the ongoing saga of awkward and exes

well, he doesn't hate me. i'm not too surprised, though only because he's not a bitter person at all. i feel better now; these may be baby steps, but we seem to be back on our way to friendship again.
lately i've felt oddly full of goodwill towards humanity in general, and though it isn't the new year i think from now on i'll try not to be as bitter and angry towards people. deciding that feels nice.

regrets

what do you do when you know you've hurt someone and you desperately want to be friends again?
i dated my first boyfriend for three months, in between junior and senior year of high school. we were good friends all through middle school, and i think that summer might have been the best of my life (not entirely because of him, but still). he's the epitome of the skinny, nerdy white boy, and we were that couple who sat in central park using the uncertainty principle to describe our relationship. and it made sense to us, though maybe not to anyone else. every weekend or two was spent in a different museum, eating gyros and pretzels in central park, pretending to be the adults that we'd eventually have to become; and though we may just have been two silly kids, we were gloriously happy.
maybe i shouldn't have broken up with him when school started again. now i can't remember why i actually did; all i can remember is what i told him instead of the truth, and at that point i wasn't the accomplished liar i am now. he saw through it, we didn't speak for a while, he took me out to see macbeth that spring with some inscrutable reason which i still can't figure out, and then we drifted apart again.
i saw him in april briefly, but we don't talk anymore. maybe i shouldn't bother trying. but i hope somehow he finds this post, because maybe if he reads it and understands then we can go back to being friends.

the politics of hair

despite the fact that i've been dealing with the trials of having mixed-race hair all my life, i never really realized that handling black hair has its own politics. i've been relaxing my hair since i was nine, simply because it was always too difficult to get a comb through the curls, and it's always been just a matter of convenience for me. but today i came across this article on jezebel, and reading the comments was a rather interesting experience. it's frustrating that so many women base their personal appearance on what the world thinks and expects of them, rather than their own preferences, because really no matter what you do you cannot please everybody.
i am not my hair. it does not reflect my intelligence, education, or organizational skills. and most importantly, what i do with my hair is not a statement of where i belong. if there's anything i hate, it's being pigeonholed based on race, sex, my choice of major, anything; but especially something like my hair. i change my hair when i get bored with it, and so do many other women, so why are you going to judge me based on what it's doing today? could you possibly be any more stupid?

on being a purist

i just watched the trailer for the picture of dorian gray, and i can't decide how i feel about it. i enjoyed the book, but i read it so long ago that it has barely any effect on my perceptions of the movie. besides, while ben barnes is not beautiful the way dorian is supposed to be, he certainly is pretty.
the new sherlock holmes, on the other hand, is an entirely different animal. i've been reading holmes since i was six, and after seeing the trailer i was disappointed to see that it's basically your standard action movie, with only a different historical setting to recommend it. i suppose it might be fine as a movie on its own, but as an adaptation of a novel that i am more than familiar with it offends me.
unfortunately i seem to feel this way about a lot of movies. the past few harry potter movies left me cold; neither the jim caviezel count of monte cristo nor the french version thereof were any good as adaptations of the book (as a matter of fact, the more recent movie was an absolute travesty); and even the lord of the rings trilogy was not quite up to my standards by its close. is it better to miss out completely on what could be a good movie or be repeatedly disappointed by failures?

an unintended hiatus

apologies for my disappearance, but i haven't had anything of much importance on my mind lately; so between lack of inspiration, freshman orientation, and a series of relatively serious things happening in my life, i just haven't had much of a reason to write. term started last week, though, so within a month or so i'll probably be back to posting with disturbing frequency ;)
worry not, dear readers, you will get your fix of randomosity soon enough.