Friday Night, So cool.
You make me think. You make me analyze my friendships, and listen to lyrics. I hate you. I don’t know why you can’t leave me alone. You aren’t even talking to me and you can’t leave me alone. WTF mate? That doesn’t even make sense as a sentence. I don’t get you. I don’t understand why you can be so great and suck so much. I met you two months and 4 days ago. You were perfect for almost exactly half of that. Beautiful, thoughtful, energetic, passionate. “I’m going to kiss him now”. One of my favorite moments in life to date. It encapsulated everything I liked about you. Your forwardness, your enthusiasm, your lust for me. You were beautiful, despite wearing clothes that accentuated aspects of you I did not particularly care for, which didn’t even really fit you. You had no makeup on. You were, for that instant, perfect. And for a month you were terrible. You were everything I hate in people. Illusive, dishonest, not forthright. You took advantage of my forgiveness and giving nature. You put in no effort, and all your actions were aimed at making sure I remembered you exist, none at growing, or even preserving, or even slowing the decay, of a friendship. You texted me while I was asleep everyday for a week and a half after we broke up. The first few days of that I trusted you. You were dumb, (“whoever you end up with is going to be so lucky” “unsurprisingly, it seems you have made a new friend”) but what did it matter. You had made up your mind, and there was no changing that. I worked to devise a plan to get you back, assuming I would continue to see you. Alas, with no interaction, no such plan could be put into motion. At one point, I carried in my back pocket for a week a printed sheet of paper which had on it all the points I wanted to remember to discuss with you should I have ever gotten the chance. I can see that sheet now, still folded into quarters under a towel and some tickets on my desk. But I never saw you. Its moment has passed. I wanted to defend my honor, explain to you my sexuality which you missed, among some other points I would have to unfold the paper to see, but without the opportunity, what did it matter. Now we don’t even talk, so defending my honor is the least of my worries.

“I knew before you did”
Why do I care. Why did you end so abruptly. How did I fuck this up. Friday night. That’s how. I felt it die with the simple throw away sentence, “you never let me do anything”. I knew it was over then, but didn’t want to believe it. Then I changed your facebook, and it was a done deal at that point. But who gives a fuck. I’m still attractive to plenty of people. I have dated since you. She was boring. Only cute through the right lenses.

I walked by you once fall semester on my way to class. I didn’t know you, but I waved and you waved back. The next several classes, I made sure to be in that region at that exact same time, and to walk slowly, to maximize possibility of running into you again. That is why this bothers me the most. I wanted you long before I knew you. It was so storybook, so right.

My dad has more game than me. He doesn’t have the ability to charm a girl or get a random hookup, but he could get a girlfriend. He did with my mom. He was a sophomore, and he wouldn’t show her where one of her classes was when he was giving her a tour, so that she would need him to walk him there. I would never think to do it, let alone be able to.

I am upfront and intense. You were too. You even liked that in me. It is one thing to have chemistry, that happens often enough. But to have chemistry and craziness, and then to throw it away, that’s a pretty tough blow.

I don’t have to analyze if I am smarter than you or not. You think I am smarter than you. My thoughts are thereafter irrelevant. That was not something I had realized before you. Most people, I believe, don’t look at a person and first consider who is more intelligent, unless there is a very large disparity. They consider who is more attractive, but that is it. You go beyond that, and I used to. But with you thinking I am smarter than you, that is a crushing blow to us having a relationship. You are not mature enough to have a relationship partner smarter than you are. You are too insecure about intellect.

But I don’t even want you. “You never loved me, you loved the idea of me.”/”But you were such a great idea.” You are hot, but you can be ugly if I want you to be. You are very fake, much more so than you want to believe. You consciously pucker your lips when talking to people, even girls you aren’t threatened by. It is like an animal who puffs his chest in the wild, you are trying to assert your dominance over her, regardless of the fact that you don’t need to. She knows you win, you know you win, and there isn’t even a competition taking place. Very superficial, very indicative of your insecurities. You are manipulative. I use manipulation only as a means of revenge or when I feel it is either directly or potentially beneficial to someone else’s wellbeing. You manipulate me to feel better about yourself. You made sure I think of you, even when you had no intention of actually talking to me. Hence the IMs and texts, but no phone calls or lunches. I think giving you credit for asking to lunch with me when you should have known I was in class is even a stretch. You manipulate your friends to make sure they do what you want. You manipulate boys at parties to make your presence known, to assert your dominance over other women at parties. You manipulate the hosts to earn “VIP status” to assert your dominance. You never learned that high school was over. My roommates don’t like you. They overreacted to you, but you did behave somewhat inappropriately. They don’t like anyone I bring back to the room. Never have, not sure why.

You have made me realize how discontent I am with these current friends. Connor is dumb and manipulates Camie. Ross is annoying, judgmental, hypocritical, and doesn’t realize that he is in any way any of these things. Camie can’t handle anything that isn’t perfectly to her liking. John and Jeremy are strained at best. Brett can be good, but I don’t think he is inherently a good enough person. Mike is great, but moody and emotional, and randomly gets upset with me for reasons I don’t understand and he is unwilling to divulge. Whenever I think of this, it comes from thinking of you in some manner. The discussion with them, where they flip a shit because you flipped the eye-hole, is awful and ridiculous. They get so mad about it, and don’t realize that if they hadn’t seen you do it, they would never even have known. It was easy to fix, no harm, no foul. They can’t process that. They are never wrong. Even when they are. I occasionally say “no, you are right, I was wrong.” They never do. But I am right more than them. Look at the board, I have more wins than most of them do contests at all, and I have fewer losses than all of them. I am willing to back it up, and when I do, I am usually right. All of my losses came last year, it should be noted. See, smooth transition from you, to them. It doesn’t make sense in the abstract, but it is there.

You make me wonder if my standards are too high. I am unhappy because I expect too much of people. But if I lower my standards, I will be displeased with the actions of those around me. I do not want to lower my standard for honesty. I’d rather be unhappy than feel as though I cannot trust those who matter. And I am unhappy only because of how small the list is of “those who matter”.

What bothers me a lot is that you should be on that list. It’s all there. You have the ability. You have the personality characteristics. You have everything required to make it onto that list. But you choose not too. You choose to value the superficial more. You choose to care more about being prettier and proving that you are smarter than everyone else. You choose not to realize that no one is doubting that you are these things. No one cares that you are 4th in the grade. Honestly. No one. People will value you much more for being a nice person. I have never heard someone say seriously “I love that so and so, she was in the top five in her college class”. I have heard someone say “I love that Betsy, I always feel like she is being herself with me, she seems so real, so legitimate”. People may comment when describing you that “and she is fourth in her class”. But that is a descriptive characteristic, not a reason to enjoy your company. And in the long run, you will get a lot more from people who enjoy your company than people who are moderately impressed by your accomplishments. I’m not saying don’t do well in school, don’t try hard. I am saying don’t try hard because you think you benefit from beating Johnny. Most people don’t even put their GPA on their transcript.

And no one thinks you aren’t pretty. Stop trying so hard. I say that Smush girl yesterday. She looked like shit. She was just trying way too fucking hard. People get enough bullshit everyday. They don’t need you to give them any more.

You make me think about my friends from camp. I love camp. Camp has kids, it has friends, it has honesty. There is no murder and travesty at camp (knock on wood). I cried for two hours because some people got kicked out. Intense sobbing, so much that I got a bit dehydrated by the end of it. They got kicked out. They are allowed back the following summer. That is a camp travesty. The world sucks. It is mean and unforgiving and terrible and tragic. Camp is forgiving, loving, kind, and beautiful. During the summer, I tend to be as sexually fulfilled as I want to be, as I usually have what can be described best as a hookup buddy. But that is not what matters. What matters is that I have Sez and Phil. Phil and I didn’t speak for half the summer, but we still cried together when Matt got kicked out, and we still lamented at the Saxons drinking on camp together. That is friendship. When you can not talk for that long, but still have each others back completely, no matter how wrong the other one may be. I have kids who look up to me, and I am outside every day running around.

You make me think about smoking pot. I like it because it releases me from all these thoughts. I can only think about one thing at a time. I don’t have these 80 levels going on simultaneously. But there is a lot I don’t like. I don’t like my eyes looking red the following morning, and the droopy feeling that comes with that. I don’t like using a substance that much. I don’t like the way my roommates react to me being high. They judge and don’t understand, and don’t even try to. They don’t listen. They never listen. To anyone or anything. They say what they want, and think what they already thought, and no one can change that in them.

You don’t make sense. I can find you ugly. You are fake. You do not know that high school is over. You have some of the most unappealing qualities I believe can exist in a person. Including a lack of thoughtfulness. You do not consider how your actions or words would be interpreted by a person not privy to your entire life and your thoughts and feelings. You do not realize that other people will always read the situation differently than you do. So incredibly undesirable. But yet, I can’t stop thinking of you, and I would take you back in a heartbeat if you wanted it. You don’t have to be all these things, and you aren’t always these things to everyone. When I was a priority of yours, I saw that you have the ability to be thoughtful and considerate. When I ceased to be a priority, I saw just how undesirable you could make yourself. But knowing that the possibility is there, it enables me to still want you sometimes. And someday you will learn, as everyone does, that high school is over. Your biggest flaws, as I seem them, are inherently temporary. That makes it harder than it would be otherwise. And since I don’t love my friends, ignoring that they don’t like you is easy. That they don’t like you may even make me want you more because it makes you seem more unattainable, and it is me spiting them like I usually am unable to. But that is not something I have thought about that much, and it is not something I care about. They value much different things than I do, I do not need their approval. And besides, mike would like you if he had to, and he is the only one who matters.

You are trustworthy. That hurts me. You will tell Kaity most things. Wait a second you aren’t trustworthy. No, she isn’t trustworthy. She asked you, fully knowing I did not want her to know. She is the one more at fault there than you. You take some blame, but not a lot. Did you know 2 friends of mine have lost their virginity with a condom I gave them. Yes, I have condoms. I keep them in my backpack and next to my bed. Not in my wallet. I don’t want to be fucking people if I don’t see it coming that much, that’s just not who I am. So either it will be in my room, or I will make sure to take my bag with me if that can be inconspicuous. If I have to I will take it out of the bag. I usually just decide towards the last minute that I don’t want to. Those who have propositioned me to date have been people I didn’t care about nearly enough, and sometimes it takes until about the last second for me to realize that. Yes, I have been naked with a girl who was naked before. I lied and said I didn’t have a condom. I had one in my right front pocket that night. She was 26 and British. Not my cup of tea. Get it? Most other times some of my clothes were on when I made the decision not to. But back on topic, I can talk to you, you will listen, and respond how I want you to respond without me telling you how to respond. That is nice, and hard to replace. Ie, I have no one else who I can say that about.

I have now written four pages about you. Add that to what I wrote last time, and you have somewhere between 6 and 8 pages. That is a lot, and it is annoying. I don’t want you to let me go. I want you to acknowledge that you made a mistake.

Since I met you, something has happened to me that has never happened before, twice. I was turned down for a position I applied for. RA and UGBC. That is clearly not your fault, but all the more reason to be miserable. I used to at least say I had my extracurriculars.

“Still I’m the one who’s stupid”
I don’t regret anything I have said to you since we broke up. I regret telling you about my month long sabbatical, but that is about it. What I said this week needed to be said. It was not me telling you not to talk to me. It was asking you to be fair with me. I would rather we do remain friends. I don’t have too many, and I see a lot of potential in you. I also do not understand why we are not together as I write this, but perhaps that is a topic for another day.

Earlier I hoped I would be in state for your birthday, and that I would see you on it. I am now very glad I will have been in NH for a week come June 15.

I know you had sex with Bosworth over Easter. That’s kind of annoying. That is really my only thoughts on that matter.

I am completely insatiable when I like someone. That is not common for me, as it has only really happened with Laura, SS, you, and maybe Lizzie. I am not horny for horniness’ sake. I am horny for passionate kisses. Not ones that are forced because I want to get to the end result. But I am far from asexual, as you seem to think I am. I don’t enjoy hookups that much when I don’t care for the person involved. Hence, me not going for too many random hookups, and not caring so much if I go a while without. But when I like a girl, that’s when it is different. I know you say you are horny, and you say you had sex 9 times in three days. Don’t care. I promise you I would still have been looking for number 10. Because I liked you, and didn’t just want your body. Emotion is what turns me on. And I could never stop once turned on. I tried to explain this to you once, but you weren’t listening. I sometimes wonder if your were listening then, would we still be together. If the reasons you gave me for why we broke up were true, I think we would be. But I don’t think they were legitimate. Maybe you believed them, but that doesn’t make them the real reason. I think you were bothered by believing that I was more intelligent than you. I don’t even know if that is the case. But I think you think it is, and that is what matters in this scenario. That was what I believe was the primary cause.

“That’s when I knew”

Your new friend Olivia is one of those girls who eats breakfast at Lower on random school days. Sketches me out. I see her everywhere. She is prettier in pictures than real life. I have never met a whole group of friends who are prettier in pictures than life.

I’m winding down. I have been writing here for almost two hours, although for writing this much, that is actually a very quick pace. I just want you to decide you made a mistake. You do not even have to want to fix it.

"And there is this burning
...
I've never been so alone
And I
I've never been so alive"
- posted by Alex @ 4/28/2007 03:28:00 AM

 
Life Lessons from "Grid lock"
I enjoy playing online puzzle games. Personally, I tend to prefer the "puzzle games" from ebaum's world. However, regardless of your procrastination from of choice, I think that there are great life lessons to be learned from how a person approaches their favorite game. Ok, maybe not great life lessons, but lessons nonetheless.

I'll jump right to my point, because I think that this is something I can explain better with an example than vague descriptions:
I am playing this game (off ebaum's world's puzzle games) "Grid lock". If you have never played it, it consists of a number of different length rectangles that are in a large square. Some pieces only move up and down, others only move left and right. The objective is to move the pieces around within the square until you have given the blue rectangle a clear pathway out of the gridlock. Fun game. You should try it if you ever read this. Anywho, the lower levels are relatively easy and somewhat repetitive, but as you get up there, they get pretty challenging. I was on one level for over an hour (not in a row, but on and off between TV, facebook, etc). I find that when I focus on a hard level for a long time in a row, I get stuck. I repeat the same moves attempt after attempt, and make very little progress. I was on one level for 15 minutes straight, made almost no progress. I look away, give it some time, forget about it for a while. When I went back to the game at the next ad, I solved it immediately. Sometimes, all a game like that needs is just a break. Forget about it, do something else for a little bit, and come back to it when you feel like it, and all of a sudden you have it figured out.

I think the implied parrallel to life and relationships is pretty clear. It is the obvious answer, just not the easiest to accept. When having a problem in life, one that you cant solve immediately, sometimes it just takes a little time, and a little break, to figure it all out. It seems like a pretty obvious statement, but it took me playing this simple online game to realize it.

Strange as it may sound, I think that one can actually learn a lot about life or themselves by analyzing their approaches to video games (or board games, etc). (Let it be noted that in writing this I feel like a really fat kid trying to defend spending his entire life playing Zelda on Game Cube or something. That is not what I am attempting to accomplish with this post, I am more aiming at creating self-realization through approaches to competitive or challenging activities of pleasure). I have found other interesting parrallels between my attitudes towards certain facets of life and my approaches to strategy games. Games like these are created to be challenging undertakings of pleasure. The ways in which one approaches challenges which they choose to undertake, as opposed to challenges they are assigned for one reason or another, can be extremely telling of the inner workings of their personality, or they can explain to you basic life lessons which you probably should have known anyways, but chose to ignore.

This might be rambling and poorly written, but sometimes its hard to clearly explain what I mean.
- posted by Alex @ 4/07/2007 12:11:00 AM

 
For Serious?
Damnit Woman. I even hear your voice when I am successfully doing things to not think about you.

I purposefully stop myself from doing things that would make me think of you, and all I can hear is your voice saying "you don't let others help you, and you don't let you help yourself."

Well, at least I am right, and allowing me to help myself. That doesn't count for anything though, does it?
- posted by Alex @ 4/06/2007 12:44:00 AM

 
Well, I'm not in High School anymore...
So, It has been a short while.

I did not abandon you careful readers who still check daily for my next words of thought. I merely wanted to make sure that my much anticipated return would be worthwhile enough to quench your by now well-developed thirst. AKA I had nothing to say and/or no desire to post anything. If anyone other than Jonah actually still checks this thing, I would amazed. And to you Jonah, I appreciate the loyalty.

So, I return here today out of lack of knowing where else to go. Writing shit down seems more productive than mindlessly trying to create a new playlist on itunes, and so here I will leave my thoughts as they regard to a certain individual. Since no one reads this, I feel as though I can confidently write freely about my true thoughts. However, just in case, I have left out the name of the individual primarily referred to throughout the post.

Here it goes.

All these words you say haunt me. My sister tells me to watch TV. I hear your voice, telling me I got the worst combination of my parent’s personality traits. Not in an Alex-you-suck-you-inherited-the-wrong-traits type of way, in a you-are-better-to-the-world-but-worse-for-your-own-peace-of-mind type of way. Ilyse watches TV and hears the TV. I watch the TV and process goings-on of the TV show, but I hear you moaning under Bosworth’s body. Not a pleasant noise, quite frankly. It doesn’t sound like love, which is good at least, but it sounds like harsh, brutal release of emotions. If that doesn’t make sense, nothing else I say will, so, sucks for you I guess.

I try to do as many things at once as possible. Listen to one song, read the lyrics of another, and brainstorm songs that might fit my newest playlist title all at once. I go through periods where I successfully forget what it is that I am trying to forget, but then Ilyse comes in, and says something to remind me, or Laura IMs me telling me to not think about you. Sweet deal. Easy enough right. Just forget. Easy as pie. Pie takes hours to cook. Not so easy, when it comes down to it.

You don’t make sense, frankly. You giggle still. I understand you being afraid of sending mixed messages, and me telling you to not worry about that. I was serious when I said I didn’t want you to worry about how you were acting around me. I wanted that for two reasons. One, at least one of us needs to be in our natural state when we are together in order for anything to work. I can attempt to work off of your comfort, and we can be back like friends again. But if we both come into it out of our element, me wanting you, and you being afraid of confusing me, then no friendship survives. That is the worst-case scenario. You enjoy me because you are comfortable around me. You lose that, then I am not worth anything to you.

Reason two gets to what you would describe as the more manipulative side of me. I wanted you to act as you feel, so I can get a better idea what is actually going on in your head. If you are confused, I want to know that. If you like me still, I want to know that. If you don’t like me still, I want to know that. I want to see what you are in your purest state; I don’t want the sugarcoated version, or the side of you that is aimed at giving me peace of mind.

But now we are back to where we started, you did as I asked of you. You didn’t worry about mixed messages, and acted on your impulses and emotions. Good.

But that causes problems for me. You, it would appear, don’t know what you want. I have an idea, a theory, but when don’t I? I do always think I know everything. Knowing everything can include knowing that you don’t know, but for me it is only half knowing that I don’t know. The other half attempts to come up with the most plausible theory. Occum’s Razor (Ms Jones, I hope you are proud, I think in terms of this guy solely because of your influence).

And so I hear your voice, telling me I have my father’s thought and analysis, but lack his ability to not care. I have my mother’s sociality and awareness of social situations, but she doesn’t have my constant over-analysis, and I lack her ability to open up to people, and get it off of my proverbial chest.

It is actually kind of impressive, you can haunt me while you are haunting me. My attempts to not think about you are interrupted by you. I succeed at not thinking about you, but only to think of you in a different manner, thereby failing my original goal. Talk about a paradox.

Now, I recognize that, despite what I think was a relatively well written beginning of this rant, the last couple of paragraphs became a little bit more free-flowing, and hence, probably harder to follow. Oh well. For this I am sorry in my most often used meaning of the word, ie, “I truly regret that you feel this way, and I empathize, but I will do nothing to fix the problem.”

So you have taken over my thought processes on now multiple levels, and two tangents from my original main point are both about you. Well played, madam.

So those are my thoughts for the afternoon. I will now go back to my failing attempts at removing you from my thought.
- posted by Alex @ 4/05/2007 06:19:00 PM