In my down time.

How does your brain idle?

When I’m not focusing, my mind goes of on tangents. If something really awesome happened recently (usually sex) I go back and replay it over and over again; the story slowly changes from the truth, adding in things I wish had happened and taking out things I didn’t like.

I replay conversations, including the witty responses I thought of three hours later. I make up conversations, almost like I’m on a talk show but with my friends working as the interviewers. I tell stories about myself, what I am doing, my thoughts, in great detail.

I pretend other people can see through my eyes, and there are very specific rules about this. It’s usually a friend but sometimes it’s just a stranger. I have lengthy debate about whether these theoretical people could just see through my eyes or engage my other senses as well. I usually determine they can hear and see, but nothing else. They have to leave when I go to the bathroom. This kind of creepily sounds like schizophrenia, but really it’s just my brain’s “idle” mode. Whenever I’m sitting doing nothing or driving home I blink and suddenly (insert person here) is in my head. And they don’t know whose head they are in, so I have to give them clues, like looking in a mirror or seeing signs that say “Wichita” or “Kansas.”

The working web.

Work makes me twitchy.

I run out of Internet to surf. I run out of email to write, Facebook to read.

After I’ve gone through the RSS feeds in the morning, checked my Gmail and Facebook and skimmed the top stories on Reddit it’s barely 9:00 and I still have seven hours to fill. Sometimes I have work, which I love, I really do. But lately we’ve been dead and my day ends as quickly as it begins.

By noon my foot is tapping, waiting for an email or Facebook message or anything to entertain myself. Click. No new Gmail. Click. No response from Austin. Click. Nothing on Facebook. Click. No new RSS feeds to read, Gawker or Jezebel or BBC or anything. Click. Nothing new on Reddit. Click. No new job-related work. Repeat.

By the time I get home I’ve spent eight hours online, far more than I spend most days as a whole. I bought a book yesterday about advanced webpage creation — I used to be hardcore into web design, figured if I was wasting time I may as well get back into that. I go the Y, but that doesn’t take up hours of time. It could, but I don’t have the energy for that.

I’m too tired to go out but I’m too bored to use the internet but I’m too tired to do anything else. It’s a shitty cycle.

Fuck you, extra X chromosome.

Girls are funny.

I’m sure some fault is mine, because it would be selfish to claim absolutely no responsibility for a grudge. But it’s hard to right a wrong when I have no idea what I did. It keeps me up at night wondering. When I first met her I actually thought she seemed kind of fun, you know — someone I could be friends with, and freshmen in college are eager for any close friends they can find.

If I think about it I can kind of understand why. Maybe I took something she considered “hers,” but if that’s the case that’s a gross overstatement of property rights. We throw around punches when it comes to guys but the golden rule always seems to be if you never had any stake in the situation, you don’t get the right to hold a permanent grudge.

And when I truly, honestly do my best to make peace with someone, to be friendly and all I get is ridiculous rejection thrown in my face, I lose my patience and sympathy. Mentally sorting through the cavalcade of absolutely ridiculous and offensive comments actually hurts.

There’s just no way for someone who has never stood in the pathway of the wrath of female-to-female ire to understand how cutting and painful it can be. When I do literally everything I can to mend a situation short of sitting down and talking (which is quite understandably not an option) and yet I receive nothing in return but vengeful glares and bitchy bitchy comments, it’s like a fucking stab in the back.

Honestly I just don’t know what to do, I don’t know how to handle myself next year. It’s like trying to maintain a friendship with Austin and Krista when Elliot hated me — it wasn’t possible. It was them choosing between the two of us, and I felt awful every time. Whatever. It’s not me causing these problems. I have caused problems, but in complete honesty I have done nothing to inspire this fucking intense level of hatred. Any negative sentiments I have ever expressed came later. I’m tired of this, because it’s not high school anymore.

And now I have to put on a happy face and pretend I’m totally happy with everything. Because “it’s not a big deal.” Uh, yes, it is. I’ve been through this before.

I don’t want to force someone to choose between me and anyone else, but I’m backed into this corner where, if shit doesn’t change, I’ll probably lose a friend. Because it’s back to the stupid fucking Elliot theorem, whereby the other person’s stupid rules (“I will not hang out with you if Jamie is there”) or just fake friendliness causes this perpetual vacuum where, because they’re so fucking demanding, they get whatever they want and just like last time, I lose friends.

This is such a fucking carbon copy of junior year and it’s ridiculous. Ideally, everyone could hang out with everyone and it would be all okay but at every party or social situation they’re sitting in a corner, moody and pissed, mad that they don’t have everyone’s full attention. Acting like a fucking three-year-old.

I just don’t know what to do because either I take no action, ignore it, and inevitably lose a friend or become much less of friends; or, conversely, I take action and become the villain. There’s no middle ground and this is driving me fucking crazy and I don’t know what the hell to do. Fuck.

A history of my life.

I would probably be a much better person if I could quit AIM and Facebook.

Lots of good reasons for both. AIM: I naturally overanalyze. A lot. I am fully aware of this. I do my best to keep it contained, but sometimes it slips out, even if no one else would know (although a lot of the time, other people do know). But AIM brings out the absolute worst in my overanalytic personality. Something about being able to theoretically talk to anyone online if you wanted to, or the complete and utter lack of sarcasm detectors.

I’m the kind of person who likes to be sure my friends haven’t decided they hate me or something (silly, I know, but whatever) and AIM offers no such clues. It’s a land of no sarcasm and no indicators and blocking and I hate it. But not being able to chat with my friends would be shit, and I can’t guarantee they’d call or whatever. It’s all a silly shitty web.

As for Facebook, it’s controlled by the government and is taking over my life and I hate it. Honestly, I wish my life wasn’t dictated by electronic communications. I would way rather talk to people over the phone and letters and yes I want real letters.

Part of this is centered in this constant and slightly sad need for affirmation.

I also just don’t have the balls to delete my Facebook.

My new haircut.

My hair is always blonde in bad dreams.

No matter how hard I try to dye it, highlights slowly emerge from beneath the surface, shining through my valiant efforts at hair dye.

Naturally my hair is brown, and brown dye should always cover up blonde. Frankly, I don’t understand why my hair won’t let one past mistake go. I like my brown hair.

Inevitably I will turn towards the mirror in a tense dream to find streaks of blonde running through my hair. In a way it cements the utter shittiness of the dream — like, all this shit is happening to you and you can’t even get your hair to stay one color.

Yesterday I woke up, after spending two days in the NYC sun, to find the blonde streaks once again reemerging. Let fucking go, hair. It can’t just be the sun dying it, because I’ve never had this problem in the past. I always wanted blonde hair, or at least (what I thought were) beautiful highlights, but now I’m over it. Too bad my hair isn’t.

The gym closes in two hours. I’m still in vacation mode. Usually I go 60 minutes of cardio, but I need to add in weights, so I’m thinking of changing it to 45 minutes of cardio plus weights. For some reason, I’m terrified I’ll start gaining exorbitant amounts of weight because I’m dropping 15 minutes of the elliptical off the table. I walked something like 7 miles in NY alone, plus a shit ton in D.C. and around a mall in NJ for a few hours… so I’d like to pretend that was my workout for the rest of the week.

But uhhhh it’s not, because theoretically I’d like to not be chubbs upon the return to NU in September.

I’ve never been a numbers person.

The average person has ten sexual partners in their lifetime.

I can picture looking at this from two angles — “Shit, my clock is ticking down,” or my preferred angle: who the fuck am I?

The number goes up for those who live in metropolitan areas, like in the heart of NYC or Chicago or LA. Or perhaps it goes down for those who don’t. I can’t remember, and I can’t find the statistics, which probably makes my analysis totally sound.

I can’t figure out if my view on relationships slash sexual interactions is fucked up or if I’m totally normal and everyone else is just better at hiding it. It’s not like I want to plop down in a white picket fence with a husband, 2.5 kids and a golden retriever six months after graduation; I’d say I have a fairly healthy sense of independence.

But I just can’t relive the first months of freshman year.

At the beginning of the summer, most of my friends were espousing the wondrous virtues that would return to them the second they stepped foot on campus September 16/17/18. Copious amounts of liquor. Horny freshmen girls who had never seen a city without their parents. Total and utter freedom.

Maybe I got my urge to party out of the way freshman year; I imagine everyone ultimately wants to spend a certain amount getting slobbering drunk and hooking up with strangers. And maybe my clock just ran out. So while I’m excited to see everyone upon the return to campus, I’m not excited for the liquor, the random hookups, the collegiate lifestyle.

I’m not ready to grow up, settle down, but I wish everyone didn’t have to be so fucking careless.

I feel like I’m always stuck in this permanent state of social retardation, where I’m either two years behind my peers or three years ahead. In elementary school I remember reading jokes and then refraining from retelling them because “my friends wouldn’t understand.” Now, sometimes I want to sit down and talk and just be fucking totally serious for once, but I can’t because why dampen the mood?

But it’s all me, all some misguided immaturity.

Seriously, I just want something I want for once, some goddamn stability and security, even if its just for a while. Unfortunately I crave this most at college, where not only am I changing but everyone around me is grasping out for whatever threads they can hold onto — threads that will ultimately break, fall apart, and we’ll all start the whole fucking process again.

I don’t want ten sexual partners. The thought of being able to count the people I have had sex with on two hands makes me sick. Somewhere people can do this while totally detaching from any emotional connection and I’m fucking jealous, but I can’t do this over and over and over and over.

Maybe fucking around too much in high school lead me here; I’ve exhausted the “wild child” inside and it’s left me with motion sickness when everyone else is just getting on the Tilt-O-Whirl. I just want to try something real, just to see if I’d be good at it.

Hypocrisy, revised.

I find myself spending a lot of time wishing.

Wishing I could explain. Wishing I could elaborate. Wishing you could understand. Wishing, wishing.

Wishing never gets me anywhere. I can never push past the theoretical barriers in my mind. Nothing gets done. Nothing gets said. And when it comes down to it I stammer, lost, forcing myself to submit to abysmal exchanges and weak explanations, hoping that my cyclical clarifications will cement themselves somehow.

But how can my embarrassingly convoluted excuses make any dent, encourage any change? Because I do want change, and I’m not always satisfied with situations when I say I am, but something blocks me from pushing for what I want. Instead I acquiesce to what they want, and to an extent that’s understandable: I’m happy when they’re happy. I don’t want to push for things that would make anyone else unhappy, because I often find it easier to sacrifice what I want for the sake of my relationship.

I’m not acting the martyr; it’s kind of a weakness.

But anyway, on to happier things: I can write. I mean, yes, I can write novels and plays (although I’ll leave any discussion of actual talent up to outsiders), but taking pen to paper — or in this case, fingers to keyboard — and scribbling down my thoughts actually makes progress in my perpetual muteness. Even if I can’t quite explain face-to-face I can write something down later that explains exactly what I’m trying to say.

I say I hate overshares, people who write down every thought they have and event they attend in a blog for the sake of popularity, or even just for the hell of it. And technically I do, I hate the Lena Chen, Julia Allison, Emily Gould attention-grabbing nonsense, where every post is an opportunity to inform your readers exactly how great you are.

And part of that appeals to me. I said in an email to Matt recently, “or maybe i just secretly want to have some website i update where people wonder ‘who runs that website??’” The anonymity and mystery attracts me. In theory I’d like to write about sex, events, happenings, relationships — on a personal level — because my thoughts are always swirling around ready to be rearranged on the page. I want the attention that the internet can bring.

Sometimes I write in a flesh-and-blood journal, and that helps me get to the bottom of what I’m thinking, what I’m feeling. But writing is hard — not just physically, but emotionally. Erasing the weight on my shoulders in my spiral-bound flowered notebook takes too much effort and exertion. Spilling out my thoughts electronically comes easier.

Two objections come to mind with the oversharing NYC generation. (One), What makes their life interesting? Honestly, nothing is special about Julia Allison except she has decided to share her life in an intriguing, textual way. Their activities are no more worth reading than anyone else’s, but they’ve decided to put theirs online and aren’t terrible writers. And (Two), How could I ever justify sharing personal details about my friends and acquaintances online? I feel weird enough putting initials after quotes; how could I tell stories about my friends for the world to read, literally? Here is where I put my foot down in the oversharing world. Because I could be like the Gawker crowd, sharing every detail about my sex life, my friendships, my emotions, and maybe even in an anonymous capacity. Maybe no one would read it, but I would never be able to look my friends in the face after spilling their secrets alongside mine.

So I complain that blogs are silly, and I look back on my Xanga and laugh, but sometimes I feel I need someplace — someplace online, someplace available — to let it all fly out. I try to modulate myself, keeping the emotions and irregularity hidden, but sometimes my brain needs a place to release the overflow. It’s those late nights in the shower when my brain begins writing while I wash my hair, and words that I wish I could say come floating to the surface… that’s when I need somewhere public.

There’s something about other people being able to read my thoughts that affirms me, and whether or not it’s pathetic, sometimes I find it necessary.