another year, another thanksgiving

and my first one on my own. well, perhaps not completely on my own; just my first one away from the family.
the friends and i had epic plans for this evening, but were stymied by our failure to plan properly; so the cooking has been put off until tomorrow, and instead i treated myself to dinner. a nice, solitary dinner at legal seafoods with a copy of les miserables.
and i thought good and long about where my life has landed me lately, and realized that despite how miserable i can get, i have a lot to be thankful for and very little actually worth complaining about.
i have a full-time job that doesn't suck, and will soon have insurance again through said job.
my family loves me enough to understand that sometimes it's better to stay away from home for a while, and is okay with that.
and there are people who love me enough that i can occasionally light up their lives. they may not be the ones i live with, but they exist.

avoidance

i occasionally find it difficult to rationalize my intermittent disappearances. sure, they make sense to me; when the world is not quite the appropriate frame of existence for me, i wander off for a while and come back when things are less not-right.
but it seems as though people think that i'm deliberately avoiding them. and, well, there is a sense of arrogance in feeling that one is being avoided; as though one is at all entitled to the attention of others.
nobody is entitled to an explanation of what is going on in my life and why it makes me avoid interacting with them. i am alive, and life is unpredictable, and that should quite honestly be justification enough. sometimes i am busy, sometimes i would simply rather be doing other things; and that is legitimate, no matter who you are and what you ask of me.

feeling sentimental

i come home in the evenings to a house full of light.
of everything that's changed in the past few months, this is what i notice most. the laughter, the hugs, the "where were you? we missed you at dinner!" - that's what's making the difference. yes, my job kind of sucks; and yes, i kind of hate not being a full-time student right now; but i live with people who like me, and maybe even love me, and that makes everything worthwhile.

the long-awaited explanation of where i've been

here it is: the reason i haven't had time to write, in a nutshell.
i had a complicated year. i decided a few too many times that i didn't know what i wanted to do with my life, and so the classes i hated most this year also turned out to be completely useless with respect to my degree.
issues that i thought i'd left in high school came back to bite me in the ass, ruining my self-perception and my social life. i became kind of unbearable to be around and my friend circle shrank to less than half the size it used to be. i'm still not entirely certain why so many people put up with me through that, but thanks.
in january i broke up with the boyfriend of a year, because our personal philosophies were too different. i then spent the next six months second-guessing myself and making everyone around me miserable as well. somehow i still have friends (no, i don't really understand why. perhaps schadenfreude?)
oh, and i got swine flu. twice.
disheartening? yeah, but somehow it's been good for me. now i'm taking a year off to re-center myself, and i'm looking forward to it.
but that's another (later) post, because this one is getting long.

on being an adult

i'm at home in NY for a few days, with a couple of friends and without the parents.
i am by far the youngest of the three of us, and i feel like i'm currently the only adult around. between trying to feed two picky eaters, and trying to get things done when nobody seems to be listening to me, i think i know what my mother dealt with for a long time with me and my sister.
i don't think i really want to have children anymore...

"are you okay?"

things are happening this summer. some of my closest friends have graduated and, one by one, are leaving boston. weird personal things are happening. life is being complicated, because that's what it does. but every time there is some such upheaval, someone asks me if i'm okay. and every time, i answer "i'm fine."
i am tired of being asked if i am okay. i am not okay. i get very attached to people, places, ideas, things, and when i have to let something go i have a hard time with it. but by now i am used to it. i cry, i panic, i write, and gradually i heal. it may take a few weeks of sleepless nights, but it happens on its own.
i am not "fine," or "all right." sometimes i am not even "meh." but this is how life goes, and you cannot make things any different for me. one day the same thing will happen to you, and you will understand what i mean.
life happens to us all. don't worry about me.

non-separate entities

i am one half of an increasingly insane relationship. again. but here's the thing: she's one of my sisters, not a significant other.
we're sharing a room this summer and planning to move into an apartment together early next year (more on that another time). and because right now i'm not working and she has an irregular schedule, we've been spending a lot of time together both in and out of the house. things have gotten to the point where when one of us says "we," everyone knows who we're referring to; and people sometimes address us both even if they're only talking to one of us.
and let me tell you, internet, it is FREAKY AS SHIT. i wonder sometimes what sort of effect my relationship with her will have on the rest of my social life, because we go out together so often that i think the staff of the area restaurants think we're dating. i know, hilarious.
but sometimes it really does worry me, because sometimes we kind of function as a unit. am i losing bits of my identity like this?

feeling pissy tonight...

what does it say about me that right now, i can't find it in me to deal with other people and their problems?
most of my close friends are trying to handle a lot of stuff right now. finals are stressing everyone out, there's personal stuff thrown in, and basically everyone is going insane. and i know i need to try and find a way that i can give some time to the people who're important to me, especially since i've dealt with some of what they're going through right now: but i can't seem to find a way. i have nothing left in me that i can give to anyone, and it makes me so annoyed sometimes that people expect so much from me when they themselves know how difficult college can be. i feel like i'm being guilted into being someone for others to lean on because if i don't, i'm clearly just a shitty friend.
but i have been there for others for such a long time that i've managed to neglect myself. it's okay for them to disappear off the face of the earth so they can get time to themselves, but god forbid i need to study at MIT, right?

best friends?

instead of doing my incomprehensible physics homework i tend to wander the internets; or in this case my facebook feed. i keep coming across the same note/quiz/thing done by different people, & this time i stopped to read one done by a good friend of mine. and for some reason it got me thinking, do people back home still think of me as a friend? i'm an insanely busy person with a stressful life, but who really understands that? i don't deliberately ignore people, but if someone's life consumes them and they fall off the face of the earth can you still consider them a friend?

accountability

this morning i signed into facebook to find a post from a friend of my cousin, who lives in boston and suggested that i come check out fenway church (since i still don't go anywhere regularly *shamefaced*). i met him almost two months ago, and owing to my having been out of town pretty consistently on weekends i still haven't been able to go at all. it was a nice surprise to hear from him, and i will be going weekly once the freshman cease their invasion of my life, because it's much easier to remember to go to church when you know someone there will call you up and ask why you weren't there last week.

O.o

how the hell did i become a relationship counselor for my friends? and since when did my advice apparently not suck?
quite honestly, i fail so hard at people sometimes that i'm surprised when people ask me things like i have my shit together. but i think it's even weirder when they say it's good advice. maybe i should start following some of it...

people worry too much

i love my friends and i get that they love me back, but it still freaks me the hell out when i get people worrying about me. especially on a day like today when i'm running on 3 hours of sleep since yesterday morning and i'm feeling sorry for myself and i kind of just want to wallow in it. as of about an hour ago i'm actually pretty good. i have a new room that is going to be wonderfully sunny and it is yellow. life is just weird sometimes.

things i don't want to say

i'm halfway determined not to go back to new york again; or at least, not to see people who aren't family. when i go back, i go for the weekend most of the time and i only have saturday evening to hang out with friends. i give people at least a week's worth of notice that i want to see them, and invariably i get screwed. plans don't get made, or they do and then someone bails, or family is conveniently taking up an entire weekend and i'm left feeling like nobody actually wants to see me. and then to top it off, people then have the balls to give me shit about how i never visit.
it makes me sad to have to say this, but i am done putting up with this nonsense. some of these people are the reasons i made it through high school relatively unscathed, but i have other people in my life now who actually give a damn about me. i know that everyone's time is precious; so is mine. i'm not going to waste my weekends on a bus just so i can stay home saturday night because plans got fucked again. from now on, if you want to see me that badly you can get yourself on a bus and come to boston. stop making me waste my time.

is this how dan savage feels?

sometimes i wish people would stop asking me for relationship advice. i'm on my third boyfriend and finally in a stable relationship. that doesn't mean i have any idea about how anything works. i got lucky. that's about it.
and just because i'm a girl doesn't mean i can understand your ex. i don't know why she stalks you, i don't know why she defriended you on facebook, I DON'T FUCKING KNOW. stop asking me. and stop asking me about cold heartless exes, because i am one and i frankly can't see your perspective.
i don't give advice voluntarily. this might be because it doesn't normally work.

walk on

The sun rises again.
No matter the storms we face.

If raindrops should fall on your shoulders,
let us all tide you over

If the clouds seem to darken where you stand,
please let your loved ones take your hand

And if there is one thing I’d like you to know,
keep this in mind wherever you may go:

If thunder strikes to make the sunny days
seem much less benign
Then the moments passed will make future rays
a much brighter, stronger shine.

(reblogged from a dear friend of mine, Black Polos And Sweaters)

there is no more to say. wherever you go it will rain on you at times; maybe sunshowers, maybe a mudslide or two. but inevitably, the sun comes back sometime. all you have to do is keep walking, with whoever will hold you up if need be, and you'll make it.

i don't want to grow up.

the phone never rings
because you never call
and everyone's asking why i've been such a mess

it kind of hit me this week that people grow up and go places. a bunch of really awesome people made it up to boston for my birthday this past weekend and set the bar pretty high for my next few birthdays. but now they're all gone, and i don't get to see most of them until term starts again, and it's making me more depressed than end of term did. there's too much permanence to this moving away business. a year from now my best friend will have been gone for absolute ages and he may not feel like my best friend anymore. a year from now i may take an internship in a place where i know nobody, or i may have found another lab to have a love-hate relationship with. i don't know. all i really want is to be with my friends and enjoy life, but the older i get the less carefree i can be and the more our paths diverge: and the more distant we may get. if i could have frozen last semester, to go back and visit it at my leisure, i would spend all my time in those last few weeks of insanity before my best friends had to go behave like real people.

birthday weekend

you know how you who your friends are? the people who fly up from florida and/or drive 500 miles one way to spend less than two days in boston for your birthday. and who think that a copy of the american bartenders' handbook is a good birthday present.
this weekend has been seriously epically amazing. dinner with 30 friends being seriously rambunctious at vinny t's; wandering out to a bar in the pouring rain; blowing things up in the microwave because wikipedia said it was a good idea; a zillion other things that i can't remember...
birthdays are awesome. i have the best friends ever.

are guilt trips the best way to travel?

i don't know if i feel any better for having said what i did tonight. my friends back in new york miss me, but are never around when i visit. and the sad thing is, they're the only people i come back to see. they're the only people from high school that i'm at all inclined to make time for, because they're the only ones who ever really loved me.
the memories aren't all bad, but enough of them are. enough that i feel ridiculously alienated when i visit. so many people are so fake to me. they hug me, they tell me they miss me, they say we should hang out; and yet when i look at them all i see looking back at me is the girl who cried herself to sleep every night for months, the daughter my parents almost lost, the girl who was ever so lonely for ever so long. and i can't quite ever forgive them.
there are a select five people whom i am so blessed to have known, not least because each of them did their part to keep me on this earth a while longer without ever knowing it. i miss my besties so much, and i'm so sorry you feel that i've abandoned you. i don't know when i'll be able to say all this to you in person, but if you find me here know that this is for you.

what happens when you spend saturday night at an orchestra concert

• you fall in love with saint-saens all over again
• you rediscover an ambivalence towards violin concerti
  
• you decide the second movement of beethoven 5 would make an epic wedding recessional and it distracts you for the rest of the night
• until you listen to ravel's gaspard de la nuit, at which point you wish you actually played piano
• and you regret not having time to play in the symphony orchestra
  
• and then you text all your wind ensemble friends from high school because you miss them a lot
• but you go download recordings of your senior concert and feel a little bit better
• and then you remember that you also have super awesome musician friends up in boston and feel better still
  

home #1

people keep complaining at me for deciding against spending my summer in new york. and i wish i could tell them all to shut up and get their own lives on track, but that's probably rude.
when i was deciding what i would do this summer, i told my parents quite plainly that coming back to long island was the last thing i wanted to do, and that i'd only do it if i couldn't find a research position up here. and you know what? they were completely okay with it and understood exactly where i was coming from. unfortunately, most of the other people i know are behaving rather selfishly about the whole thing. i will be doing what i want to do - working in lab, flying kites, and spending time with awesome people - and if people really cared about me they'd understand that.
home is not where you grew up. home is not the place where you sleep every night. home is where you feel you belong. and for me, that's here.