Shy Girls Talking To Strangers

Shit is fucked up. I am fucked up. My life is a roller coaster and I don't know if I am capable of getting off unless I just close my eyes and jump. Or maybe someone has to push me.

So I'm leaving. I've decided. What am I going to do with my college education, you might ask? Well, let me tell you. I am going to skip over half of my classes (seriously, I haven't been to Finance 303 in 5 weeks), barely pass my last two semesters, dropping my GPA from a 3.9 to a who-knows-what, and in March I'm going to get in my car and drive to who-knows-where. And sleep on people's couches, and work in a coffee shop, or try to get a job at a flower shop. And mostly I'll just sit around in coffee shops all day and talk to people. I just want to be around people, mostly. I've found that I quite enjoy them, and that they aren't nearly as terrifying as I once imagined. And then I want to leave those people behind, and I want to be okay. Because change is really hard to deal with, and I think I need some self-imposed practice before I'm really, truly down to go with the flow.

And...I'm going to figure out who I am, I guess. Because I really want to like myself, and I really want to love myself, and I really want to respect myself, but she keeps eluding me somehow, and I keep feeling disappointed and confused about what is left behind. So I guess I just feel like the only way to really find her is to do the scariest shit possible, which is: show up in a new town all alone and make friends with strangers.

Go.

Oh, and here's what I think about boys:

sometime in december. somewhere in the mountains.

Thinking about the way they all were, it makes me ache.



The way my parents used to be, how my Dad loved my Mom. The love letters he wrote her when he was my age that I never read until today, the house they shared which I have never set foot in but I can imagine the cold and the claw-foot tub. The dried flowers from their humble wedding, the dress that still hangs in my closet, too shy and sacred to be worn in public.


All of them, the graying photos with bad light and old film. The long hair and the drugs and the inches of waistline grown over the past 30 years. They look like they could be my friends.



Things I'll never really understand or know, and it makes me ache. With longing to know those people that I know now but who will never take the same shape. Would we have been friends? I wish so hard that I could have these same intimate back porch conversations with the people I love 30 years ago. Everything was so different but it feels so much like home. Like life repeated. And I can't help but wonder what for.


Ticket stubs and flyers announcing concerts at the same venues where I attend my feminist meetings and have stood on-stage. Susan's poetry lining the pages of the same college newspaper where my designs are published today. Letters written with no knowledge of the inevitability of the future.



The inevitability of the future. This is what most weighs on my mind and causes my heart to drop, my bones to ache.

Pondering MySpace and MySelf

I am sick, it's been a week, and I really am starting to get frustrated. I just want to live a normal life again where I can do physical activity without wheezing and not feel semi-delerious all the time. Now I have an ear infection, so there's that. Bring on the drugs. I'm bored and want to get out of the house but it hurts to do anything buy lay around and wallow in my sickness.

I'm very self absorbed these days and I feel quite guilty about it.

I read articles about our current generation, hip trendy articles in the New York Times and AdBusters, about the MySpace culture of self-obsession, expressed through mindless, unconscious capitalism, where our greatest form of activism is expressed through buying products that are labeled "green," and judging everyone else for not even pretending to care. But we're not really giving anything up.

I feel guily about this, and I worry. But then I just update my Facebook status and I feel better.

Control Freak

Sometimes I really, really want to be in control of everything. Even silly uncontrollable things, like the future. And what's the fun of anything if you get to plan it all out and there are no surprises? I mean, it always works out fine and dandy in the end, and it's not like I've got any complaints with the current plan (except during the intermissions). But still on some level, I just really really want to be in control and know how everything is going to end up. Maybe so I can plan my moves accordingly. But that's just not how it works. No; I suppose we all just have to take our chances.

On another note, I'm pretty sure I have enough boogers to go around for everyone.