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I still don't want to be evil, but I do want to be helpful, so before I gave helping Bethany another try, I decided to get some more experience.
Thus, I found Norman.
Norman was, as his parents described him, 'an angry young man'.
He certainly sent a lot of angry e-mails, most of them to musea and gallery owners who would not buy or display his paintings. Going by the amounts of hits his website and on-line artsy store were getting, they weren't alone in feeling that Norman perhaps wasn't quite the genius artist he considered himself to be. I didn't really have an opinion on the matter myself, but I could see that if Norman kept telling himself he 'just needed a break' in order to become rich and famous, he was never going to be happy.
Norman had two cats, and he posted pictures of them nearly every day. He'd dropped out of college in order to 'focus on his art'. His parents told people that he was just 'going through a phase' and that he would eventually return. I wasn't entirely sure what they were basing their opinion on.
At first, I tried to get Norman interested in photography. His cat pictures already were very nice, but if he insisted on pursuing a career in the arts, he might make a better photographer than a painter.
When that didn't work, I tracked down a painter whose works Norman really admired and got him to visit Norman's website. When he tried to leave, instead of letting him go back to his preferred search engine, I directed him to the guest book, which invited people to leave a comment about how they'd liked Norman's art.
The comment the painter left wasn't very nice, but I suppose that he was being honest.
Norman vaguebooked that 'his world had ended' and that he 'had no more reason to live', which was a little alarming. He also sent an e-mail to his parents to asking them for a loan, and he visited several websites about colleges that offered an education in the arts, so I figured he might have been exaggerating.
Two weeks later, he'd filled out an application. His parents vaguebooked he was going to become an architect, which surprised me a little. Still, unlikely as that sounded, maybe they knew something I didn't.
Next, there was Karen.
Karen had three cats, and she posted pictures of them every other day. She lived in a small apartment on the fourth floor, which was a problem, because the elevator broke down a lot and she didn't walk well enough to be able to take the stairs.
Karen had worked for forty years as a secretary to the director of a big oil company. At the age of sixty-one, she'd retired. She also liked to knit. That was the other thing she posted pictures of. She knitted scarves and sweaters and mittens, and she always posted pictures of her current projects.
Recently though, the store where she used to buy all of her yarn had been replaced by a place where people could buy expensive sandwiches. Now, in order to buy yarn, she needed to take the subway, which she didn't like to do, or ask someone else to get it for her, which she didn't mind, but her grandchildren apparently did, because after three or four times of Karen sending them to buy her some yarn, they stopped visiting.
While I couldn't immediately think of a way to make them start visiting again, there were plenty of on-line stores selling yarn, so I showed Karen some ads for the ones with the best customer reviews and that solved the yarn shortage. (I did feel a bit bad when one of the stores apparently got her order wrong, to which she responded by leaving them a bad review. I guess they deserved it, though.)
Getting her to move to a place better suited to her needs was trickier. Eventually, I got lucky.
The nephew of the woman Karen used to work for was getting married and was moving out of his current apartment, which was located in a quiet neighborhood with very low crime rates. The apartment was on the first floor, but the building it was in was very new, and during the past three years, the elevator had only broken down once.
Best of all, there was a store that sold yarn on the other side of the street.
I sent a general e-mail reminder about Secretary Day to the director the day she was having lunch with her nephew and his fiance, who happened to be a very nice young man owning a Maine Coone which I would have liked him to post more pictures of. (Sadly, he seemed more interested in posting pictures of him and his groom-to-be and, later, of their new home. Ah well.)
Three days later, Karen vaguebooked that she was going to move.
Happy with my recent successes, I decided to return to Bethany.
The only good thing that had happened to Bethany since the last time I saw her was that she hadn't found a new boyfriend yet. That wasn't much, but I tried to be optimistic.
Bethany still wrote long e-mail messages to people she considered her friends. They still sent back very short replies, or none at all, which would often as not prompt Bethany to write an even longer e-mail message to someone else. It was a vicious circle, and I had no idea how to break it.
Given that none of her friends had actually told Bethany to stop writing them, I assumed that they did, in a way, care about her. They just didn't care enough to actually do something to make her life (and by extension their own) better.
A few of them had started on e-mail messages telling Bethany what they thought she should do (stop blaming other people and get her life back on track) and what they thought she shouldn't do (spend all her money on things she didn't need and write long e-mail messages) but none of them had actually sent them.
To send an e-mail message they had decided not to send seemed wrong. It might help Bethany, and if I timed it right, they might never realize it had been anything other than an accident (I knew several of them who'd drunk-texted people) but it would be crossing a line.
Bethany herself didn't have any unsent e-mail messages. She wrote what she felt, and never considered that another person might not want to read about her feelings.
I might stop her e-mail messages from reaching their destination, but what good would that do?
It was very frustrating. I liked her cats a lot, and she still posted pictures of them every day. I really wanted to make her life better.
Then, I got an idea. It was still more interference than I was comfortable with, but it was clear to me that I had to do something, and this was something that might actually work.
First, I tweaked Bethany's vaguebook settings a little.
After that, I waited for her to send someone a long e-mail message. After reading it to make sure it didn't contain anything really important, I replaced it with one of my favorite pictures of her cats.
I did this for two weeks. I kept a log to make sure no one got the same picture more than once, and I screened each of Bethany's e-mail messages to make sure it was okay to replace them with a cat picture.
People didn't respond right away, but by the beginning of the third week, someone sent her a medium-length reply, telling Bethany they really liked looking at her cat pictures, and that they were glad things were going better for her. (You're welcome, I thought.)
I was a little worried that Bethany might get confused, and write a very long reply about how it made her feel that someone liked her cat pictures, but instead, she sent back a simple 'thank you' message, and vaguebooked about having applied for a new job.
I wasn't sure if that was true, but I gave her the benefit of the doubt. I started showing her job postings again, and after another week, she found a new full-time job that paid well enough for her to start thinking about moving out.
Things were finally looking up. I kept a very close eye on her spendings, wary of another unwise shopping spree, but this time, Bethany seemed determined to stay cheerful.
(I briefly considered blocking her credit card if she gave any signs of wanting to buy more shoes that hurt her feet, or got too close to a store that was too expensive for her, but again, I decided that would be going too far, so while I did track her phone, I only made sure she didn't accidentally pass any shoe or clothing stores on her way to her actual destination.)
Realistically speaking, I know Bethany probably will fall back into her old patterns at some point.
This time, though, I'm hoping some of her friends will actually do something. That they'll remember that Bethany isn't just the friend who sent them long e-mail messages about how she feels, but also cat pictures. Lots and lots of really great cat pictures.