Prose and Cones

I could have had the best day of my life yesterday but I had a brain. It was a functioning, over-analytical brimming-with-depressed-neurons brain, and it won’t let me stop thinking about the pros of what I don’t have, and the cons of what I do have. I was hanging under the monkey bars with my pits exposed to the whole world with zero modesty, but my mind was in the two places I couldn’t be. I could probably grasp those rusty metal bars for minutes on end but I couldn’t quite grasp the reason why inertia couldn’t be applied to everyday life, if scientific laws were truly unbreakable.

Friday the 25th, I was waging an impossible war against myself. I tried to get the important people to have a say in my personal conflict but they were either too calculated, or too self-involved. I pitted my selves by myself instead. In my head, my past self and my future self were garroting each other trying to decide what to do with my present self. One of the two had to die, and by 3:31pm of that Friday, it was pretty clear my future self was the surrendering vegetable on the ground. I marched back to the room in which I withered for my freshman year, with the newspaper folks who used the word “awesome” and “epic” seven times more than your average human being.

Come Saturday, the “supposedly” best day of my life. I couldn’t believe I asked for spikes for my fifteenth birthday and I had to wake up every morning, seeing those shoes and thinking, there’s no “I” in softball. I could have at least joined the club since the 18:00 transportation wouldn’t be such an issue but Coach, who previously wanted me to continue playing, looked at me like he wanted me to scram because I was such an ugly view, waiting with my pointer finger all over the sign-up sheet when there clearly was a dozen less-problematic freshmen waiting behind me.

“Pag-isipan mo,” said he who I spent my most productive summer days with. That was the worst advice, to be left alone with your thoughts when you’re clearly in need of outside opinions. I turned around and walked away while the freshmen chattered on behind me, without knowing I was deeply conflicted and torn. Why should they know anyway? I was letting myself be consumed by the moment. That was a pivotal point, had my life been a movie. It’s not every day that you face and decline opportunities that could have put your whole life in a different light.

I don’t want to get started on the fitness club’s triathlon dream and how appealing it is to have companions who can run distances without you having to hear about their weather complaints. I don’t want to have visceral pain in three places. I think two problems are enough, thank you.

In Diary, that bloody dirty fishbowl of a novel, Chuck Palahniuk says that what we can’t understand, we can make mean anything. It’s been months but I still don’t have enough heart or logic to make something out of this frustration I have. I just want to be something bigger than I am. I want to break out because that’s the good and healthy thing. I want to stop writing and do something else with my life, like playing as catcher while getting singed by the sun. These mighty efforts I put into the races I ran and the balls I threw, they’re the outside forces that I thought would break the straight boring line that was my workaday life. If inertia were true, I would have been a zigzag but I guess God and the Rest of the Universe wanted something else for me.

And I have a favorite passage from the Bible now. I never thought I’d be that kind of person but Matthew 6:34 is the best thing I’ve read since Palahniuk. It simply read, “Do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will take care of itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” It's not very biblical, for a verse from the Gospel of Matthew, but it's universal ideals like those that keep me going.

I now leave this blog with an adjective I'll be hearing zillions of times in different contexts for the next forty or so Friday afternoons. God and the Rest of the Universe, taken as one great entity, is awesome.

Hiding In Estrogen

I started reading the first two chapters of Invisible Monsters (i.e. the ONLY book I find superior to Looking For Alaska) and so far, everything about the book has gone way beyond my expectations. This is the first time I've read a book and feel like the author doesn't give a flying poop about the characters, but everything works out anyway. I prayed to God in the middle of the pages and thanked Him for the book, which really isn't as crazy as it seems, and now I think my only problem is how I can't read it without taking a shower and drying up, because I wouldn't want a speck of dirt on the cover or the pages. It's now sitting safely where dirt couldn't get to it. I think this is what you call an obsession.

At least I can listen to Time to Dance with a smugly I-know-something-they-don't-ish smile. 

So I promised myself and my nonexistent circle of critics that I was going to dis on my being female just because nobody, with the exception of one, is willing to listen to me without concluding that I was either a lesbian or a closeted lesbian BECAUSE I'M NOT. I still don't know how to drop the bomb without making a bigger mess of things here in my blog, so I'll probably just get back to this after taking a shower and reading a few more chapters of Invisible Monsters. I didn't think I'll ever find a better book than Looking For Alaska but life seems to be on my side lately, and thank goodness for it.

A Few Things

I think I'm something else now.

I simply remember

my least favorite things

and then I don't feel so bad!

I have no problem cashing out on ice cream and Chuck Palahniuk books (e.g. the annoying dirt-magnets that were the only available paperback copies of Diary and Invisible Monsters -- why must they be white?!) and in fact, I did nothing but that the whole weekend. That, and running 5k races with someone in fishnet stockings anyway. I wouldn't have believed if I found out earlier how I could do it in just a little over twenty-seven minutes. I even taunted the funky-smelling old geezers by sprinting the last hundred meters. HELL YES, I'm my school's greatest derby horse. They just haven't figured it out yet.

That's my Problem of a Lifetime. I've been so unreachable this summer that I might as well be dead, or lost at sea to all my lovely friends, but there's a little funny fact about that. Over the years, I've learned that if people wanted to reach anybody, they would -- across the bloody globe, or not. In my case, only a select few did, so it gives me a migraine to think about what to tell them whenever they pop out of nowhere and say something of the hello-how-are-you-I'm-bored variety. I've always been socially inept and a failure at talking small, always clinging on to my imagination for entertainment because, with the exception of my best pal, I mistrust the rest of the human race with varying degrees.

So NO, I AM NOT FINE. 

People, without much argument, have already established the fact that I was weird during the last days of freshman year and they're right -- I'd rather be alone, but society makes that option unavailable, or available with unjust treatment. Hey, is it really that difficult for everybody in school to let a person like me be whoever I am? What business of theirs should include ridiculing my introverted nature in front of a public and a teacher anyway? It's not a problem for any of them to stick their heads in because they know nothing about what's going on and what's not going on in me, and I'd appreciate it if they'd get their paws back in their own jars.

I'm just unfit for this day and age. If there were three things I could change about the life I'm in, they'd be my ASL. I always thought life was better growing up in the 90's, or even in the 40's. I want to grow up watching Clark Gable and Grace Kelly, not Amanda Seyfried and whoever's the new dude in a superhero suit. This isn't me being pretentiously post-modern, but modern technology's setting the bar too low for every aspect of society. Maybe I just hated Ironman 2 too much to ever think about watching anything else similar to it.

AND I HATE BEING A GIRL. I should probably get off and spend a minute or two brainstorming for a new post, in which I will be bitching about being born with the cursed disease of being female to an audience of none. See, the most annoying thing about my brain is it always tries to find something to hate about myself when I've gotten over an older flaw.

Why, oh why?

In Anticipation Of

I have twenty (sunny) days, three books, two races, and  one more demon to kill  before the start of sophomore year. Am I stoked for school? The simple answer is a yes, and that's only because I can't wait to wear cleats and take my self-worth to new heights with sweaty, smelly mitts. Am I stoked to be with the people in school? The only answer is no, and that's because I learned something the school would never ever think of teaching its students -- the only way for an individual to discover and develop his capabilities to the maximum is to drag him away from his friends and toss him into the ocean, the way authentic fishermen learned to swim. 

The way I see it, we are the ones holding each other back. Friends can only get you to an I-guess-this-is-fine distance, and somewhere in the middle of living and dying, one has to figure out that there's more to live for than just the social aspect of life -- there's stuff like childhood dreams, and we can only chase after these by ourselves. We can't have our friends as cavalries. They should have their own dreams to pursue, or they've gone mad. Shame on the majority of people in school, for passing on opportunities fit for them when they realize they can't have their friends along. I want to wear a black panty hose over my head, look like someone I'm not, and shake everyone off this way of thinking. There's just so much life to waste, for Chrissake.

It's all about that where I'm from -- friends, friends, friends. They bring you up. They let you down. They make you cry. They give you hugs. They kiss your butt. They ride with you. They talk trash. They borrow. They don't return. They waste your time. They make your day. They make fun of you when you suck at volleyball. They make birthdays worth living for. They tag you in pictures when you look like poop. They tell you when you've got blood stains. They fill in the silence with cheers the brief moment before you deliver your speech. They ditch you for better friends and better crowds. They make you say you hate math even if you don't. They always make you want to pretend you're someone you're not. It's great poem material. You can't live without them, but that doesn't mean you ought to build your life around them.

Maybe my hatred for conformity is all just because I get by so much better by myself than anyone else I know? That's what I am, I guess. I'm a loner. I'm alone. I'm aloof. I'm the quiet harmless thing sitting in the corner. I'm nothing else but, and I'm never going to be anything else because I didn't just spend my summer running races and plucking strings and getting in a varsity team and reinventing myself. No, I did boring things with my boring summer because I'm a boring person with a boring life. That's what they'd expect to hear because that's what they see me do.

But that's not my life.

My life is amazing.

Day 45

It's raining, after a heat of a hundred and seven degrees. It's only the thirtieth of April, but I can't hear anything other than the rain on the roof. I feel cheated on; downpour shouldn't start until July. I haven't even gotten close to a beach to sit on a rock and pretend I'm a nereid, and out of nowhere that bipolar witch of a weather decides it's time to get our coats out because the real summer's over. Now I'm just a kiddo on break for the next thirty-seven days. Thankyouverymuchdearweather.