There are only a handful of board games that i’ve ever played with more than two players. In fact, of all the games that one might find in your neighborhood toy store, there are a relative few that i played before the age of 18. My mother could only be coaxed into a one on one deathmatch of Monopoly every so often, after all, and there were only so many games a boy could have with only his mother and his GI Joes to play them with.
I don’t know how i feel about other people. I spent so long only having to worry about making myself happy that i am equally torn between continuing the behavior or trying to do the same for everyone else i know. I never learned how to make some of the people happy some of the time, or to be happy with some of the people some of the time. So, now that i have people in my life, people that i see every day when i get to work or every night before bed, i have trouble deciding who comes first: me or them.
Obviously it’s not as black and white as that, and if we were to all follow the golden rule it wouldn’t matter anyway, right? Still, there are some weeks in which i will bend myself in any direction to please someone else, and days like today where i’d rather sleep than talk to anyone in a mile radius.
I’m just not very tired.
selfy-stuff
After much deliberation i have decided that i can only pull this off because i am so incredibly sexy.
I’ll share some of my other sleep-deprived conclusions with you later this week.
The way things were headed i seemed due for either a complete mental breakdown or halfway shaved head. And, having just had a complete mental breakdown two weeks ago, i decided that looking like half-hearted punk rocker was better than lying in the middle of my curled up floor sobbing and speaking gibberish.
Subtract half an hour. I was sitting on the stairs averting my eyes from the television because Nicodemus has always scared me. As her hair fluttered down to a white trash bag spread out on the linoleum one razor-sized strip at a time Kate said that none of us had ever seen her natural hair color before. Grinning, she stood up and and walked out of the too fluorescent bathroom as Ross turned to me and asked if we were just trimming up the back.
Add twenty minutes, and i was attacking it with scissors while he shaved off the back with a half-inch blade, pulling at my thick hair so hard that i was crying. Tears carried shards of hair down my face like tiny rivers as we all laughed out loud. I wish that i could blame our hysterical laughter on being drunk or stoned, but we had all stopped drinking hours beforehand. They were laughing heartily, rolling around on the floor outside the bathroom, and i was laughing at myself.
Subtract fifteen minutes. They voted five to one for my haircut, but add twenty-five to that and they all drifted away. Bored with me, though i played the comedian as i tried to get Ross to pay attention to how short my hair should be. Elise won’t like this, i said, and they all laughed at my antics as i complained about the hair that was in my eyes and how much it all hurt. She won’t like, i thought, because i’ll hate it. I will never be able to convince her.
Plus thirty minutes. Standing in front of the mirror with the clippers wielded like a dagger, and it was almost perfect. Ross had left, Kate was in the shower. The top was excellent, the back was a little shaggy, but the sides were all wrong. They needed to blend from the top, and loop around my ears. The left side slowly conformed to my wishes, but on the right i came too close in front of my ear and was left with a tiny bald spot when i pulled away. It just won’t do, i thought.
They had joked earlier about giving me a mohawk.
Six months ago today was the third night Elise and i slept beside each other in the same bed. Six months before that i was packing up what there was of my life and wondering if it meant anything at all. Six months before that i was already saying what i refused to let myself figure out. And i don’t remember what happened six months before that, other than that it was a week before i started using blogger.
After Ross left, Kate wanted a shower, Lindsay wanted me to sweep up the hair in the bathroom, and Erika wanted to go to sleep. I just wanted my curls back, to save them for winter when i can be pretty again, and now i am just teary and wide awake waiting for the train to take me away from here in the morning.
I will not forget this feeling.
Well, it’s not quite a mohawk, but the clippers are still in the bathroom.
Everybody has something that makes them feel real. Or, realer, if you already believe in yourself. Attention and applause generally fit the bill in the circles i move in, but sometimes the thing you really need is a little more tangible. Money. A nice place to live. Gourmet food.
Despite my obvious predilection for both applause and attention, there are some other things that i require to feel as though i am an actual and worthwhile corporeal entity that is actually meant to take up space and breath. Or something like that. Things that make me feel as though things are going well and i really ought not to go frolic in traffic anytime soon.
One of those things, for those of you who don’t pay much attention, is music. Whether i’m listening to it, making it, or just hearing it in my head, my life feels like nebulous between station static without a soundtrack to tune in on. I also need something to do … doing nothing or participating in something passively tends to make me stir crazy in a very short amount of time. Thus my general distaste for television, past the obvious Friends fixation and American Idol addiction. The list goes on and on, with varying assignations of importance, down to the little things: Jeans that make my ass look good, for example.
There was one thing that was missing from the assemblage that makes up the difference between my current glib happiness and the droll existence i lived late last year; one especially tangible item that my life seemed to beg, nay, yearn for. I was certain that having it would make me happier and increase my quality of life.
Elise bought me the blender about two weeks ago.
For two weeks it just sat on my kitchen shelf, looming like a Northern Star over my blended-drink-less life. It was an invitation to smoothies and daiquiris, health shakes and margaritas … in effect, an invitation to increase my happiness and well-being in the area of semi-liquids. And it was still snuggly nestled in its cradle of Styrofoam and cardboard … until Tuesday night. That night i gathered girlfriends, roommates, and our general partner-in-crime SL and her beau. All of us were ostensibly assembled to watch the aforementioned American Idol program, but we had the secondary purpose of breaking in my blender with a jumbo-sized TGI Friday‘s premixed Mudslide. And break we did.
Three days later, and i am noticeable a more chipper person than i was before i slit the tape on the top of the blender-box open. It isn’t that having a blender is about getting really sloshed, though – as we found out yesterday – getting a few drinks into me makes mopping the kitchen a lot more fun. It’s just one of those appliances i’ve always felt as though a real person might own. I mean, how can you be real without the capability to make milkshakes? Eventually i’ll need an entire kitchen full of widgets and whatsits to make me happy, but for now i’m happy to have a ten-speed jumbo-pitchered blender to brighten my days.
Anyway, point being, i have moved on step closer to my materialistic and self-centered version of Nirvana. Now all i need is a gold record and abs of steel.
What about you?