Things Which Are Further Falling Apart - 8/11/2006 in 2005 - 2007: High School

Lately, as I have been lying awake at night, I have been getting extremely angry at people. for me, anger is synonomous with the urge to talk some goddamn sense into the bastards.

Five nights ago, it was Gail. I got extremely angry at her and how little sense she makes. I recalled the infuriating look she gives me every time she tells me something that it is very important that I be careful about, for my own good. I remembered the time that she physically took my hand and stuck it into a mess that I was not in any way responsible for, even though I had already told her that I was not responsible for it. I yelled at her. "Why can't you learn to criticize constructively instead of just insulting us all the time? That's not even economically efficient, Gail, let alone morally decent. If everything has to be done so goddamn exactly, why don't you just run the goddamn store all by yourself? Has it occured to you that we might have our own ways of doing things that work just as well for us as yours do for you? Maybe if you respected your employees, they would actually want to do things right around here."

The next morning, I ended up working with her. In fact, the only people working, for a while, were me, Harry, and Gail. As a defense mechanism, I responded to everything she said to me with a pause followed by, "What? Oh, sorry, I didn't know you were talking to me."

Four nights ago, it was Adam. I started imagining what it will be like next year to have him in my classes and sharing my band leadership position, and probably hanging around my lunch table with my Julian. I yelled at him the way I usually do.

Three nights ago, it was Kathy Lu, the anal retentive bitch who forcibly took control of my final giant Odyssey group project. (I didn't even talk about it at the time because it was too infuriating.) She ended up hating me for being unable to come to all five thousand of the meetings she called because of concerts and my job. She also took terrible offense every time I disagreed with her, but wouldn't tell me, opting instead to spend the rest of the meeting she had called in silence, with her arms crossed, and saying, "oh, no, I'm fine!" when I would ask her if something was wrong. I yelled at her. "Why couldn't you ever just say what you meant, Kathy? Why did you always have to be so smiley and friendly to everyone, when it was clear that you hated half of us? And why did there have to be so many details, huh? You always got hung up on the details, such that we couldn't even talk about the deeper ideas. You didn't come up with the deeper ideas, Kathy. I did! That was the meat of the presentation, Kathy, and I came up with it. But what did you do? You marked me down. Drastically. Saying that I was a big disrespectful jerk and that I 'needed to understand that other people had obligations too.' I never disrespected anyone for not being able to come to a meeting. You were the one who did that, Kathy. And I was never a jerk. Excuse me for not being perky and giving out homemade snacks to everyone while simultaneosly hating them."

Two nights ago, I spent the evening with Emma and Molly, hanging out and watching project runway. First of all, project runway is a spectacularly terrible show. For those of you not in the know, it is a reality show about fashion. But they genuinely enjoyed it. They weren't even being ironic. And they spent the whole time, even when we were watching the show, just talking. About stupid stuff. About food, and clothes, and babies. And pseudo eastern philosophy. And Emma complained. She whined about stuff that she's whined to me about dozens of times before. She is not intelligent. She is not interesting. I have realized that I don't actually like being around her anymore. But Molly makes an effort to keep in touch with her, and she was acting just like her. I left early. I just called for a ride and left. Because I couldn't stand the girly stupidity anymore. They wouldn't even let me talk. I would try to talk, and one of them would interrupt me with something stupid and girly.

I lay awake being a little angry at femininity in general, but mostly not being mad at anyone, just confused and depressed and very afraid that I no longer have any friends.

Last night, I went to a party at Alice's house and watched Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Quite a lot of people were there, almost all of whom I like, and the rest of whom I don't know. Among these people were Molly and Dave. They spent the entire party touching each other in some way. For more than half of the party, some part of her was in his lap, usually her in her entirety, but sometimes just her head or her legs. She didn't talk to me except to cheerfully and passive-agressively bring up what had happened the night before.

I lay awake last night absolutely furious at Molly.

I was right. She's become girly. She now embodies everything that I hate about femininity. She talks about dumb shallow stuff. She cares about her appearence. She is perky and happy, and when she is mad at you, she keeps being nice to you and just waits for you to guess. She is artificial and she is a sexual sellout. She used to tell me she hated PDA, that she would never engage in it, or at least not a lot of it. She used to tell me that girls sitting in boys' laps seemed very demeaning and silly and uncomfortable. She didn't used to be friendly. She didn't used to be happy. She used to be introverted and genuine. She used to cut off all of her hair at once and let it grow out again over a period of two years simply because she hated having her hair cut. She used to want to dye it. Now she tells me often that she likes her hair the way it is, long and blond. And that she needs a haircut because she has split ends. Do you understand what I'm saying!?

I hate the way they act around each other. It's not real. They're just absorbed in their own little artificial, endorphin-soaked, highschooly world, so much so that they've stopped caring about stuff that they used to care about. Both of them, but especially Molly. It makes me angry because it's so clichÈd and uninteresting, and because every interaction they have with each other is secret now. She never bothers to tell me anything. She doesn't tell me probably because she thinks it would be awkward. But he - no, not even him. The relationship has become her whole life, so I don't even know her anymore. I don't know a damn thing about her clichÈd, uninteresting, very female life. I don't know her anymore because she's a different person.

I feel like they're not friends anymore. They are not "more than friends," and they are not "friends who also make out sometimes." They have stopped being friends, and they have started being something much dumber and shallower that I can't be included in in any way. What I'm trying to say is, they've finally done it. They've taken themselves away from me. And it fucking sucks. I probably should have cried, but I didn't.

Last night after I finally went to sleep, I dreampt that I was in a place with a lot of people. First a (fictitious) kid from JV jazz band wrote this children's book type book about how he really liked my ex neighbor Jessica, (who recently got a job at the Bagel Store but who is not to be confused with Jessica the Bagel Store Bitch). I read it, and I knew it was intended for her, but for some reason I started acting like he was talking about me in the book. I still knew he was talking about her, but I couldn't help acting like that. He was like, "no, what's you're problem? I'm talking about Jessica."

Then I was the son of the head of the mafia, and had to run away from home because I didn't want to be the next head of the mafia. There was a chase scene, and I found this woody swamp area that I decided I could live in. I went to get my girlfriend to come live with me, but she wouldn't talk to me about anything worthwhile. She just wanted to be silly and swim around in the swamp and have babies.

Then Julian came back from being on a reality show all summer on a boat in England. I couldn't get to him for some reason through the crowd, but Emma was following him around asking him a bunch of immature questions. She ended up coming back and reporting to me that he had a boyfriend now, and somehow I knew that it was undoubtably true. I finally found him and talked to him. He was old. For some reason, he had grown really old over the summer. He didn't really have any of that delicate gangliness anymore. His beautiful jawline was no longer really defined, and his skin was wrinkly and discolored. But he had the same eyes and voice. I asked him a few polite questions about his trip, and then I said, "What's he like?" and he could tell that I was hurt, and he tried to explain, and said that they hadn't done anything physical, really, with all those cameras around. As he was explaining, I kissed him. He kind of spasmed and ran away, and then I collapsed on the kitchen floor and screamed as oldish women who looked like they belonged in a kitchen threw breakable things at me.