What. The. Hell?!?! (Or Wherein Lupo is offered shelter from domestic violence...?)

[Sebine]

Him: Fine. Let him kill you. See if anyone will help you then! Probably better off so your stupidity doesn't corrupt the gene pool.
Me: ExCUSE you?!?
Him: If you won't help yourself, I'm sorry for trying to help you!

I would have beaten the prick to death with several books at this point...

Show him some abuse!

[DGoddessChardonnay]

I would have beaten the prick to death with several books at this point...

Show him some abuse!

Make sure they're dictionaries. And all of them turned to the same page where the word "abuse" is listed.

Why no officer, I was only showing him in the dictionary the proper defintion of the word "abuse." And then all the dictionaries just fell on him.

[dalesys]

Make sure they're dictionaries. And all of them turned to the same page where the word "abuse" is listed.

Why no officer, I was only showing him in the dictionary the proper defintion of the word "abuse." And then all the dictionaries just fell on him.

To paraphrase Bill Cosby:
"Get a Dictionary. One with All the words in it..."

The OED (Oxford English Dictionary) sounds about right...

[Munkie]

I've gotten some pretty impressive bruises myself. there was one i got when I walked into an ice machine. I had another on the back of my arm that i haven't the faintest where i got (probably backed into a box, it happens), and one on my ankle... i think I kicked a cart.

[ExiledV20]

This. He did not mean well. He was an asshole. He was hoping that you'd be so damned grateful that you'd fall in love with him, the shining white knight, and when you destroyed his little delusion, he flipped right the hell out. That may not have been the exact plan, but some variant.

I agree. This asshole was attempting to use Nice Guy Syndrome to get in a relationship with you. What's a Nice Guy? See here:

http://divalion.livejournal.com/163615.html

When you rejected him, he lashes out with abusive behavior. To quote: "A true-blue Nice Guy invariably will unleash the scorn and contempt and resentment that's been seething under the surface all along, and excoriate the woman he claimed to care about. One of the favored maneuvers is to retreat behind sarcasm, claim that whatever she found unwelcome was "just a joke", and defensively inform her that she has no sense of humor, that she's taking everything way too seriously."

[Primer]

Indeed. And abuse isn't just physical either. It can be verbal, too, or emotional... You can abuse someone without touching them.

quoted for truth! (take it from a survivor!)

This. Society for the most part teaches girls to use make-up at some age, and that knowledge is easily applied to bruises on the arms, etc. The only time you see a woman covered in bruises is if they're innocent in origin. It's sad, but the victims tend to become very skilled at hiding the marks of their abuse. Both to protect their abuser (twisted, eh?) and because of the embarrassment that comes from having your life run completely by someone else.

as nharbourgirl mentions, long sleeves are also used, sometimes under the excuse of a "skin condition." (I don't know the first thing about make-up, but I do know about long sleeves and psoriasis.)

I do also come up with the stray bruise every now and again, with absolutely no recollection of where it came from. My doctor says I'm the first woman of my age that he has ever had say that she did NOT bruise easily!

[thedrunkenmonkey]

quoted for truth! (take it from a survivor!)
as nharbourgirl mentions, long sleeves are also used, sometimes under the excuse of a "skin condition." (I don't know the first thing about make-up, but I do know about long sleeves and psoriasis.)

I do also come up with the stray bruise every now and again, with absolutely no recollection of where it came from. My doctor says I'm the first woman of my age that he has ever had say that she did NOT bruise easily!

Hah.

During the summertime my eczema and psoriasis act up. My elbows bear the brunt of it, but I do have some on my belly. But that's not the worst of it.

I, for whatever reason, cannot stop slicing and dicing my legs, arms, chest, ear, cheek, hands, and fingers - to the point that my vehicles have goatskin gloves, kneepads, and a bandaid kit with saline solution, medical glue, stretchy bandage, alcohol prep pads, and full knuckle bandaids, in addition to *ahem* items normally used for soaking up copious amounts of blood and/or other body fluids. (Yes, I can plug a bullet hole if the bullet passed all the way through the body cavity.) It was worse when I was learning welding and helping with glassblowing - both summertime things. I have a heavy leather apron that I gave to a friend because a drop of 2000 degree molten glass fell on it and burned right through near the crotch. Fortunately, the leather apron took it and managed to get it to drop BETWEEN my legs, so I don't have a permament ornament of cobalt glass in the bait-and-tackle department.

I'm also 6'5" and fairly solidly built, so I'm not shocked at all that people (mostly) see this as my due. Don't get me wrong, my bruises, when they occur, are huge mottled things, but these days it takes a 9lb sledge blow to the arm to really mottle me up.

But this little girl, dressed all in black, came up to me the other day and tugged on my arm - the one not covered in slash marks from where I fell into a blackberry bush and didn't notice until later, the one that also had a 1/2 gash that went to the bone on the knuckle of my index finger on Friday night (yep, one week ago), the arm that also has a half-dollar sized shiny silvered scar over the elbow, and four citricizations on the palm from landing on sharp pointy rocks as a kid and shoving my hand in salt water to clean the wound, handed me a support group card and said...

"You can join us if you want. I cut sometimes to release the pain."

In my head, I laughed uproariously. I took her card without smiling and said, "Really, they're from a blackberry bush, and this one (showing her my leg scars) were from moving a month ago, and these were old holes from ingrown hairs and bug bites that don't heal well, and this was when I got nailed with a batch of nails that I wasn't really expecting to be at rib level, but thank you. I scratch way too much and sometimes it's easier to forget the bactricin." And I thanked her and said if I felt the urge to cut myself, I would come to her meeting.

I wish I'd handled it a little better, but I can't quite understand why someone would VOLUNTARILY cut themselves open - having had a chunk of rebar go through my calf, a K-bar blade neatly slashing through my lower right arm, a hatchet slicing my toe open, and nearly tipping my left thumb with a meat cleaver at the second knuckle in 2000 means I'm not normally very sympathetic towards someone who didn't get injured because of some colossal fuckup or sheer carelessness with a sharp pointy object.

Then again I also like to play with combustibles and have accidentally lit my hair on fire more than once, so i comprehend how some people have an attraction to knives.

But to the OP: really, the best thing to do at that point would be to just say, "Look. I can SHOW you how books bruise you. Just keep talking and I'll show you, Gala-Ass."

[calulu]

Drunken Monkey I totally get being bunged up like that all the time. I do stained glass and have fooled with glass blowing before. I'd get so into the stained glass I'd not realize I'd cut my leg and blood was running into my shoe unless someone pointed it out. You end up with exotic cuts, burns and bruises but thankfully no one ever assumed it was self mutilation.

Apparently cutting is something that a large swathe of teenagers do. I don't get it at all either.

[cinema guy]

Once when I was in the midst of a bad, bad bout of depression, I accidentally cut myself while making food. The sharp stinging pain from the knife immediately over-rode the deep psychological discomfort for several seconds. The sensation of physical pain drove away the depression. For that brief period, I felt alive - I was in pain and pissed off, but I was feeling something akin to normal sensations. It was good.

Not that I started cutting, but I can understand the need.

[elsporko]

Heh. I am so pale I glow in the dark and incredibly thin-skinned (you can see my veins like a roadmap, folks, it's creepy), and like a lot of y'all, I bruise if you breathe on me too hard. Once when the Hubster and I were sort of tickle-wrestling (he was trying to tickle me, I was squirming like a snake), he grabbed my upper arm to keep me from falling off the bed. He's got incredible grip strength, let me tell you. Next morning I'm getting dressed for work and he goes "What the hell is that?" and he's pointing at my arm. Clueless, I look at it, and there's a row of four round bruises just the size of his fingertips. I laughed and said something like "Hey, cool!", because I knew how easily I bruised and he hadn't known me long enough to really get it. Poor guy fell all over himself apologizing and was practically in tears thinking he'd hurt me. I just wore a long sleeved shirt for a couple of months until they faded away because I just KNEW that people would ask awkward questions if I didn't.

I agree with others here, Mr. Hero didn't give two shits about Lupo, he wanted to be a hero and get recognition for it, and when he was denied his 'fix' he got angry and, dare I say it, abusive himself. Doing the 'right thing' in hopes of a reward is doing it for the wrong reason.

Tickling can be dangerous. My fiance was tickling me the other day and I accidently elbowed her in the face. Luckily she was fine and didn't have any signs of injury that would get me arrested.

[lupo pazzesco]

But to the OP: really, the best thing to do at that point would be to just say, "Look. I can SHOW you how books bruise you. Just keep talking and I'll show you, Gala-Ass."

I like fire, too! And have also set my hair aflame multiple times. <snerk> Easier to do, depending on what you're playing with. My family says I'm not allowed to have a kitchen torch, for just such reasons...I'm a klutz. >.>

Love the Gala-Ass, wish I'd thought of it...

[Soulstealer]

Make sure they're dictionaries. And all of them turned to the same page where the word "abuse" is listed.

Why no officer, I was only showing him in the dictionary the proper defintion of the word "abuse." And then all the dictionaries just fell on him.

No! That would crack the spine. What did the poor dictionary do to you? Forget to make your sandwich the right way?

[BlaqueKatt]

I have burned myself with a tempermental hot glue gun and had a coworker ask if my boyfriend was abusing me! I didn't have a boyfriend at the time.

good gosh-they'd have a heyday with me-I work with autoclaves-big metal machines that steam sterilize biohazards to a temperature of around 252 degrees Fahrenheit-needless to say one of my co-workers made the observation the other day that I'm becoming a tiger-which is to say I have enough autoclave burns that I have "tiger stripes" of burns on my arms.......(as in over 20 per arm)

[mharbourgirl]

Tickling can be dangerous. My fiance was tickling me the other day and I accidentally elbowed her in the face. Luckily she was fine and didn't have any signs of injury that would get me arrested.

Oh, no kidding. The Hubster doesn't try and tickle me anymore, because he finally understood what a hyper-reactive nervous system means the day his best friend grabbed my foot (just playing around) and I came about half an inch from removing D's front teeth. I didn't intend too, I just reacted. Tickling is actually painful for me, it's not fun at all.

I've had people look at my hands and actually ask me if I needed help. My hands are a maze of little scars, mostly from cooking - cuts, burns, encounters with the cheese grater - and none of it ever done on purpose. It's weird how people never want to believe that there was a time I was THAT clumsy in the kitchen, they'd rather believe I had some kind of psychological issue that needs treating. It wasn't a psychological issue: I had no depth perception and needed glasses terribly, but I didn't get them until I was 16. The 'issue' was that I had a horror of having to wear glasses to school, not that I liked bleeding.

[Hemily]

it's weird, as a guy people assume the opposite...

i actually did sink so low in my depression, that i did start to cut myself... no idea why... it seemed to make sense at the time... and for some reason it's addictive.. so i couldn't stop...

i wear short sleeved shirts most the time, so people usually just asked me if i'd fought with a cat.

and thankfully i don't bruise easily, i got hit by a car once, no bruises, i slammed a car door over my finger, it huts and feels a bit sore, but no bruises. i have a lot of scars from that rut i was in, but i don't bruise easily, you'll have to look carefully to find them