Research.

Okay guys. Thanks for the birthday wishes. You all fucking suck. None of you? Not one. You all fucking suck. And you fuckers took your time and thought about it. Like every one of you did that. All of you are assholes, and don’t be an asshole on my birthday.

Moving on. I’m still very much wondering about the possibility of obsessiveness. I see the argument for and against that case. Am I obsessive, or is this just kind of who I am? I like to know everything. I will follow every possible lead until it’s dead when I’m researching something. Is this just me and my personality, or am I crazy?

Let’s get a baseline for me. And this is the argument. It’s called The Graves of Dead Children. I would say it was probably a 3-5 year research project into school shootings. I was not doing this as an academic thing or anything. Just doing it for fun, so to speak. It was about school shootings. I have actually gone to Colorado and visited the graves and took photos of all the kids killed in Columbine. I was trying to actually find the best possible solution to the issue. Which the answer is twofold. First, limiting the capacity of magazines because that is generally when they take out the shooter—when they are reloading. Smaller magazines give more opportunities for neutralization. Better, but more difficult, is making guns as accessible as rental cars. You have to be over 25 because, guess what? School shooters, and actually the majority of mass shooters, are middle- to upper-middle-class white males under the age of 25 with legal access to guns.

This was years of research. I have binders. You cannot open a drawer in a piece of furniture in my home without finding at least one binder filled with documents or historic laws or FBI files that are marked up and highlighted in multiple colors and have handwritten notes all over them.

So am I me, or am I obsessive? I actually feel I just created more questions than answers on that one.

When I started researching for this case, it started as I was trying to piece together what had just happened in my life. I was looking at this plane crash that was my life. Much like the NTSB, I was looking for the pieces to reassemble the plane so I could figure out where the failure was that caused the crash. This is literally what I was doing.

{D} was, of course, not particularly pleased with me at the time. I will quote him, post-apocalyptically, saying, “I love you, but I don’t like you right now.” He would not tell me a fucking thing. That was my payback. He knew damn fucking well I would spin my wheels forever, and it would drive me nuts. Fine, now I must find out because fuck you.

This takes me a step further because I am not just researching. I am now full-grudge researching.

And {D}, I will say this to you right now. You know me. You know me way better than most people. You intentionally made me research out of spite? I don’t fully comprehend what exactly you expected from me. Given what I have found, given what you had given me, I really think I would have made the decision to just tell me the answers I was looking for so I didn’t go looking, because there was so much more shit to uncover. And you fucking knew that.

I don’t ever fucking want to hear shit from you about this. I know nothing is ever your fault, but you brought this upon yourself.

I am kind of laughing my balls off right now. Okay, this is on you, Assclown. Not me.

Did you underestimate me, or what the hell happened there? Dear God, what were you thinking with that? You are the dumbest smart person I’ve ever fucking met.

Everyone else, guys, I get that this little exchange sounds odd to you. But please know {D} knows what I’m talking about. I’m not sure I can explain it, but he can see the bemused smile on my face right now and can hear the tone of my voice with the slight air of me talking to him like he’s stupid, and he is thinking to himself, “Yeah, I really did kind of fuck that, didn’t I?”

Just as an example for those of you who know this man. We got into an argument about Lavender Law. He told me I was wrong. I sent him an article that proved my point and left it at that. He told me that didn’t prove anything and I was still wrong. Okay. You want to play with me? So I sent a bunch of shit to him, analyzed it, then went point by point and made him concede each and every point. I then said, “{D}, what does that make me?” And he goes, “Right.” Now this is part of where, if you know {D}, you will understand. You know he knows who I am. I said, “{D}, now, if I’m right, what does that make you?” And he says, “Wrong.” And I said, “Yes, {D}, you’re wrong. Very wrong.”

And I will leave it at that because, if you know, you know. Ya just do.

So maybe that’s the answer. Maybe I was always like this. Maybe this case didn’t create some obsessive version of me. Maybe it just handed an obsessive researcher the biggest mystery of her life. I still don’t know whether that’s healthy or unhealthy. I do know one thing: if you hand me a puzzle and refuse to answer my questions, I’m probably going to solve it anyway.