New Year, Old Habits
January 4, 2009 | Filed Under Boys | 10 Comments
< disclaimer > I could give any number of reasons for my habit of posting infrequently. I could place the majority of the blame on Comcast for failing to provide Internet when I have the opportunity to access it. The rest could go to my parents for depriving me of that opportunity by dragging me to a beach whose residents are more concerned with rebuilding their houses than reestablishing their Internet connections. While I’m at it, I’ll add Hurricane Ike to the list of scapegoats.
I could do all of this, but the fact of the matter is – nobody likes blog entries that start off with apologies or disclaimers. What’s more, nobody likes a blogger who tells you what they aren’t going to do by telling you that they’re not going to do it. So I’ll just skip the part where I direct a meaningless apology toward the entire Internet, as if it had feelings. I wish we could all just begin every blog post as if we’d never gone anywhere at all, simply picking up where we left off. That isn’t possible because we seem to operate under the assumption that our absence somehow means something to people who aren’t even aware of it. < / disclaimer >
This is me picking up where I left off, or rather, with what I left out.
I gave all of you the impression that the boy update was… well, up to date. That’s what happens when I don’t respond to your comments.
I’m no good with temporary story endings. I left the story unfinished hoping that the right words would eventually come to me. It’s like leaving the sink full of dirty dishes and hoping that somehow they’ll get clean. Maybe the moldy food will evaporate right off of them. Maybe someone will accidentally spill soap and water onto them. Life doesn’t work that way and neither, it seems, does this story. Those words are as absent as I have been lately and this story is likely to keep on going with or without me and those words. I will probably see Dave (and John) again since we seem to enjoy hanging out with the same group of people.
So these will not be the words that came from the burst of creativity that I was counting on. Instead, these will be the words that were born of necessity. It is time to move on. To make up for everything, I won’t bore you with verbosity. I’ll make this one concise.
I saw Dave once more before I left for winter break. There was another mini-party with the same group of people. I’ll cut straight to the point by establishing that this particular party centered around a game with many similarities to Truth or Dare, with much more of an emphasis on Dare. We kissed. Twice. In front of John, but not because I purposely wanted to create more tension. I’m not that dense. John was also playing the game. It is only by some miracle that I didn’t have to kiss him too.
I wish I could say that those two kisses changed our situation, but they were really just a part of the game. Neither of us would’ve initiated a kiss otherwise. I do get the feeling that things would be different if John weren’t a part of the group (or if I hadn’t kissed John), but what’s a girl to do? I can’t kick him out of his own group and I certainly can’t take back the kiss.
So that’s the story. The entire story – beginning, middle, and temporary ending.
I leave for school on Monday and I’m more concerned about what will happen the next time I see Dave than how I can possibly survive a school schedule that will be more intense (if that’s possible) than the one that I just suffered through.
I need to get my priorities straight.
My resolutions for 2009? To stop drinking soda, to start writing again (and responding to the comments), and to forget that boys exist.
I’m Just Saying
December 26, 2008 | Filed Under Uncategorized | 10 Comments
I’ve been scaring myself senseless lately. While you and every other normal person in this world have been watching It’s A Wonderful Life, The Polar Express, and Home Alone, I’ve been watching Hostel, The Midnight Meat Train, The Butcher, and anything else that is terrifying enough to keep me from sleeping at night. If someone isn’t brutally murdered within the first five minutes, I’ll pick a different movie from the FEARnet category of the On Demand menu. I have my standards.
There is clearly something wrong with me. I prefer watching awful torture scenes to movies that warm your heart and restore your faith in humanity. It’s the season for that kind of stuff, that warm and fuzzy stuff. The warmth and the fuzziness is definitely absent from the genre of movies I’ve been watching lately. To be quite honest, there isn’t even a sense of relief at the end of most of them. The bad guy tends to prevail. Evil triumphs over good. It’s not a warm and fuzzy feeling that you’re left with when the bad guy that you’d thought was dead grins into the camera in the final seconds before the credits run. It’s an uneasy feeling. Then again, I’ve always preferred blood and guts to warm and fuzzy.
You’ve been watching Christmas miracles and I’ve been watching killers pluck eyeballs out of sockets, hack limbs off of bodies, and bash faces into skulls. Something is wrong with me.
There was no point to this. It’s just a general statement of fact.
I have issues.
About a Boy (or Two), Pt. 2
December 24, 2008 | Filed Under Uncategorized | 9 Comments
I’ve always been afraid of things that I’m unsure of. That’s just my nature. I’m a math geek. I need charts and formulas and outcomes that are always the same. I crave consistency and predictability. With flirting and dating and relationships, you can’t have that. There are no guarantees with feelings. Promises get broken all the time and hearts do too*.
Friday nights are for going out. They’re for spending longer than necessary getting ready – trading makeup and clothes as well as predictions about what the night has in store. Friday nights are for finding any parties that are taking place on campus and hoping that the music is good enough to dance to, complaining when it isn’t, and staying until the party ends no matter what. Anything to momentarily forget the stress of the week because what Friday nights are really about is forgetting that there is a real world out there, a world in which we have responsibilities and obligations, papers and problem sets.
Unlike the Friday nights of weekends prior to this particular one, I knew that somehow it would end with the same people as the night before. After dancing until the party ended, we met up with the same group. I pretended that deciding to stay up an extra three hours was for Marissa’s benefit. After all, that would give her more time to spend with Sean. But, in the back of my mind I knew that it was my curiosity about Dave that kept me from heading back to my dorm room early that night.
My memory isn’t good enough to allow me to recount the story detail by detail or the dialogue word for word so I’ll just fast forward past meeting another one of the regulars in this group, John. For whatever reason, I ended up talking to John for most of the night. If I could have had my way, I would’ve spent the night talking to Dave again, but he was in and out of the room dealing with other things and other people.
I could blame what happened that night on any number of things, namely my lack of sleep (and the effect that has on my judgment) or Dave’s absence that night, but what it all comes down to is my own stupidity. I was too dense to realize that John wasn’t just talking to me because I’d have been alone otherwise (since my friend Marissa was so caught up with Sean). He was flirting with me the entire night and I didn’t realize it until it was one of those undeniable facts that’s just sitting there, staring you right in the face. Until it was undeniable because he was sitting there, staring me right in the face, saying, “Hey look. Everybody’s distracted,” and leaning in to kiss me.
This is the part of the story that my driver’s ed teacher would call The Point of No Return. The Point of No Return was the moment where the light has just turned yellow and you have to decide whether to go through the intersection or not. It’s when you’re going too fast to brake without sending your passengers lurching forward but just fast enough to barely make it through the intersection before the light turns red. Basically, it’s the point at which it no longer makes sense to step on the brakes. So I didn’t. I didn’t back away or turn my head because at the moment, I didn’t have the time to analyze all of my options. I went through the intersection, so to speak. I let him kiss me. At a time when Dave just so happened to be in the room, I let him kiss me. A situation that was bad enough to begin with was made even worse by the fact that Dave was there to witness it. I offered John a sheepish grin and made some excuse about how it was late and how we needed to be getting back to our dorm. It was late and I did need to get back to the dorm, if only to distance myself from the situation.
I knew that Dave saw the two of us kiss, but I didn’t know if he was the type of guy who cared. I didn’t even know if he was really showing interest in me the night before. That’s just the impression that I got from what he said and how he acted. But how much of that was my imagination and how much was real? After Friday night, I decided that it didn’t really matter. The kiss with John had ruined any chance I might have had with Dave.
The thing about Friday nights is that they don’t end until after you’ve analyzed the night with the same girls who helped you get ready for it, until after you’ve compared it to the predictions you’d made many hours earlier. My night was nothing like the one I’d predicted, but if there is anything that I’ve learned about guys thus far, it’s that you aren’t guaranteed predictability. You aren’t guaranteed anything. There are no guarantees with feelings.
*Taken from an entry on my other blog, written on 7/3/08.
**I didn’t purposely wait forever to write part 2. I have the worst internet connection ever (thanks to Comcast).
