I woke up yesterday with really, really bad bedhead. I was tired and did not want to go to bio. I got myself out of the house. Then when Molly and I walked into the lobby of the school, two teachers were blocking the stairs to where we usually sit in the hallway. They shooed us into the field house. I wondered whether our school had suddenly become totalitarian and against loitering in the hallways in the morning. I must have looked confused. So one of the teachers said, "You have to go to the field house or the cafeteria, you can't go upstairs. There's been a power outage."
There was a power outage freshman year. That day was one of the best days of my life up to that point. Power outage = hanging out in the field house, eventually getting sent home and wandering around town for many hours. The whole thing is surrounded by an air of spontaneity and overall chaos. I was pretty ecstatic.
We found Dave in the field house, and the three of us went over and sat on this bench so that Molly's sunburn would hurt less. It was really far away from where everyone else was standing in a giant crowd around the door. But really, there were no exciting people over there. Julian came over to us once in a while and would talk, and then he would leave through the door to the outside and presumably wander around by himself for a while. At nine o'clock they sent us home. We decided to go do stuff. I invited Julian. He declined. So we took the bus to Molly's house and drove around doing stuff. Whenever I give play-by-plays of social things it turns out to be really boring. So I will just say that we picked up Tom, then the four of us went out to breakfast, watched Office Space and threw a frisbee around, and then we picked up Alicia and got icecream. We talked and Tom made things openly awkward again, and it was good fun. There, that is my summary of yesterday. It was a pretty sweet day.
Except that when I got home I had a huge fight with my parents. Basically, my mother was in my room for two hours trying to fix the printer, and would not talk to me when I came by to ask how much longer she was going to be because she was talking to tech support. Then I got a little mad, and my parents got even madder, and it escalated to really, really sucky proportions. After an hour or so they stopped being mad, and I wanted to continue being mad, but out of necessity I forced myself to stop. Okay, yeah, I probably overreacted a little several times. And I know that my parents give me everything and without them I would die, and all of that. But regardless of whether or not it's fair to my parents or how ungrateful it makes me, I start to go crazy when I do not have access to my room. It is my room, and my mother should at least tell the tech support guy to hold on a second while she asks me why I am standing in the doorway instead of just shooing me away. I have nowhere else to go in this apartment, really, where I can be alone or have access to any of my stuff. Maybe the amount of personal space I need is higher than normal, but when you refuse to give your children the amount of personal space they need, you just end up with children who are even more territorial, antisocial, and emotionally fucked up. I was really pissed off. But I cannot be mad at my parents for very long simply because it would make my life too difficult. So I'm not mad at them anymore. I cannot wait until we move.
I recently realized that it has been a surprisingly long time since I have been depressed. Like, since early January. Granted, there was that feeling-terrible period somewhere in the middle, but that was for a reason. That was "terrible things are happening to me," not "Everything's useless, nothing can ever get any better, and I'm a bad person." They're two different feelings. Even when I was going through some relatively sucky stuff, there was a complete, obvious absense of depression that I was conscious of all the time. I got through March fine. And April. In fact, I have been happy. Maybe this is finally one of those extended manic periods I'm supposed to get along with my quick little manic bursts. Or maybe this is the end of depression altogether - maybe I've finally learned to just deal with it.
Except that today was a pretty exceptionally shitty day in terms of the "everything's useless, nothing can ever get any better, and I'm a bad person" factor. Nothing all that sucky hapenned, but by the end of the day I was in a bad mood and felt terrible about myself. I felt self conscious enough to be afraid to talk to Eric and Alice because I thought I would say something dumb or not be funny or just be awkward.
Basically what it comes down to
(I'll bet you guys are never going to see this coming)
is Julian. He doesn't talk to me. It's not just that he doesn't talk. He talks. He talks pretty freely, to Eric and the grungy bassist in Greg's other band and Jay and Mike and RJ and that crazy looking kid who wears cool clothes and doesn't say anything, and Stonerdrummer and Rob. He mostly just doesn't talk to me. I will try to talk to him, and the conversation just dies. And it makes me feel awful. Mostly because I have now spent approximately two years of my life worshipping people who don't give a shit about me. That is too much time for anyone to spend doing that. I have been pretty lonely for a pretty long time. I guess in some ways I am doing alright convincing myself that I do not need Julian, or anyone, really. Most of the time, hanging out with people to the extent that I hang out with people is enough. And as long as I keep letting myself be intense about random things, I will be happy. But a lot of the time I just need a hug and a kiss on the forehead. And I need someone to be as unreasonably devoted to me as I get to other people. And I feel pretty empty, because no one is. Furthermore, I don't think anyone ever has been. Unless you count Mark, which I don't.
Maybe it would be okay if Julian at least liked spending time with me or respected me a whole lot. But I don't think he does. I think that he is going to stop playing with me. Today at jazz band he was asking Jay and Rob if they wanted to play on the bridge. And at lunch he left my section of the table to go talk to grungy bassist. I heard the names of several songs and several musicians in the school. I heard "Jethro Tull" come up, followed by my name, but they didn't tell me what they were talking about and they didn't ask me if I would do it.
I'll bet it didn't help either that Dave wasn't in school today because of an AP test. I always hang out with him almost all day, especially on jazz band days, and without him everything was just socially awkward and not fun. I was thinking about it, and it is not that there are things about Dave that I think are awesome. In fact, there are many things about him that I find pretty annoying. I just somehow became very close to him. Probably because we are remarkably alike. Even when it comes to our flaws. No. Especially when it comes to our flaws.
Alright, fine. If you take out all the times when Julian was sitting next to me not talking to me or looking at me in situations where it is completely normal and expected to talk to people you know, today probably would have been fine. The Dave thing was a relatively minor factor compared to that. So was the random guy in the restaurant yelling at me for not holding the door for him. (I am completely serious. That actually happened. It's not like I decided not to hold the door for him, I just wasn't really paying attention. Jerk.) There was even some pretty good stuff in there, like the fact that I got promoted to second trombone in jazz band for the new piece we're playing, a good conversation with Mr. Hoffman about what math class I should take next year, and a very amusing philosophy club. I will be fine. I will get over it. I am not a bad person, I am just a socially awkward person with bad, bad taste in guys. And I am going to bed.
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