known them for some time before.

Correspondence May 15, 1987 (greeting card)

I do not have the first piece of correspondence that my soon-to-be long distance relationship partner sent me. I don't even have the first bit of written correspondence that he sent me. What's that? You don't understand the difference between correspondence and "written correspondence"? Of course, you are confused. Normal people didn't do what we did back in the day.

The first piece of correspondence that I ever received from my future love was a cassette tape of him speaking to me for about an hour, possibly 90 minutes. Since I no longer have the tape, I do not know the length. I only knew that I was thoroughly unimpressed by him at the end of that time. I did reply on a tape of my own. My response was less than an hour and I did it because I felt obliged to reply to him out of a sense of courtesy and decency.

I haven't decided yet in this blog how far I'm going to go with revealing names. To protect the privacy of everyone involved, I'm censoring the names from any scans I put up and I'll refer to my partner as "T" and myself as "S" as those are the first letters of our names. At a later date, I may be less squeamish about such things, but this will do for now.

T responded to my tape rather quickly, but I wasn't really interested. I tossed his second set of tapes (because he sent two the second time around) aside and hoped he'd forget about me. He didn't. Around mid-May, my guess is shortly before the card I am scanning and posting here was sent, he sent me a letter asking politely if I'd gotten his tapes. I threw out that letter, but I did send this card in response:

Card front:

Card interior:

Transcription:

May 15, 1987

Dear T,
     Actually there are excuses and I'll probably bore you with them. Let me first apologize for not getting back to you in some way, shape, or form much earlier. The reality of the situation is that I haven't even had the opportunity to hear your tape, let alone respond to it. I did get your letter and read it.
     Ready for excuses? Work has been a true bitch (there's a lot of internal strife... my boss hates me and I had an anxiety attack on the job). My social life sucks, I'm having an identity crisis, and I went to Boston for a week in April. Now aren't you happy I laid all of that on you? I knew you'd be. Heh, heh, heh. And it's not even a soap opera, it's real.
     I promise, promise, promise (!) to try to get back to you ASAP.

Your pal,

S

*****

One part of that card was a bit of a fib. I was very busy, but I could have found the chance to listen to his tape had I made it a priority. I did have an identity crisis at that time (and, yes, I knew I was having one and why), and my boss was treating me horribly. I don't recall having an anxiety attack, and I think that what happened was more of a meltdown. This message was the calm before a storm emotionally, though my life seems to always be full of thunder and lightning psychologically speaking.

1987

My long distance relationship started in 1987—July 18, 1987, to be exact. Such precision is possible when you have never actually met the person you've fallen in love with and a formal announcement of the change of status of your relationship from "friendship" to "relationship" must be made in order for the coupling to commence.

In 1987, the world was a different place. Here are some ways in which it was different that mattered to me:

• $1 in 1987 would be the equivalent of $2.08 today
• There were no cell phones, obviously. People looked at each other and listened to one another when they met for meals or conversation.
• Few people had computers because the cost was prohibitive. In modern terms, a personal computer (like an Apple), would cost over $7,000.
• Only local calls (within the same town) were free. Long distance calls were prohibitively expensive, especially across states during prime times.
• CDs were just becoming popular, but were so expensive that few people could afford to buy many of them. Many still bought records.
• Recording technology was analog. People mainly used cassettes for sound and VHS for video.
• The minimum wage was around $3.35 (equivalent to $6.98 today).
• Pictures required you to buy film, have it developed, and for prints to be made.
• A postage domestic stamp cost 22 cents (equivalent to 46 cents today).
• Few people owned video cameras. Home videos were a luxury most could not contemplate without a decent cash outlay.
• Nearly all college students had to research "by hand" by going to libraries and finding books, journals, papers, or microfiche.
• The only way you could get to know or learn about another person was through other people or filing official documents through a court or other agency. There was no such thing as an online profile or search.
• 56.8% of high school students enrolled in college as compared to nearly 67% now
• Television viewing largely consisted of the three major networks. The Fox network existed, but it only aired twice a week. Cable as we know it was greatly more limited.
• People tended to visit the homes of their friends to socialize with them. There was no online social networking.
• The main way in which strangers met for dates was through blind dates or by visiting bars. There was no online dating.
• People used paper road maps to find their way around.
• Phone numbers were something you wrote down in your paper address book or Rolodex or you simply had to remember them.
• Prozac had just been introduced, but was not yet in widespread use.
• Technology neither talked to you nor could you talk to it. That was the stuff of "Star Trek".
• Banks had pneumatic tubes through which you could conduct business at a distance and ATMs were called "Mac" machines on the East coast and had physical buttons that you had to push. 
• Most people made purchases with paper checks or cash. It was difficult to get a credit card and, when you were allowed to use one, it was ran through a little machine with raised letters that imprinted on a special form.
• AAA would assemble custom "triptix" to help with complex travel. They did this by hand and made it into a little book of maps. It tricky to plan such trips on your own.
• The only way to know if a restaurant was good was by word of mouth, to eat there yourself, or catch a review in a paper.
• The postal service was the main means by which packages were delivered. UPS and FedEx existed, but they were more expensive alternatives used to ship either special items (such as large parcels) or faster than the postal service.
• "Mail order" meant paper catalogs that you received at your home and ordered using a letter that you sent to the seller. Sometimes, you could order by phone, but this wasn't as common. 
• Pornography was hard to come by and something that you found only in specialty shops. 
• Ronald Reagan was president.

Some of this information is fairly trivial. No small amount of it sums up to the fact that, in 1987, the world was one in which contact between people was largely if not entirely face to face and experiences were far more tangible (analog, printed) and less ethereal (digital) than they are now. Your music wasn't something invisible in a tiny device. It was something you had on a shelf, held in your hand, and saw moving in a machine. Your photos weren't bits on a hard drive. They were pieces of paper in a book that you leafed through. Money wasn't data on a card. It was paper and coins you fumbled with in your wallet. Everything was concrete. Things were solid and you couldn't pull them out of thin air into existence.

It was not a time during which people were comfortable conceptualizing anything in life as "real" unless they could see it, touch it, feel it, smell it, or taste it. Conducting any relationship—let alone a romantic one—at a distance was an act of imagination as you could not see the couple interacting together. At that time, a long distance relationship that was not forced by circumstances (such as a military posting separating a husband and wife) was regarded as very peculiar. The sort of person who would engage in one was regarded with suspicion. Why wouldn't someone just do what everyone else did when looking for a partner? There must be something wrong with the involved parties or they would pursue relationships like "normal" people of the time.

If you have been or are in a long distance relationship, do people ever question the legitimacy of your relationship? Do they see you as being somehow "wrong"?