I have time to kill while I am waiting for the 6th season of ‘One Tree Hill’ to finish downloading, so I am learning to play ‘Hang’ by Matchbox 20 on my acoustic guitar.
I swear to God I am 24 years old.
I may be a little behind on things (as is evidenced by the fact that I am watching season one of ‘One Tree Hill’ right now), but I’m fairly certain Gavin DeGraw has Asperger’s.
If I want to, if I close my eyes and remember hard enough, I can still feel his hand on my leg, my hand on his.
I remember reading something, probably a lyric, not too long after we started dating about the writer still being able to trace the outline of a former lover. Ugh. Lover is one of my least favorite words; I just don’t think it says enough. But anyway, I thought then that that’s what really being in love was like—being able to feel someone when they are gone.
As he drove me to California, every hour or so, he made a point to touch my thigh and look at me. “I love you. Did you notice that I’ve been making a point to touch you when I say that?” Even then, it felt like he was trying to sell me a set of steak knives.
The ability to feel him despite his absence was involuntary and comforting when we were ‘together’ but apart after I moved. When he ended things, it became involuntary and gutwrenching. Now, over a year later, remembering the texture of his hair or mentally running a finger down his spine is fully in my control, and bittersweet.
I am ready to start remembering, to start writing, about someone else.
Today I got a 3 page letter in the mail from my dad. It’s really sweet in a way I hadn’t anticipated from my pops, since he’s been out of work for a while and I’m usually pretty clutch for him when he’s un/der-employed. He mostly talked about my mom baking things and giving him shit, and the new kitten, and how the neighbor who owes him $20 promised to pay him back and then asked for 10 more. The ush.
He was so upbeat, in fact, that he wrote ‘LOL’ in the letter. 3 times.
I went out with this guy half a dozen times last month. He wasn’t my ideal guy or anything, but I probs would have hung out with him for a while if he had seemed at all interested or normal. But he didn’t and I was going to eat my Spagettios tonight and think about how pathetic it was that I couldn’t get a guy who was so proud of himself for beating his CHESS COACH to call me back until I saw this picture.
This is his latest facebook friend.
I still ate Spagettios tonight, but I’m feeling a lot better about being me.
I’m predicting a MAYJA JVDB comeback in 2k10 (have we decided how we’re doing the years yet?). The droid Voiceover gig is just the beginning. You heard it here first.
Saturday Night/Sunday
I stayed home from work today, which is probably the stupidest thing I could have done, considering, but I am definitely in the midst of some cold/sinus infection thing that makes me want to cut off my nose, look at it with disdain and throw it against the wall, so why don’t you shut your damn mouth.
I watched the first part of Bride Wars that I missed when I went out on Saturday. It’s awful. It’s a romantic comedy, so it’s predictable, but not just in the “Oh, I know how this is going to shake out before I enter the theater, but it should be mildly entertaining watching it unfold” way, but in the “Wow. They’re going to telegraph every joke. Every single one was mentioned in at least seven lines of dialogue before the actual joke is made” way, which made me want to kill myself slowly with knives.
I also watched two documentaries and another movie which I won’t mention (okay, it was 9 1/2 Weeks). One of the docs was about these three brothers and how they all came to use steroids at one point or another in their lives. It was made by the middle brother (attention whore) and his basic breakdown of the steroid situation that we’re in is that it is a consequence of being American, that we are a sold as Americans on an image of the ‘American Dream’ and winning and competition that is wholly dependent on the use of steroids.
Things I am now writing off as a consequence of being American:
1. The light in my fridge is out.
2. I ate half a bag of Doritos while watching the other documentary, which was about obesity.
3. I don’t think I have any clean socks.
4. My dad told me last week he wants to go see ‘New Moon’.
5. Ryan Seacrest.
Behold: the first time my bangs have looked halfway decent since I got them cut
I haven’t written anything for months, and I convinced myself it was because I didn’t have anything to say; that my writing is born, like so many of my brothers and sisters before me, out of angst and sadness (and, let’s be honest, drugs), and since my life was going pretty well, I couldn’t write. I convinced myself I wasn’t a writer. Maybe that’s true, that I’m not a writer.
Anyway.
I’m broke. Not filing for bankruptcy broke, not ‘living in a box and making friends with hookers in the Tenderloin’ broke, more like ‘hey, it’d probably be a good idea if you got a job on the weekend’ broke.
This is hard for me to face, since I feel like I’ve always been fairly frugal. I spend my money in hazy blurs, in weeklong benders of electronics and cupcakes and ironic t-shirts that I convince myself I deserve because I’m so frugal the rest of the time.
Which is a lie.
This is made even harder to write because I can’t do much about this state that I’m in other than to just stop spending because I have no bankable skills. I can edit video, but I don’t have a reel that I feel like I could show anyone. I could edit copy, I think, but how do you prove that to people?
I need to get out of here, because my roommate is throwing a party and that is the last thing that I want to participate in at this very moment. Tomorrow, I have to sit down with my finances and look myself in the eye and figure out the rest of my life.
I feel like I do this every six months.
