boston

this year is wearing on me. i'm enjoying not being in school full-time, and i do love my job, but the academic stress has been replaced by personal disasters.
i almost think i should leave the country for a while. after i graduate maybe i'll go to israel for a year; but i want to find a way out of the hole i've dug myself into now.
i left new york for boston so i could start over; leave behind who i'd been in high school. and i managed it for a while until i started burning out. and now that i've made my mistakes in yet another city i feel like there's nowhere else for me to go to try and fix things.
rationally, i know that moving is not the answer, because it involves too many complications. but hell if i want to stay here.

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.

on dreaming

remember way back when i dreamed of being a real musician? when i finished my last final and immediately sat down to look at conservatories for post-graduation? when i had Plans for my life?
...yeah. more and more, those plans are looking like a waste of my time. i'm not an actress; so goodbye broadway. i'm not really a soprano; so goodbye any sort of classical performance. and i have artistic integrity, so no recording contracts for me. going to a conservatory will really end up just being a waste of time and money.
the hardest part of having dreams is waking up and realizing that they were just that: dreams, and nothing more.

mindless irrational paranoias yay!

i have two days off from work this week. i think it's time for me to go back to therapy.
and i am terrified.
i've done a huge amount of introspection in the past eight months, and discovered things about myself that i wish i didn't know. i am loving, caring, and friendly; vicious, manipulative, and arrogant; fragile, insecure, and lonely. i am everything anyone could possibly be, rolled into a five-foot bundle of contradictions that i would dearly love to have sorted out. but who will i be when that's all said and done?
i am scared to shit of what i'll become. i don't want to change, but i don't really want to be who i am now either.
yes, okay, maybe somebody should call the waahmbulance.

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.

eh. life goes on.

the idea that life can go on in my absence takes a lot of getting used to.
last summer was like this too. i disappear for a weekend and parties happen. people acquire stories, photos are put on facebook, and i get to feel irrationally jealous about it. i guess it's because i miss my friends terribly when they're gone, but nobody seems to notice when i'm not around. they tell me they miss me, they say they're there if i need to talk before i come back; and then when i need them most they're nowhere to be found.
and this weekend, it was okay, because i know enough people in weird time zones that i found someone awake and willing to lie to me for half an hour so i could stop panicking. but that was just sheer dumb luck; and i wonder what will happen the next time if there's absolutely no one around.
one day i'll have someone who'll sit by the phone waiting for me to call. or at least that's what i keep telling myself.

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?

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?

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.

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.

holding out

it's so much easier to give in to depression in college than either high school or the real world. nobody checks on you to make sure you go to classes and you don't need to call in sick when you don't want to get out of bed. and it's not infrequent for people to spend days holed up in their bedrooms if they're working or, as is more likely, working their way through all the past seasons of heroes before the next one premieres. all you need is a laptop and a hot pot and/or microwave, and it isn't imperative that you surface for three days. people don't really worry about you if you disappear for a while, they'll just assume that you're busy.
i really hope i don't start doing that.

disclosures

i think i'm beginning to understand why you should never tell people who know you that you have a blog.
i know too many people who judge, too many people who can't keep their mouths shut, too many people who are the sort to talk to me about what i write while in the company of others. and now i haven't posted properly in a while, because what's on my mind involves certain people that a good chunk of people know: and while i'd love to just vent it all out like i need to, i don't really feel like subjecting them and their lives to inordinate scrutiny. so i'm once again reduced to dumping my woes on friends while this blog languishes and, in all probability, has an emotional crisis due to an inability to fulfill its intended purpose.
once my life starts behaving normally again and i go back to having regular arguments with people, all will be well and good. until then, here's something happy and fun to amuse yourselves with.

carcinogens

i have this bad habit of working with toxic chemicals.
any kind of glue you can use on a model airplane is bad for you, and of course i never remembered to open the windows when i was building mine.
rubber cement is a lot of fun to play with, never mind that you shouldn't inhale it at all.
two summers ago i volunteered in the pathology department of a local hospital and spent three days a week in the close company of an insane amount of formaldehyde.
now i'm spending my summer in a lab where i deal with toluene and acetone on a regular basis. and it turns out acetone soaks through nitrile gloves. and both make me nauseous.
i worry about myself sometimes, just a little bit.

i feel awkward sometimes

i feel like i'm becoming unbearably awkward and shallow. and i can't do anything about it, because i really want to go buy new makeup and there's nothing i can do to change that.
and to top it off, people keep asking me what i want for my birthday and i have no freaking clue. if i tell you, then you'll go buy what i tell you to get, and that's no fun. i like surprises.

straight a's

i could totally get straight A's here if i could get bored enough. unfortunately, the state of my room often means that i'll default to cleaning it instead of working if i really have nothing else to do. this is probably why i stopped working in here...

the wee hours of the morning

why do people think that it's perfectly all right for them to call me at 330 am simply because i'm now their go-to person for relationship questions? i understand that some things are important, but "can you come to the movies with me friday?" could absolutely have waited till an hour when both the sun and i are generally up. especially on a night that i'm actually sleeping. thank goodness the txt at 43o didn't wake me >.<