Sunday, December 21, 2008

So, about that...

I never really did write on here, did I? I suppose I could have used the literary exercise; my essays weren't good enough to get me into my first choice college. I simply got deferred, or, as I like to call it, rejected in slow motion. Deferral is one of the single-most frustrating circumstances, especially when you're lounging in application purgatory while all of your friends are getting acceptance letters from their favorite colleges. I know I sound bitter and cranky here, but I'm really not. I'm unbelievably happy for my friends, f'reals.

I just got home from babysitting and I made more in one night than I did in two weeks of waitressing. I need a new job.

I'm already on winter break, praise jeebus, and I've pretty much just been hanging out with my friends who are home from their respective universities. I needed a break from all of my high school bullshit, and they've been a welcome one.

Damn this entry is boring and self-involved. I'll try to be less of a dickbag on here from now on.

Thursday, July 31, 2008

"Doubt thou the stars are fire, doubt that the sun doth move, doubt truth to be a liar, but never doubt I love."

Man, Shakespeare knew how to say it, didn't he? I'll be blogging more often, I need to get back into the swing of things to prepare for application essays (HOLYSHIT).

Monday, March 17, 2008

I need to get out of my head sometimes. I've tried so hard to do that lately, and the way I've tried is by talking more, but then I notice people acting as if they'd kill their mothers to make me shut up. I can tell, the way they move so that their backs are facing me, the distant, glazed look they get whenever I try to say something, the excuses they find to be somewhere else. They liked me better when I would just come up with a snappy one-liner every once in a while. I did too, actually.

I can't tell if I'm normal if a bit on the introspective side, or an overthinking, antisocial freak of nature. Am I the only person who has extremely involved daydreams nearly all the time? I invent situations, and then think of how people I know would react to them, and what I would do, and on and on and it's an hour later and I have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing. I get so bored and frustrated with regular life that I just think about something dramatic happening to me. I daydream so often and so intensely that half the time I forget that everything I think about is a lie.

See? If I didn't think those things, (or in this case, write them down), then I would just SAY THEM. OUT LOUD. TO PEOPLE. I just have no idea how people deal with me.

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Things that are comforting:

My dog, and the way he just jumps up on my bed and lies next to me and then ignores me, as if he's too cool for me and can't believe he's even here
My mom's perfume that actually doesn't smell good and I would never be caught dead wearing
Macaroni and cheese
Wes Anderson movies (especially The Royal Tenenbaums and Rushmore)
My best friend's car
Green sweatpants
Orange juice
My big blanket
My big grey sweatshirt from that camp I went to one year
Gloves
Baking
My stuffed bear
My fish, Spike
My sunglasses
Amelie
The Big Lebowski
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
The soundtrack to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind
Shakespeare
Letters (mail-letters)
Letters (alphabet-letters)
Phone calls that go on late into the night, that aren't about anything bad, just to talk
My really old sneakers, the ones with the insides falling apart and the holes forming on the sides
Socks
Bathrobes
Candles
Crackers
That sound a match makes when you first light it
Soup
The song "Blackbird" by the Beatles
Well, any song by the Beatles, really
Holding hands
Hand-drawn pictures
The color green
Sweaters

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

I get in a weird mood when I read. I always have.

I used to read a lot when I was a little kid, actually. It got to the point where I got in trouble for reading too much, which is sort of funny on the surface, but also kind of sad now that I think about it. I didn't think it was sad then.

My parents were concerned because I did nothing but read, and they thought there was something wrong with me socially. I was a very serious little kid, which is weird to think about now, because I come off as sort of a ditz nowadays. It might be on purpose, it's probably on purpose, to compensate for the fact that I was a remarkably serious child. I had my friends, and I liked to go out and do things, but what I liked the most was to get a new book and read it on the big white chair in the living room. But if I did that, my parents would say things at me, so I started reading in my room, where my parents would come in and say things at me, so I started reading in the bathroom. I was finally safe in there, safe from their concerned looks and pointed questions.

I'm glad I turned out to be fairly normal and happy-go-lucky, because at least that means that they were wrong.

Monday, February 18, 2008

This is from my for-reals, written down journal. It's green (the journal, not the entry).

I was just thinking about summer camp, three and a half years ago. It was an acting camp, and i was thirteen years old and going into my freshman year of high school, the youngest age allowed to attend this particular summer camp. I was feeling pretty tiny. One day, we were reading a scene in which I was the younger sister denouncing my "older sister" (in reality, a Long Islander named Amanda whom I barely knew) for her incessant drug use. The director, a daytime soap producer with a scraggly mustache, kept telling me to make it real-er, to give more emotion, to show the magnitude of this exchange and I... just couldn't. I didn't know anyone who did drugs, I'd never had to plead with anyone who insisted, for whatever reason, to throw their lives away in such a cliched manner and turn into a cautionary tale, and urban legend, or a "local teen" in the town's newspaper. I just didn't have the proper experience.

Now? Well I still don't personally know any bona fide addicts, unless you count a nearly forgotten childhood friend I see once a year at a family friend's Christmas party. Last I heard, that girl had run away from her boarding school for troubled youths in the Berkshires.

I can, however, rattle off the names of quite a few casual drug users, nearly as many more-than-casual drug users, and a pretty good number of semi-alcoholics, many (if not most) of whom I can confidently call my closest friends.

Maybe it's just the age. As mid-teenagers, we're first discovering who we are as actual people, not just as concepts or potential beings. And many of us, myself often included, cannot deal with that responsibility. We want to bury it under pharmaceuticals or wash it down with alcohol or burn it in a hastily rolled joint. Those are the people I worry about the most. The recreational, just for fun users don't scare me nearly as much as the escapists because the recreational users can basically stop whenever substance abuse ceases to be amusing, but the escapists can't rejoin reality without an intense and painful return trip.

Would I be able to successfully act out that scene from three years ago with the experience I have now? Probably not. I've tried pot quite a few times, I've been drunk more often than I'd care to admit, but I just didn't like either of those experiences, no matter how many times I tried each of them, so I couldn't understand the desperation necessary to talk someone out of a chemical addiction. My personal form of escapism is more literal: I take walks, I ride my bike, I do as best I can as a teenager without a drivers license to physically separate myself from a father who expects too much and a mother who makes it abundantly clear that she can't stand either of us most of the time. It doesn't help much, and sometimes I think the chemical escape would be more effective, but it gets me to a place where I'm not screaming every hateful thought that comes into my unfortunately sober mind.

Sometimes that just has to do, I guess.

Saturday, February 16, 2008

My older sister Kathryn is the center of her universe and everyone else's. I can't help but feel ignored sometimes, but she acts as if it's justified; that her life is just so big and legendary that there's no room left for me in my insignificance. She isn't consciously self-absorbed or malicious about it, she just can't bring herself to care about a younger sister with no ludicrously hilarious or emotionally charged stories to tell. So, instead, I have to listen to her wax poetic about her ex-boyfriend, a continuing friend of mine (which, of course, causes no shortage of awkwardness) or her new boyfriend, a nineteen-year-old druggie on probation I haven't yet had the pleasure of meeting, or her numerous witty and glamorous friends who seem to fawn over Kate's every action and utterance.

She reminds me of my younger sister Annie in that regard: the big language, the attitude that she's the star of her own play and everyone else is just trying to upstage her. However, my younger sister is six, and Kathryn is eighteen. Maybe it's middle-child syndrome or maybe it's just my own numerous neuroses coming to surface, but I sometimes wish that Kate could mature at least to the point of listening to anything I say.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Things most people don't know about me

I have trouble falling asleep at night
I love the smell of honey
I get scared about silly things
I almost exclusively fall in love with people who are unavailable, emotionally or otherwise
I try my hardest to make people think I'm not trying too hard
I take pride in how intelligent I am, but downplay my intelligence any time anyone tries to acknowledge it
Sarcasm's my defense mechanism
My favorite food is pasta with pesto
I talk to my dog and my fish
I get unhappy when I can't listen to music for an extended period of time
I feel guilty about EVERYTHING
I'm crazy about someone who had a crush on me two years ago, but is dating someone else
I want to be in a decent, low-maintenence relationship with someone I legitimately like
My earliest memories are of dancing around with my mother in the basement to Michael Jackson, Midge Ure, and early Goo Goo Dolls
I used to hate being pale, but now I think it makes me look classy
I'm conflicted about growing my hair out
I have very few friends my own age. Everyone I'm really close to is older than I am
I love to write but rarely do it
I'm emotionally reserved
I act more dramatic than I am
I love my dog Buster more than anything else in the world