The first woman I ever found attractive was Catherine Zeta Jones and that crush has stood the test of time. Although I never copied it down in my journal, I remember watching The Haunting released 1999 in our exercise room. I sat on an exercise machine that felt like a piano bench cushion in the unfinished room. I watched the actress’s entrance up until this line:

“So what about you? Husband, Boyfriend, Girlfriend?”

Her last word was accompanied by a mischievous smile at the camera with her brown eyes heating me up in the cold uninsulated.

My crushes on women in my red journal are confusing to read. My fantasies for men were so prolific, that I was inherently suspicious of small slivers of attention towards women. I had no problem with other people being gay or bisexual, but I was strangely scared of the thought in myself. In fact, if I included all my self analysis on this subject, this would be a very long story heavily involving a personal philosophy involving Eve, the tree of knowledge, and the meaning of life.  

• 3/28/----
• I haven’t written in you for awhile because I have I have a file on Mom’s computer. This doesn’t always work, however, for I have certain secret things I don’w wan’t to put on the computer. I also have trouble because you have to scroll down past were you were.
• My secret things are this. I dread finding out that I am a lesbian. Frankly, it seems extremely likely as I am so boyish. It’s only at ballet and in bed listening to slow jazz I feel extremely feminine. Oh, by the way, listening to slow jazz before bed makes probably anyone dream of, well, sex.
• [I move on to describe other secret fears].
• I’m not gay, why do I dream of some man a head taller than me dancing to slow jazz then settling down to a cozy warm bed. LORD PLEASE FORGIVE ME!

I might have been a strange kid… However, I had to acknowledge as I grew older that I did have romantic and sexual feelings for women. It just considered them strange.  In fact, I wrote more about those feelings than the extremely prevalent straight fantasies I had, because they felt oddly alien in my brain.  

• 6/29/----
• The reason I want to write is I had another weird ass dream. However, reading this there is a lot I should write in this about recent stuff… There is virtually nothing about the whole Sean thing. This must happen every year I have a crush on someone before summer and then as soon as I stop seeing them it explodes following the phrase “Absense makes the Heart grow fonder” but I should tell about the dream first.
• So I’m walking down the street with my friend Ally, someone else, and Jennifer Anisten—but we call her Rachel like her character’s name on Friends. She’s giggling and telling all of us about how she gets to kiss this guy she likes for work. The rest of us are just saying ok nodding our heads and we’re completely unable to say anything to add to the conversation. Then she wanted to demonstrate—she came up to me and said, “So then I kissed him just like this” and she did so… to me. It was a simple kiss then she did it again to demonstrate the place in the scene. Then again she kissed me. I was the one to introduce a tongue. Next time she used a tongue. Yet all of this was in context with her conversation. She was making me very uncomfortable and finally I said so. She didn’t seem to care either way and the dream sorta ended. When I thought about it later I realized that final kiss before I said “No, your making me uncomfortable” was just like that famous Britney Spears and Madonna kiss with the tongue completely out from both sides and twisted around each other perfect for pictures. Haha.

Rereading this dream reminds me more of the kissing scene in Meet the Millers than my usual fantasies. The strangest thing is, even including single dream celebrities like this one, I can count my crushes on women for my whole lifetime on my fingers. There are three celebrities, one friend, two former classmates, and one former coworker:

1. Catherine Zeta Jones 
2. Jennifer Aniston,
3. Selena Gomez. Since watching the SNL version of Hands to Myself, my husband and I have both had Selena Gomez on our free pass list.
4. My maid of honor whom I still affectionately call the most beautiful girl in the world on the phone.
5. My high school classmates B and
6. Carrie.
7. My coworker from work with the strawberry blond hair and insane intellect was an unexpected and problematic crush. 

Thats seven crushes verses far more than a hundred crushes on men over the years.  Of these seven women, I will probably have occasions Carrie is the only who is neither already covered nor in later installments. My maid of honor and B were heavily involved in “The whole Sean thing” which I think I’ll talk about next week. Selena Gomez and my coworker will definitely make it into the "things I whisper to my husband about while making love" category. However, my crush on Carrie was largely self-isolated. It was severe enough that I had a different journal about her.

• 07/02/----
• My purple journal tells everything relating to Carrie and the entire contents is about my “Homosexual urges” except the stuff written in this journal. 

• 08/21/----
• It is so different to read what I just wrote compared with the stuff I have written about Carrie. Those pages were ripped out of another smaller journal, because I was using it for something else and didn’t want anyone reading it. My letter to Carrie was most of what I’d written in there. Compared with the dirty little thoughts in this book, that journal talks about caring for someone. I wrote a letter I knew I wouldn’t send. It explains each and everyth thing I knew about Carrie and showed how little it was, yet how much I cared. The letter also talks about how doubtful the affection for Carrie is (because of how little I know her). I conclude that this emotion could not be love, it must be lust. Then I finish mentioning how I long for her. This of course I wouldn’t have mentioned if I had actually considered sending it. My real letter would also not mention how her numerous hugs set my heart on a roller-coaster.

For some time, those ripped out pages were tucked safely inside my red journal, but by the time I am sitting down to write this they have long disappeared.  Most of what I have are my memories and the above entries to go off of.  Carrie had this sweet little thing she would do with her friends, whom I barely qualified as. She would point at herself, then the friend, then make a motion of slowly smooshing her hands together before taking the smooshed nonexistent object and stuffing it into her pocket. What it meant, for those who understood it, was: “I want to shrink you down and put you into my pocket.”

I had hoped back then that she'd put me in her pocket and just take me with her everywhere.  Alas, it was not to be.