plague

so I have the plague, and it's pretty awful. Sweating on and off, shivering, lugey-ing, sniffling. Oh yeah, and I'm supposed to start at hook in tomorrow's game against UMO. Apparently, also, their forwards are mads fat, which means we're going to be faster, which is good, because I can't breathe.

but besides letting everyone know that I'm currently a campus germball, I wanted to put it out there that for all intests and purposes I am FINISHED with my study abroad application, and am progressively becoming more and more obsessed with the fact that I'm going to Greece daily. I think if it feels so right, it can't be wrong, you know?

Of course I'm going to miss my roommates in northern Europe and my friends back home, but if I really need a shoulder to cry on, I can see them in a weekend (theoretically). But what I need right now is tissues. and to stop trying to stay in one position for too long without blowing my nose.

Allie and I on Chatroulette

Allie does not like ChatRoulette. I can understand this because we saw a penis in every chat window we opened, whether it was held by tight fitting underwear or just plain right out there.

Are boys really this pathetic?

Answer me this, men: What IN THE HELL KIND OF GIRL do you think wants a big old penis with no face on her computer screen? Obviously no kind of girl one would want to form any sort of relationship with. How about you go outside, to a cafe, and meet a real girl, not naked on your bed with your cock in my interwebs? I wanted to go on chatroulette because I wanted to meet a real person before I went to dinner and all I got was COCK. Dammit. I told Ally it wouldn't be all penises and the first chat window we come to is a giant ass DICK.

So way to ruin my sliver of faith in chatroulette. It's like AIM chatrooms when we were thirteen and you only went in one to figure out what cunnilingus meant. Why the hell do people ruin things for me? If I could reinvent the world, I would make it so that if I yelled at someone for something EVERYONE who did that thing would stop. Now I'm just angry. Now I just want to sign back on chatroulette and tell them all they're tiny and that I prefer black men.

Or Jews. Or people who aren't them.

Allie asks what I'd do if a black man or a Jew came up on chatroulette and I say it's simple. Tell them I prefer the other. Oh, you're black? I only online strip for Jews. Sorry. Come again later. Except not.

I feel like putting yourself out there like that takes a lot of confidence. It takes balls (well, balls and a dick) to be an internet exhibitionist. So maybe I'm jealous that I'm not so free with my body as to plaster it all over the internet so guys can beat off to it.

But what I really want to know is...there is obviously one girl to every 400 guys on chatroulette. isn't it awkward and kind of gay for them to be looking at each others' dicks all the time? Do you just like, "next" another bro or do you stop touching yourself to ask what's up? I mean, that would be courteous. And if you do, why am I not afforded the same courtesy? Ask me what's up? Take your hand off your penis and ask me. Then I might even consider having a brief and polite conversation with your naked ass.

Allie is bored. I can tell. So I think I'll talk to her now I guess. But seriously. Chatroulette. What the what.

Toxic People

So what kind of blogger would I be if I didn't read other blogs? A bad one, duh. So I was reading a blog by a woman who's in journalism, kind of hated her husband for a bit, and was on a quest to be happy, much like myself (except I don't hate Ben). She, having gone through a life-Renaissance of sorts, I think is qualified to give someone like me advice on dealing with the adult world. She says to rid my life of "toxic people," i.e. people who make you feel worse after hanging out with them. Whilst this doesn't happen to me (or to anyone I would think) very much, it has happened, and does happen. Sometimes people in my life can have their toxic days, where I can't deal with them, but most of the time they're all right. But I can think of a few that have been persistently toxic. One is a friend I wouldn't want to slander electronically, because they have been there for me in the past, except now I'm not really sure we're the kindred spirits we used to be, and I've been thinking about this person and whether or not to label them "toxic," but I'm kinda sure this all related to the power plant of toxins that is my mom. It's probably not even their fault at all, really.

Confession: I have mommy issues. But as she's virtually withdrawn from the Internet after a recent fallout, I doubt she's stalked me enough to know I started this frivolous little thing. Anywho, reconnecting with my estranged mother has been, well, difficult. This is because she is a toxic person to me. I don't know if its the gratifying reversal of being all but worshiped after being abandoned for years, you know like the attention and stuff, or if its me martyring myself in some sick, weird way dealing with her obsession with us and weird combination of self-pity and self-loathing. Either way, I feel like a better person after seeing her, except kind of in the way that Harry Potter felt better going back to the Gryffindor common room after detentions with Professor Umbridge with "I must not tell lies" written in scars on the back of his hand.

Except my hand would say, "I must not tell truths," because if I have anything to bitch about (as is the way of 19-year-old girls) she'll somehow turn it against me and make it seem like I've been neglected by my family unit and am deeply psychologically disturbed for some reason. God, I'm so sick of people thinking I'm crazy, just because I was a little crazy as an early teenager. And I admit by a little crazy I mean a lot crazy. I just hid behind being "unique" to feel like that was the source of my "tortured" persona, you know, like, artist-crazy. Turns out I'm not much of a composer, dancer or singer (though, as evidenced in my last post, these things still make me very happy), and I know I shouldn't have alienated people to try to be an introverted-genius-type. But here's the thing: You can make these mistakes because you don't know any better, and some people will still act like you should have. There was too much crazy bleeding into my life from all sides during middle school and early high school that I didn't really notice I wasn't developing socially.

But don't pity me. Because that's what my mom would ask you to do, but I won't, because I don't need it. I feel like this is one of those things I think about a lot, so I should explain it now, mom and middle school and being a "Fatty No Friends" for almost two years of my life. And it was me. All me. And there's no one else to blame, so I'm not going to blame anyone. But I have to confess to my self-absorbed blog that I'm still really torn between yearning to be friends with the people I spent so much time with in high school and middle school so much that it makes me sickened to think that I had all that time to make a few people like me and I failed, and the alternative, snobbishly rejecting them because I go to a really competitive school, dress pretty cute, and still have the boyfriend I so triumphantly won and kept in high school. By keeping this facade of utter perfection when I go home, I protect myself from them thinking anything bad about me, maybe the worst being, "she walks like she's the shit." And Beyonce says I should. So I try.

I feel like I have a lot better things to talk about in this blog than these sad little vignettes about reconstructing my life by looking to my dramatic sordid past. But the thing that's getting to me about my friend is the fact that they aren't thinking about their emotions, and their reasons for being the way they are now, which is so different even from when I first met them, relatively recently. If you can't think about these things, and to look at them from an un-depressed, thoughtful, interested standpoint its like ignoring the owners' manual to your own personality. Why do specific things make you upset? What do you regret? What are you out to prove and why? I could really go into it and dig for my deep psychological trauma, and so could everyone, even the most privileged of people. But I'll spare you, because as long as you know how you are now, it doesn't matter how you were then.

And thank god for that. Because I don't need a fanfic-writing, lonely-soul, constantly philosophizing revival of what I used to be. She was fun, but I let her go. Like shaved-head Britney Spears, I just prefer myself now that I've kind of got it together.

An Easy Fix

So here it is: my self-absorbed blog.

I suppose you're wondering a lot of things, like how my self-absorbed blog got its name, what its purpose is in life, and why the heck I needed a self-absorbed blog in the first place. And I'm going to tell you these things and probably a lot of other junk too, because its 11:20PM, my boyfriend's sleeping, and I need someone to talk to. And he got mad at me for trying to lay in bed next to him and tell him about my life. So I thought I would tell his flat screen computer instead.

For all intents and purposes, this blog is about my study-abroad to Athens, which, unfortunately, doesn't happen for another year. But hell, I'm making life changes and getting a head start on something might be good for me to do, for a change. Elaborating some more on the circumstances of my title and life predicament: I am a Classical Studies Major (yes, I know I have no life options besides an extended foray into academia and/or law school, but oddly enough I'm trying to break into the film business), and it is required for my major that I learn some Ancient Greek. So basically, I spend my days translating various vignettes about Xerxes, Themistocles, and How the Egyptians Avoided Gnats, which, albeit, is all very interesting, but there's always one little phrase that makes no sense, that I can't understand. Which is weird, because the Ancient Greeks were very frank; they told you how it was. But they did it in such a specific way that its complicated. I can't explain. Lost in translation, I guess.

But here's the thing. This "it's all Greek to me" thing? This "I don't understand the world around me and maybe I should" thing? That's the relevant part. So poignantly relevant that I started this blog a year early with the sole purpose of preparing myself for going to a country where I only know the dead version of its language, all by myself, for four months.

Because how can I ever presume to think I'll be fine and dandy gallivanting around Athens and "finding myself" when I'm not really sure what I'm looking for anymore? I'm caught at a crossroads, at an age where you kind of need to step out of your own awkwardness and into your big-kid life. And I don't really know what that entails. All I know is that I've been, well, blah these past couple of weeks and I needed a lift, and tonight especially I was thinking about things that I used to do to make me happy that I just don't do anymore. So here's a list (you'll come to find that I LOVE lists):

Things I Want To Do That I Don't So Much Anymore:
1) Sing, especially while playing piano. When I sing in the car, its bittersweet, and my voice is a lot feebler than it used to be. I want to sing in places other than my car.
2) Dance. I used to dance around my room alone at night just for fun, and now I don't. I don't know why I stopped. I just did.
3) Pretend. I mean, I just haven't really had the chance lately; I haven't consciously stopped. I used to like to go "fake shopping" for prom gowns when I had no prom to go to, for "rich clothes" for my later "rich" life, "home shopping" for my future home. And I always got a kick out of thinking about the possibility of things, more than I think I do about those possibilities becoming realities. Or maybe I liked to pretend someone was filming me for a cliche "clothes-trying-on" montage. Who knows?
4) Watch Sappy, Bad Movies. No Bryant, I don't want to be a film snob. I want to be me, and me likes bad, cliche, not-groundbreaking, regular old box office fluff films. I want to write regular, cliche, box office fluff films. I want to make stuff that Amy Adams stars in, and I think that's okay. Because you're supposed to write what you know, right? I know sap. I know cliche. And I don't want to be Dziga Vertov or Orson Welles, I want to be Oscar Wilde. I want to do what everyone's doing better than anyone else who's doing it. Flawlessly, harmlessly. So fuck you, Bryant.
5) Write. And this is the easiest thing for me to do right now, to write, because I can just start this blog and do it and even now I feel lighter, more tired, but light. I used to write every time I felt something. I don't know if I feel too much now or much less than I used to but I know I don't write it.

I think there's this charm in writing about high school that goes away when you hit college, because in college what you talk about every day isn't dreams or tripping in the cafeteria. You talk about who's a slut and that asshole that talks like she's the best thing ever in class, and about sketchy boys and what readings you can skip and still scrape your way through school. Its like the German Expressionist version of high school: everything's murkier and well, morally ambiguous. You realize everyone that you go to school with is as smart, as talented, and as charming as you are. Heck, I'll admit it. Most people at Bowdoin are MORE smart, charming and talented than I am. And I can't find a place for it. It bothers me. But I have to deal with it.

So I write, so I have a voice. I need a voice. I can't possibly tell you how much I need this voice.

I'm awkward. I'm hopeless, and I need this. I need to start writing again. There's no way I can deal with all the drama and emotion that's breathing down my neck (more on this later) without some humor. And there will be humor, trust me.

So I hope you understand why I'm writing this. Because "it's all Greek to me" isn't just funny because I'm a Classical Studies Major, but because I know more about the kind of person Themistocles is (he's a double-dealer, don't trust him) than I know who I am.

So I hope this wasn't boring, and I hope somehow thinking about all this might help my study for my Mythology test on Monday.

But I'm thinking probably it won't.