Scattered scattered scattered.
Yesterday was all about scattering myself like a dandelion in the wind to see where i wound up. I didn’t like many of the places, and so i kept scattering again and again until i had nothing left but sleep, and so that’s where i finally wound up.
Some things amaze me. There was a girl flirting with me, and she seemed nice enough but to me she was very unattractive. She was thin, and pretty, and talkative, and everything — but she absolutely didn’t mean anything to me at all. She took a hold of my necklace and asked me if i knew how to hold the reigns of a horse and i found my body suddenly sliding out from under me and two minutes later i was locked in a bathroom hiding.
The funny thing is, other guys at the party were eager to flirt with her… in fact, nearly all of them were, considering that she was blonde and single. I just couldn’t understand it; am i broken somehow, that i’m a boy yet i don’t immediately want to even so much as kiss someone if i’m not implicitly interested in them? Am i supposed to want to kiss just for the sake of kissing, and to see where it leads?
Do you know that some boys really still tally up their sexual partners like proverbial notches on a bed-frame? I always assumed that teevee-bred frat-boys and other such miscreants did it all of the time, but it’s a strange otherworldly feeling to be in a room full of boys who are having that conversation where i keep thinking… why would i want to give some of myself to so many different people? I can’t even begin to talk about the whole ordeal because it wholly involved the private-me and not the internet-me, but what i can say is that there is someone who i used to quite like as a person to talk to who i now can’t even look at because he disgusts me on such an inherent level that my stomach is currently churning. It’s not just sex… it’s disregard for self-worth. And personal safety.
In the same way that i never thought of my own friends as those sorts of boys, i never saw the Players’ dating habits as indicative of college as a whole. We are thespians, after all. However, suddenly there are all of these new girls floating around and i am old enough that i am separate from them at the parties we attend, and they make me wonder. Are they flirting with nearly everyone because they like the sudden power they have over men? Do they have their own notches and bedposts and bragging conversations that i am blissfully unaware of? Or, are they somehow hypnotized by the plain old bunch of us just because we’re older and have apartments and wet-bars and roles in plays?
I wonder if i acted anything like they do when i first got here… i always thought i had found my real friends for the first time in my life, but maybe it was just that i had finally found a social structure that i could weave my way into. Maybe for me it wasn’t the beer and the pot and the escape from the dormitories so much as the feelings that i was braiding myself into a continuing history that had existed before me and would go on without me, and that forever-after a smattering of those rambling tales of wild weekend nights would inevitably include me.