I remember sneaking out the back door in high school after my parents fell asleep. Memorizing the pattern of creaks in the stairs, minimizing the screeching of the door, and slipping out into the night. Wednesday was a little different. Grabbed pants. Grabbed a sweatshirt. Grabbed the keys. Left a note that read, "gone, back before you read this". Let the stairs creak, let the door screech. Ignition. Out of sight.
I didn't know where I was driving. Initially, it was just to the waterfront, but that soon changed to Hermiston. Didn't feel like getting out of the car just yet. Actually, how about Seattle? Yeah, set course for the Emerald City. Junction with 26? Fuck it, let's just go to the beach.
Maggie found someone new. Good. Happy for you. I'm grimacing, but I do mean it. Ahh, you have more to say? You add he kisses you like no boy ever has before? Well that's a little harsh. But whatever, just a passing comment...oh, no? You'd like to make clear you're happier with him than you've ever been with any guy? Damn girl, it's not like now that you're rid of me, you're feeling bliss not known to you since the age of seven, or anything. Oh wait. It is? Well, I do appreciate you making me and the rest of our Portland friends aware that two weeks with him quickly eclipsed the highest of highs of two years with me. Let's see, how's this: I never tell any of our friends about anything you did. We let them think we broke up because I'm one gangly emotional motherfucker. They shuffle their feet back in your direction because they were your friends first. Nobody ever asks questions. Stick to the story. We just weren't right for each other. Long distance relationships are hard. Nothing to see here. Did you know you had picked the one twisted idealist who couldn't help but go along with this shit, or did you just get lucky?
There were no other cars on the road, and there hadn't been for miles. I accelerated. 60. 70. 80. Taking up both lanes, by design. The engine began to drown out the sound of Wilco from my speakers, which had already been ignored as irrelevant background noise. Follow the white dashes. 85. 90. 95. Before, I thought the problem with excessive speed is that it reduces your margin for error, and demands more precision in steering to not drive off the road. This is not really it at all. Basically, each corner has an absolute maximum speed it's at all possible to get through at. If you happen to hit the corner at, say, twice the posted limit, you have two tools to fix the predicament: The brake and the wheel. You can't do it all with either, and you can't use too much of both together. Not enough brake, only relying on the wheel, and you fishtail. Too much of both, and that fishtail turns into a nice rollover. Use not enough wheel and solely the brake, and you slam into the guardrail. Just hope all those tipping points leave you a combination that allows your cute little hybrid to have a chance at not being totaled, and that you manage to put it into action successfully.
100. 105. 108. A corner. Brake. Turn. Shit. Can I clear the rail? I felt the wheels on the right side lift off the ground, causing me to lean in that direction and grip the wheel tighter. I remembered not to overcorrect if the barrier sent me left, and braced for impact. It never came. The wheels settled back down. My foot remained frozen on the left pedal, until I eventually slowed all the way to a stop on the straightaway. As I exhaled, You Are My Face played on into the third verse, unaware of anything being different. "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?" I screamed, in the direction of the only discernible object nearby, a helpful sign warning motorists of the existence of elk in the area. "You could have killed someone," I said under my breath, aware of the fact that I was the most likely candidate. "Okay, that's your dumbass invincible youth moment," I thought. "Now don't do that shit ever again."
I sat out on the beach, downing a six pack of creme soda and a few bars of chocolate until I left in the morning. Drove the speed limit, refilled the tank, and parked the car back where it had been in front of the house. Finally, with everything put back in its place, I fell asleep on the couch for the eighth night in a row.
It's interesting who we are to people.
To some I am the genius, to others I am the idiot. To some I am impossibly strong, to others I am comically weak. To some I am one of the most genuine people they've met, to others, I am one of the most triangulating. Ask Meredith, Molly, Karen, Ranna, Jon, Ann, Julia, Colin, Chelsea, and Daniel, and you'll get hundreds contradictory answers about the parts that make up the whole. I guarantee that if you sat Meredith and Karen down in a room, or Chelsea and Ann, or any pair really, and had one of them say, "Alright, I'm thinking of a person we both know. I will describe him or her using general personality descriptors" (wow, sweet game), each is going to look at the other after my name is revealed and think to themselves, "Wow, I know him a lot better than you do".
This reality sends my bullshit detector off the charts. Am I a quieter version of Andy Bernard, constantly personality mirroring and projecting whatever I think will be received well? I guess it doesn't have to be like that, though. It could also be that showcasing different aspects of myself to different friends is perfectly normal. People click for different reasons. Ann and I don't really have the same sense of humor, which is why I'm constantly laughing and cracking jokes with Chelsea but not with her, and why I guarantee Chelsea would describe me as unusually playful but I'd be surprised if Ann brought up that adjective. Each relationship highlights its own distinct connections. So maybe I'm not full of it. Maybe. It's still frustrating how I can be so perfect with some people and yet become so inept with others.
When I first saw "Give Up" was the name of The Postal Service's album, I thought, really? Are you trying to sound super emo and depressing? Why would you call your album that, especially considering it has nothing to do with any of the songs? It's a term that brings to mind the powerless and the pathetic. It is also though, I am realizing, essential. A dude named Akio Morita, the founder of corporate giant Sony, tried to get his start by inventing an electric rice cooker. Alas, his appliance basically just burned the stuff to ashes, so he only sold a hundred of them. Now, Morita could have spent the rest of his life devoted to fixing his machine, admirably refusing to quit. But he gave up. He got over it. Consequently, in that realm of his life, he went on to matter.
Relationships are often unbalanced. It makes sense. It's really not very logical to think that just because you find someone's mind to be extraordinary and want to know everything about it, he or she is all that much more likely to feel the same way about yours. Forcing it makes it worse. All you can really do is scale things back and forget your own delusions of whatever connections you had hoped were there. As long, that is, as they really aren't.
Since watching the classic of Twelve Angry Men, I've taken to enjoying a good black and white movie now and then. Tonight's choice was Casablanca (so that's what that prom theme meant...). Quality stuff, yes yes. A great main character, that Rick. Smart, bold, and kind. Oh, and without even trying, he absolutely skewered the pervasive media narrative about bringing China's failings into the public eye during the Beijing Olympics.
Shrewdly, Rick kept the peace in his Moroccan nightclub by feigning disinterest in World War II. "You'll have to excuse me, gentleman," he would explain, "your business is politics. Mine is running a saloon". Politics. If it seems odd to think of the struggle between the Allies and the Axis powers as merely "politics", your head is screwed on correctly. Politics is how many town hall debates Obama and McCain should have. Politics is caving in on telecom immunity because not enough people like Darcy Burner have been elected to congress yet. But genocide? Apartheid? Genocide is not politics. Apartheid is not politics. When human rights are abused to this extent, we're no longer in the political sphere. Ask a republican; any will be happy to agree. Yeah, I'm mad that our fourth amendment isn't looking so sturdy these days. Still, as the great Penn and Teller show with a little magic while burning the flag, China is on another level.
The Olympics wails with objections, hoping that we'll take the bait, that we'll listen to the media and decide it should be 100% sports. The athletes! We can't punish the athletes! To be oh so clear, I'm not arguing for a boycott. I'm not asking for the archer who has put in thirty years of training to be denied a chance to live her childhood dream. Still, what's with the hubbub when the torch run, a tradition started by Hitler himself, is disrupted by someone's freedom of expression? What's the problem with standing Mr. Jintao up at the opening ceremonies, or interrupting the inevitable onslaught of pro-Chinese propaganda throughout the fortnight? Like Rick, the Olympics are saying to you and anyone else who might visit, "I don't like disturbances in my place. Either lay off politics or get out". Oh, and they mean it too:
Yang Chunlin, who gathered 10,000 signatures for an open letter that declared, “We want human rights, not the Olympics,” was sentenced to five years in prison.
"I'm not interested in politics," Rick says, amidst massive genocide and the attempted coronation of a master race. "The problems of the world are not my department." It's the Olympics. I'm a saloon keeper. Will you allow me to spoon feed these lines to you until you're pacified and powerless?
Debate all you want about what the best tactics are for making the atrocities right. Debate China's claim on Tibet, and the amount of blame we should place on them for the lack of improvement in Darfur (maybe you're wondering what the hell I'm talking about). Tell me you don't think protesting at this event would be effective. Fine. But for the love of God, don't tell me doing so would just be forcing politics into the sacred Olympics. As much as I love the spunk of the Icelandic team handball squad and don't want them to be distracted as they sweep through Group B, I think the two kids in the left picture matter just a little more.
June Poker: +$5130 over 100 hours.
When you think of a person addicted to gambling, people generally come up with someone who bets more than he can afford, someone who loses, someone who just can't stop. However, you don't have to have those characteristics to have a problem. You can have great bankroll management, above average talent, and lasting discipline. You can be a winner. You can never tilt, rarely make the wrong move, and prove to everybody that your success rate is outside the 99.99% confidence interval of results due to chance. But really, what's the difference between the addict who stays afloat and the addict who doesn't? What's the difference between the crackhead ibanker in a suit and the crackhead homeless man under the Fremont bridge? Is the leper healthier in Alaska than he is in Arizona?
I don't have a clue what I'll end up doing with the money I've made. "Put it towards a house someday or something," I told my sister. It never really mattered. My reasons for playing were not so pure. Basically, when Ted told me about a year ago he had made a couple thousand, I thought that was the coolest thing ever. My experience with poker had been one of five and ten dollar buy-ins down at Jesse's house or up at Colton's. I thought losing with JJ to J7 (92%) for fifty bucks in a tournament was one of the sickest soul-crushing beats of all time. To hear that Ted had gone on the internet and made four figures (an enormous amount of money to me) made me think, damn, he's the man. I resolved to do the same and hoped people would come to a similar conclusion.
But of course, this isn't really what happens. Some people think it must be easy (man, why didn't I think of that?). Some think it's all luck (will you tell me which lottery numbers to pick?). Some are still thinking about themselves (if I gave you some money could you double it?). Some think you're a degenerate (please, will you just stop playing before you get in over your head and lose it all back?). Some, quite rightfully so, don't offer you their admiration for such trivial things (well that's cool, but what are you doing with your life?). Still, I didn't just play for other people. It was an escape. An escape into a virtual world (my life was so great I literally wanted a second one. Absolutely everything was the same... except I could fly) where I was succeeding, where I was doing something productive, where I was going somewhere. A world in which I knew I could improve my circumstances, in which I knew I had what it takes, in which I could be the best. Still, like most escapes, all it was serving was to put aside problems of the real world instead of facing them and beating them. You know, that cliché.
So last night, +$14,000 for the year and showing exponential growth, I cashed out what was left in my account and called to have it deactivated for six months. I'm 20. I don't need to be making real money. But at least my bank account will have approved of the experience.
Ada McCormack. Fuck, what a stomach punch. Tim Russert, randomly. Went over to Ted's house the other day. "How've you been?" I asked his mom, politely. "I had a heart attack!" she replied with a grin. On cue, a seizure promptly overcame their dog Lucky, and he fell hard to the floor. Blankly, I looked and blinked like Large in the airplane. Reminders of mortality are following me around.
Can you think of a moment in which you knew, even at the time, that normalcy as you knew it had just died? There are decisions and events that can be backtracked from, and there are those where such revision is lunacy. I'm talking about the second. You're different. The world is different. All you can and should do is suck it up, accept it, and find new comfort in a new normal. The old one is keys in lava man, it's gone.
"Useless!" she said, and I kept quiet, concentrating harder to make sure no more crumbs from my whole wheat toast fell onto the counter. I had stopped talking, using a hand to cover my mouth whenever reflex would have produced a comment. "Really, though, did you have to give Julia that kind of hug? Or lean over and just randomly tell Molly you love her? What the hell? God, it's so embarrassing when you flirt so much. Everybody thinks so, too, they all say it. Ugh, it's so weird..." she trailed off, as I kept staring downwards at the residue on my plate. I noticed I was crying. She looked at me in disgust and walked away. I made sure to rinse off my plate and put it in the dishwasher, before stopping to stare outside into her backyard, where it was another bright summer day just like the day before and the day before that.
I did a sloppy job of drying my eyes, and walked into her room, where she lay on the bed. Instinctually, I kissed her, letting every sensation of desperation and the determination work their way into the motion of my lips. She undressed and I began to touch her, before she stopped me to ask, "are you sure you want to do this?". I said yes. Using my right hand while laying on my left side, I kept switching between trying to think of something else, anything else, and trying to take the changing expressions on her face and archive them as some sort of success. Mostly though, it was just miserable. I knew it was fucked up. I knew there was no turning back. I thought about stopping, but couldn't bring myself to leave her hanging. I don't even care, I was saying, I'll be fucked up for you, I'll do the unreasonable for you, don't you get it? This was my gambit in response the entire summer, to show so much unconditional love and stoic devotion that she would realize she didn't have to manipulate to get it, and to tell her as much. I do not recommend this strategy.
She finished, and I turned away from her, on my right side. She asked if I wanted anything in return, and I declined. A few minutes of silence passed. "Well, what do you want to do now?" she asked. "Can we just stay here?" I asked, attempting with considerable difficulty to keep the tears from affecting the tone of my voice. "Oh, of course," she said sarcastically, bemoaning my laziness. But soon she was asleep, and I stared at the wall and the various pictures of Bob Dylan looking back at me. Gambled. Lost. It's all over now, baby blue.
There will be a new normal, of course. Who will be in it and how it will be composed is continuously in flux. Still, it will be influenced by the demise of the last one while managing to become freestanding and stable. Until, of course, the next one of those moments comes.
On a much lighter note, I won an ridiculously easy prop bet the other day. Risking $50 to net $95, I bet that a woman would win an open event in at least one of this year's 55 open World Series of Poker events. If you do the math (women are about 5% of fields, (.95)^55...), these odds are beyond stupid. Anyway, Vanessa Selbst took down #13, so I got the winnings. Yours Truly: Profiting by being aware of the rampant sexism in society since 1988™.
Near the end of the school year, I did a dumb thing. I am awake thinking about it. The streetlight is dutifully assisting the crescent moon, and what photons managed to seep through my window are enough to illuminate the texture of my wall. Before starting to write this, I had been staring at those bumps, seeing patterns in them that did not exist and coming to conclusions about where to go from here. Conclusions I already knew were not the little black dress but the off shoulder shirt, not the impounded stray but the beeping tomagatchi.
One of the more normal, benign ways Maggie and I didn't connect was in our attitudes toward nakedness. She disliked unnecessary, non-sexual exposure, always making sure a blanket covered the appropriate parts as she got up in the morning and asking me to promise not to look as she changed in the corner. It was cute and driven of course by insecurity but still I would have preferred her to be more comfortable with it. After a summer afternoon of kissing following tears at lunch, I lied in bed curled up in a ball as she got dressed, not making any move to collect my clothing strewn around the room. She came back in jeans and a wilson "knows/shows/goes the way" t-shirt and rested her body next to mine, before noticing I did not want to get up. "This is weird, really weird" she said, "will you put on some clothes?". I asked if I could just be naked there with her, to just lay motionless with nothing left hidden in reserve and for her to stay. "Jesus, you're so lazy" she replied, and walked out of the room.
I wrote it to not be pathetic. To not be that feeble fool who bemoans his circumstances and yet does nothing about them. That depressed kid who gets angry that popping some pill doesn't magically make the world sunshine and kittens. That haughty "progressive" always pointing the finger to blame yet comically unaware of the plank in his own eye. To do something. To say what I was embarrassed to think. To break the awkward silence. But naturally, as soon as I sent it, I wished it could be undone like Peter Gibbons did after slipping the letter and the unsigned traveler's checks under the locked door. No arsonist saved me.
I called Meredith. The day before, she had stopped by my room as a break from a marathon organic chemistry study session, just to lay and recharge for a half hour. I asked for the same favor. Soon she was at my door, and we collapsed on the bed to rest. After a few minutes, I looked at her and asked, "can I do something weird? Can I be naked?".
"Of course. That's not weird," she replied. There are three ways such a thing can be said. One, as a complete lie of convenience, disguising a judgment of yeah, you're a bit of a freak. Two, with a little generosity, finding it a little odd but choosing to deem it normal to be supportive. Three, with the implication that it was obvious, almost a relief that the buildup had led to such an unremarkable request. Hers was the last one. She is amazing to be naked with, literally and metaphorically. To bear the vulnerability and incur, to borrow a phrase again, a supreme calm. I still think our plan of being single over the summer and seeing where we're at in the fall is a good one, but the more I learn her intricacies the more I wonder if this might be going somewhere. I'll be sending a letter soon to Nepal, where she's helping in a medical effort. On June 7th, she went the entire day without setting foot on anything connected to the earth. Now that's what I call living up in the clouds.
I've been doing a lot better. Seratonin helps, but I think I just love Portland.
RE: Payout Reference Number xxxxxxx
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Twenty inch blades on the Impala. ROI: 15000%. This will be the third poker check I've deposited. If the teller happens to inquire into where it's from, I'll offer the standard refrain about having sold a few things on eBay. Don't get me wrong, nothing about online poker is illegal for the player. However, at the last minute, the odious Bill Frist (don't think you can buy me off with your late meals) slipped the UIGEA into an unrelated port security bill, forbidding banks from processing credit card deposits to gambling websites (and to tell you a shocker, this administration's department of justice isn't particularly concerned with protecting personal liberty). Thus, financial institutions get paranoid about associating themselves at all with poker. Still, they aren't so worried as to not want your money, so it becomes an implied "don't ask, don't tell" procedure. I have no doubt this is about as badass as I will ever be. Like Bond movies, except really just that chess scene. You have five, sir. I suggest you hit.
Went to graduation. Boly's speech was incredible on the unintentional comedy scale, so if you've had him and don't know what I'm talking about, ask someone who was there. Afterward, I got a call from Julia, who wanted to chill before she headed back to Gonzaga the next day. The original plan was to watch the epic There Will Be Blood, but when we saw what was on TNT, that changed. After all, sometimes all a guy wants to do is watch Pretty Woman, fall asleep with someone he loves, and get up at five in the morning to give a ride home to his sister and her newly acquired George Foreman grill.
I'm home. Done with finals, with sophomore year, with the first half of college. My sister dons the cap and gown next week. She went to prom. My brother is a graduate student at Lewis and Clark. He has a serious girlfriend, calls her gorgeous way too much, and is probably going to marry her. My mother, always a nuisance to the city's political in-crowd, just parlayed her decades of civic involvement into a thirty point primary win. What the hell is going on?
It feels like the world is in fast forward. I bend down to tie my shoes in the morning, and when I look back up, someone has done her laundry, finished a problem set, and put on too much (read: any) eye shadow. I sit down at my desk, my phone rings, and I realize I've quite literally been staring at a blank wall, lost in thought, for longer than I'd prefer to tell you. A day is the new hour, week the new day, and month the new week. From all this, for the first time in my life, I get the sense that someday I'm not going to be young, not going to be in school, and that this future somebody is basically who I am right now. Time doesn't care one bit if I'm sitting on the top of my bunk bed with my laptop on the 2000 Jackson Middle School yearbook to protect it from overheating. Given this, I'm just hoping my head will realign itself again soon. As the proverb goes, you don't know how important geosynchronosity is to you until you don't have it anymore.
I am always interested by what people do with their time. One of the more awkward questions I often want to ask someone comes after I know they've just had a day off, with nothing planned to fill in the void. What did you think about? What did you procure by rummaging through the fridge? In detail, what did you do with your freedom? Right now as you read this, there is a poker player who is engaging in a ridiculous prop bet: He has to make $10,000 in one month by only playing tables of maximum buy-in no higher than $25. You can even watch him in his quest. Why is he doing this? He can make a much greater amount of money in much fewer hours by playing his normal stakes. While I'm sure the amount of the bet has something to do with making up the difference, there has to be something else. You don't give up a month of your life to break even. He's said what interests him is the prospect of doing something that has never been done before. If you can read it, on the back of his chair, it says "a grinder today, a legend forever". A legend. Anybody who I've ever admired has wanted to be legendary, in some sense of the word. So while sitting in a basement computer room as hundreds of people around the world watch you click buttons isn't really my cup of tea, I nevertheless appreciate the sentiment behind it.
I want to talk to my senior year English teacher. He's on a leave of absence. The alleged cliffnotes: 1. He hires one of his (underage) students as a babysitter; 2. Her family falls apart and she doesn't have anywhere to live; 3. She lives with him; 4. He goes through a divorce and messy custody battle; 5. His classroom attendance becomes as erratic as mine; 6. He is spotted downtown with her, linked arms, smoking a cigar. If it were anybody else, I'd come to the obvious conclusion of I can't believe I was in your class, you've lost your fucking mind. But it's him, and I think another explanation is more likely: He's being legendary. It's not that he doesn't understand that the perception will be that he's doing something wrong, it's that he doesn't care. He doesn't care if the school decides he's crossed a line, or if people gossip about if there's something romantic going on. He doesn't care about what will happen to his reputation or even about whether his classes will miss the point when they read Cuckoo's Nest without him. All he cares about is that this girl matters to him and he matters to her, and the nature of their unusual friendship and the chaos in her life means that he can do something that stands the test of time in its significance.
Or, as is standard in this journal, I'll acknowledge that no, maybe not. Maybe he's just another closet creeper. By extension, maybe I'm just a deluded kid who is oddly both painfully insecure and completely full of himself. I guess we'll find out.
One of the benefits of having a journal that two people read regularly is that I can write about whatever I want. Seeing as I allegedly think about it every seven seconds, I suppose I might as well take advantage of the fact that this implies I can talk about sex.
"You have a curious sexuality," Karen said to me last year, after the four jacks in the deck revealed an unusual Never Have I Ever truth table. She's right. You've read hints to suggest this, from the multiple mentions of the female orgasm to the odd comment that it's attractive to see a wrinkly patch of skin on a girl's side during a hookup. It's the reason why I've tended to avoid intimate male friends and why I don't find it necessary to project more masculinity than is authentic. It's probably a little weird. But still, it's me, and as I'm not one for repression, I allow it to roam free and see where it leads.
A week ago, Meredith was working on a paper due the next day. As we laid together on her bed in the middle of the afternoon, I reviewed Gricean conversational maxims and she diligently typed away with one window in Word and the other at thesaurus.com. Bored with my work, I leaned over and started to kiss her neck. She turned towards me to respond, but I stopped her. "Just keep working," I said with a grin, and continued to work my way down her body, teasing her by staying just on the calm side of the critical energy level that would have caused her to not be able to hold back. As she laughed and attempted to look up a quote, I straddled her and moaned barely audibly when I brushed the side of my face against hers. Again she started to sit up, but I looked to the computer with an innocent smile, and after a pause, she relented once more. The details are unnecessary from here on, but to summarize, I went down on her for a half hour or so, she wrote a total of one sentence, and it was one of the hottest sexual experiences I've ever had. "Oh, Princeton..." she joked with her notes on her left, and I corrected about a half dozen typos in what she had just written. More giggling and cuddling. She later told me she had never been able to read that line over again without cracking up due to what it had entailed.
There's a lot I don't and won't understand about modern love. To start, here's an article Karen passed on to me, the winner of a New York Times essay contest. Go ahead and read it so you know what I'm talking about, it's more than worth it. I don't get it, redhead with steaklike hands. Not following you, banjo player from the New England woods. Why would you not want to go through that incomprehensible but jarringly real progression of a relationship getting closer and closer? Why do you not only fail to seek this sort of intimacy, really the only thing I've ever felt is worth living for, but go out of your way to avoid it? And unless I'm crazy about this too, I bet anybody who has really ever been in love doesn't have one bit of a problem with monogamy. I'd elaborate on this if the point weren't so obvious already. Think about him. Yeah, you know (or knew) what I'm talking about.
But this is all fine and uncontroversial, if not more standard than the pluralistic ignorance from hookup culture leads us to believe. Still, I feel like I stray from the mean even more. Too much of what happens on Saturday night seems in the form of a transaction, where goods and services are implicitly exchanged. Because of this, people worry about things that don't matter in the slightest ("since he gave me head should I return the favor?", "should I moan or does it sound weird?", "what am I supposed to be/do/say?" etc). Express yourself. That's all. Anybody who is looking for you to get away from that is really just masturbating in front of a mirror anyway. This sentiment does not appear to be shared by many, especially among my constituents of the male persuasion.
The question arises, from my last entry and others, if I'm into submissiveness. Most definitely no. It's an awful feeling to be out of control, to feel powerless. The problem is that this sort of sexuality doesn't really watch its own back. It wants the two bodies to go crazy conveying how they feel, but fails to check to make sure the expression from the other side is healthy. Thus the getting run over if you happen to fall for someone who finds something else to be more important. Also of concern is whether this is just me getting confidence from providing something of value and isn't really my natural orientation, but I think it is. Sure, it feels good to give, and yeah, I like that a girlfriend's opinion of me tends to rise because of it. Plus, I definitely don't want to be thought of as useless (a tremendous double whammy of an insult if you think about it: Not only are you someone who's only worth being used, you really suck at it. Add in the loaded nature of it as a result of last summer, and this is the number one best thing to use on me if you're ever mad). Regardless, what I want is love, and I've learned long ago that how frequently you make someone come has a correlation coefficient of zero with the amount of time they'll want to watch ridiculously lame but oddly entertaining tv with you when you're in a bad mood. I am this way because it is what I find most satisfying. It is probably purely selfish (as I'm beginning to wonder if everything is, but that's a topic for another time).
I had the best conversation I've ever had about sex the other day with Meredith. We sat under a tree on a golf course at night and went on and on about the intricacies of contrived gender roles and masturbation frequency as if the subjects were the gas tax holiday and Michigan's bottle deposit laws. We talked about everything, from past experiences, to what the hell is with the whole marking your territory by ejaculating on her face thing (I mean, I know it's mostly the whole perverse power concept, but come on, really?), and how much of the way we fuck is pure, innate instinct and how much is dominated by porn, hearsay, and its depiction on PG-13 classics that sneak in a decent shot of side boob for at least a few seconds. We both agreed with the argument often made that we're way too hush-hush about sex in society, and that a little openness would go a long way in decreasing the problems we have as a result. A combination of innuendo, massive titillation [3:19], and pretending like it doesn't exist doesn't really get us anywhere.
No, since I'm probably insinuating otherwise, I've never had sex. Almost did once, when Maggie refused to kiss me for a week or so for not wanting to, but I managed with considerable difficulty to not back down. College hasn't changed my archaic, out of touch with the modern age beliefs that much. However, as much as the extended rants about breakfast cereal might suggest otherwise, you won't find much asexuality here.
Let's recap, shall we?
Karen A: One of my middle school best friends. We would sit next to together in seventh grade block, write notes, and try to keep our giggling relatively inaudible. She began to cut herself and talk very frankly about death. I told Mrs. Charley, but informing grown-ups didn't really seem to help. I talked to her, our teacher I mean, right before high school graduation. "Are you still friends with Karen?" she asked. I lied and said yes. After that year, we were never close again, even though I knew she wanted to be and was hurt by how I dropped off the map.
Nikki K: Good friend that same year who hurt herself and I was incapable of doing anything about it. I don't even know what happened to her.
All the Rest: There are so many of my friends during this time period who engaged in self-injury, I don't even remember which ones did and which ones didn't.
Eileen G: First girlfriend. Sometimes I think about how we started. Holding hands on Halloween. Romping off into the back areas of Gabriel Park to make out. "Hiya Papaya!" she would say on AIM, and Maxiroo14 (please do make fun) would always respond back with an old school smiley. Then I flirted with an Oconomowocer named Danielle at the SWCC pool, and other things happened with us that sent her into a tailspin, as previously described. Numerous serious suicide attempts (one of them the night she found out I was pursuing dating again), stomach pumping, electroshock therapy, still not even close to the same.
Claire D: A tennis buddy who I'd sit with as a sophomore (?). By the end of the year, she had taken on a massive eating disorder and severe depression. "I don't have any talents, except if you count deepthroating," she told me once, without any humor intended. She left for a different school before I could change her mind.
Ben R: Probably my best guy friend throughout middle school and high school. Got depressed, hurt himself, got his girlfriend pregnant and made her his wife, physically abused her in front of the baby and said horrifying things to her ten times worse than anything out of the mouth of John McCain. Tried to help at each crisis point, but was unsuccessful throughout and changed nothing.
Maggie Z: Kind-hearted girl I turned into one who didn't care enough to not call me useless after every error I made, and who let me give her an orgasm even as she saw me crying and afraid to open my mouth to speak both before and during. I ran eventually for good after realizing I had been coming back only to make things worse each time. She now has visited therapy and isn't doing too hot. A couple days ago, she wrote this in her journal: "i fought it so hard and in the end it pummeled me to the ground and destroyed me and turned me into hyde and left me hating myself even more. i wish i could say i was excited for summer and alaska but im not. im not at all. this is just a way for me to escape what i hate in my life. but really im not escaping it, im just trying to cover it up with latitude and miles. i cant wait til im out of college, i cant wait for five years from now when i can escape everything and finally live in that fucking house and im excited for the day i turn 35." The day she turns 35 being the day she's resolved to kill herself if she's still alive.
Do I blame myself for what happened to these people? For the most part, no. But even if it wasn't my fault, I hate that I couldn't fix it. I hate that the only two real relationships in my life can only be described as spectacular failures (really. Read them again). I know if you do the "It's a Wonderful Life" thing on me, I'd find spots where I've helped people out. I also know that if you need someone to hold that door open for you or give you a bite of this cookie, I'm your man. It's just that sometimes I wonder if I'm not cut out to be more important than that.
(Sticking with the theme of going for truth, I'll leave the drunk post as is, and not edit the MZ section to make me seem like less of a doormat.)
