Mistakes Experiences

LORD DARLINGTON. You always amuse me, Cecil. You talk as if you were a man of experience.

CECIL GRAHAM. I am.

LORD DARLINGTON. You are far too young!

CECIL GRAHAM. That is a great error. Experience is a question of instinct about life. I have got it. Tuppy hasn't. Experience is the name Tuppy gives to his mistakes. That is all.

DUMBY. Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes.

CECIL GRAHAM. One shouldn't commit any.

DUMBY. Life would be very dull without them.


Lady Windermere’s Fan, Oscar Wilde

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Experience: getting pulled into the changing room by her when she is trying on lingerie.

Do: ignore the middle-aged sales assistants who are looking at you weird.
Don’t: stare. Really - it’s rude.

*

Experience: getting your shoulder drenched by her tears in the little girls’ room in school, and getting curious looks from the other users of the little girls’ room.

Do: offer her tissue (or toilet paper - whichever one you have access to), and pat her shoulder, and give the other girls the evil eye - unless they belong to the upper echelons of the school’s female mafia, in which case you should stare at your shoes and try to blend in with the walls.
Don’t: remind her your white school-blouse becomes see-through when wet, and that people are staring.

*

Experience: succeeding (barely) in wrestling her down - she who is of a slighter build than yourself, and who had just bitten you on your nipple - yet hesitating to pay her a tit for tat (no pun intended) for a ghost of a shred of a scintilla of a germ of a suspicion of an iota of a shadow of a particle of a suspicion of a second, and thus finding yourself once again flat on your back and at her mercy.

Do: squeal like a pig and beg for mercy. And ask her if she would like to continue the strip poker game, since you still have your T-shirt on and she’s down to her bikini.
Don’t: try to wrestle her again. After all, who knew she had such strength in her slight yet curvaceous body?

*

Experience: asking (in what you think is a joking manner), “Hey, are you taking advantage me?” when she takes your hand out of the blue along the corridors in school, yet not even once try pulling your hand away, and, in fact, locking your fingers around hers.

Do: smile - and Shut. Up.
Don’t: continue to keep up your stream of unfunnily inane comments, and continue to ask, “Why are you holding my hand?”

*

Experience: telling her you’re nervous about your bit in the role-playing in class (not that sort of role-playing), and having her hold your hand tightly when you two act your parts in the stupid textbook-type scenario your group is presenting to a bored class and a stupefied lecturer.

Do: ignore your lecturer Irene’s up-raised eye-brow - after all, remember: this is a woman who professes to changing different brands of volumnizing shampoo every other month so that her hair would not ever lose any body.
Don’t: ask her (not Irene) if she’d like you to set her up with her not-so-secret admirer in class, Wan Rong, and then tease her about it.

*

Experience: getting asked, “Do I look like a China-girl in this? I look like a China-girl, right?” for the umpteenth time.

Do: say, “Oh shit, I forgot I left a pot boiling on my stove. See you later.”
Don’t: say, “For gawdssakes Jen, how many fucking times must I tell you - no, okay?!” because you’ll only get asked the same question again. And again. And again.

*

Experience: being told, “Shit, I’m flat.”

Do: (see above’s Do)
Don’t: tell her there are girls out there flatter than her, and launch into your favorite back-stage anecdote of your least favorite model - the one where a stylist asked Christine T--w if she would like nipple tapes because the top she was wearing was a sheer white corset, and she replied, “What’s the point? I’m flatter than an airport [runway] - there's nothing to see” - even though C.T. was dead right, and it was the understatement of the millennia (because the only cleavage C.T. could get from the corset came from her armpit flab).

*

Experience: being told, “I’ve got short and stumpy legs.”

Do: (see above’s Do)
Don’t: try to argue whether three-quarter pants would elongate short legs or in fact shorten them - you are seriously outclassed here.

*

Experience: getting winked at by her (the one you are infatuated with) - again! - before Paul begins his lecture.

Do: smile back – or wink, if you dare – and talk to her.
Don’t: smile back but look shyly away, or - worse (?) – pretend it never happened yet spend hours upon hours obsessing over it, analyzing each wink to death, then finally deciding: nah … she’s just being friendly.

*

Experience: holding her and rocking her on the night of your birthday when the star-crossed combination of alcohol and asthma medication brings on her episode, making her cry and mutter and scream in her hallucinations as she relives that one night of horror that had forever changed her life, while you cry with her, your heart aching for her, and want so desperately to make her nightmares go away, and fiercely hating, on her behalf, the perpetrator of her nightmares.

Do: bear in mind that alcohol and asthma medication don’t make a good cocktail, and look after her and try to get her to stop drinking.
Don’t: start avoiding her, ignoring her text messages and voice mails, after witnessing her second episode, because you realize she won’t stop drinking, even though she knows she’ll have another of her episodes after imbibing alcohol, and because you decide you aren’t strong enough for the both of you, and can’t take another of her episodes, even though you’d wanted to make her nightmares go away and had secretly sworn you’d try to ‘fix’ things.

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I seriously have no instinct whatsoever about life ...