With a Sense of Poise and Rationality

Sunday, December 26, 2010 || 12:23 AM

Sick as a dog.

Sore throat, congested nasal canal, the works.

Listening to nothing but songs from the 50’s, I don’t quite understand why.

I think I blame Jules.

Glad to be home, Christmas was pleasant. The evening I got home, Kenzie kidnapped me and we baked ginger cookies, then I spent the night at her house and the day after we ran a bunch of errands and we ended up crashing this old people party, and I think we both fell in love with one of the ladies there.

Even she pointed out it was Jules when she reached her 60’s. We both agreed we want to be like her when we’re old ladies. None of the glamour loss, still vibrant, and waking up every morning asking ourselves ‘How much fun can I have today?’.

Oh, and the British accents, because the lady was British. We need the accents. Well, I need it more than Kenz does, given she doesn’t fail at it the way I do.

So I’m kind of no longer allowed to have any more existential crisis after meeting that wonderful lady.

Today my cousins arrived (I can never quite escape them, can I?) so we went to their condo to watch a movie while the adults caught up and dealt with the set of crisis going on due to overdue bills, then went to eat tacos in this delicious taco place.

I like being in my room again, and sleeping on my bed, and seeing my shelves filled with my books… though I miss having more people around even if it’s just in the background.

Being back home is triggering a lot of stuff with Jules & Richard (the story is set here, after all), so Kenz and I need to go exploring downtown and taking pictures so I won’t have to rely so much on memory when I go back to Guad and want to write about them.

Been reading books on escorting to get a better picture of Jules & Alice during her years in Seattle (just after Richard, right before Cass), and they’re interesting. Also helpful for my profession, but as always, anything I read is meant to fuel character development, with my potential profession only serving as the benefitting accident, or very well the excuse.

I kind of want to go blonde now, just for the heck of it. Except if I was going to go back to dying my hair on a regular basis, I’d go back to red…which is sort of what my hair has been trying to fade out of for the last year despite supposedly dying it back to brown. Not complaining about the color now though. I kind of like it.

Jules is putting me through a vanity regime ‘supposedly’ starting New Years, but I think we’re starting out tomorrow, if I’m going to be parading around half naked in a bikini on a regular basis until mid-Jan.

I’ll be sick for my birthday like last year.

Just my luck.

Oh well.

It’s 2am, and a new day— how much fun can I have today?

Sunday, December 12, 2010 || 12:26 AM

It’s pretty much the end of the graduation party, there’s no good music on, so I’m sitting at our table, with all the little couples doing what couples do, and neglecting those of us easy preys who do not want to get hit on, and simply converse among themselves, their little universes shut off to anyone else that might want to join.

I’m relatively blind, because contacts make my head hurt, and I get scolded every time I wear my glasses at a party to the point where I’m just traumatized, so I’m just sitting there, staring vaguely at the nothing, everything blurred, following a conversation in the back of my head, because Cass and Sebastian have been arguing all night long, and I need to pay attention to this, because I’m getting an insight to Sebastian not lying.

Very casually, this guy comments on how the music fails, and tries to start up conversation. I really don’t want to talk, because my attention is focused on Sebastian, but this guy hasn’t hit any triggers that allow me to be mean, so I oblige and say “Yeah, this music’s not my thing.”.

End of conversation, I think, as I just turn my head to look elsewhere, say the comment vaguely, but then he follows up with “What music do you usually dance to?”.

Here, things start to get tricky, because I’m very much aware that whenever I open my mouth, I come off like a pretentious bitch. Unless you’re from my little group of oddballs, in which the way I talk is somehow perfectly normal. So I consciously make a point to minimize and downplay everything. You know, pretend for five minutes I somehow fit in at that table.

I’ve had a bit too much to drink, but due to the previous meal, the high never hit me, so I’m safe in the lecturing department, and in the ‘very blunt and direct’ department. I’m also blind, so I can’t read the person too well, and I’m so tired and generally disinterested, that I don’t bother.

He talks about his band, how he’s a drummer, how he studied cinematography, but likes music better, he gets me talking about art, and how I’m too capricious to kill art by making it a job, so I pursue it as a hobby, whereas I don’t mind killing psych too much (even though I can no longer read a psych book for sheer pleasure), because in the end, after I’m done with school, I’ll be able to do whatever I want with it.

Somehow, he gets very set on talking about psych, and all that goes through my mind is ‘please, no, let’s change the subject, we just don’t want to go there’. So I really try to get on something lighter like TV shows, or something I actually have the option of not verbally analyzing, but after I’m done with the House M.D reference, he goes back to psych (and of course, I couldn’t distract him by getting into the subject of girls, because I’m trying to be normal here).

So he keeps questioning me, and I almost feel attacked, but I can’t really be bothered because I’m so tired, and Cass and Sebastian have been unfortunately tuned out, so I actually have to pay attention.

He questions how I can feel I have any authority telling someone what to do, when my life might not be stable, or due to my lack of experience, or because I’m so much younger than my patients.

I’ve already dealt with all those existential predicaments before, so I have no trouble answering, and again, all that’s going through my head is ‘for the love of God, let’s change the topic.’

So I try to change it again, talking about some movie, but he gets into the topic of love and relationships, and I just want to bash my head against the table, because it’s that subject matter specifically, where I come off as some cold-hearted, clinical bitch.

I make a point of downplaying my opinions, having a hard time doing so, when he’s talking about being in love, and I’m really trying not to be mean, and really overlooking the fact that this guy keeps making physical contact to establish empathy like touching my shoulder or my hand, and I have to remind myself “This is a friend of my cousin’s. You’re not allowed to be cruel, even though he’s invading your personal space, and you don’t even know his name”.

I drag the conversation back to something light, and I want to turn the focus on the guy, because I’m done feeling like I’m under interrogation, and of course, begin getting paranoid, and question the guy’s motives for wanting to hear me talk about something he doesn’t care, when I’m used to the focus always being on the guys and their achievements.

So I say to myself, ‘you know what, maybe he was just bored and just wanted to talk to someone. He looks like the type that likes interacting with people, and hell, there’s people like that all over the place who just want to talk and don’t want to hit on you.’

My architect cousin, who, for the first night has failed to do his job at keeping men away from me, and just sat there with his girlfriend, while this guy just talked to me for a long, long time, considering it was like 5am, said we had to leave, so we said our goodbyes to people.

Very unexpectedly, some guy gives me a very energetic goodbye, sarcastically commenting on my conversation with the guy who was talking to me, and I said something vague, and just left.

In the car, my designer cousin starts to comment on how I had 4 guys after me. This comes as both a surprise and a high degree of disbelief, because I didn’t catch on to anything, given of course, I was blind, and honestly speaking, my cousins always look a hundred times more attractive than I do, so yeah.

She says ‘yes, you should have seen this guy (my architect cousin’s girlfriend’s brother, who was the guitarist in the band with the guy who was talking to me), he wouldn’t stop saying how hot you were, and how pissed off he was his friend got to you first. They said they were sick to death of preppy girls, and you had this sort of ‘alternative intellectual’ vibe’

Right there I just burst out laughing, because I don’t understand how they interpreted a blue chic satin cocktail dress, black tights and stilettos to mean ‘alternative’. Or how my lack of glasses gave off the impression of being the intellectual type.

And in retrospect, I did catch on to a part in the conversation, where the guys where flipping each other off, which my communications cousin explained was due to the fact that she was making heart motions and pointing to the guy and myself, and just making fun of the guitarist talking to my other cousin.

Apparently my designer cousin (who is currently on the phone with a mutual friend, retelling the story) was annoyed by the guitarist, because he had his head incredibly up his ass (and he was drunk), and went all emotional sadist on him, going: ‘Honey, he’s not going to get her, and neither are you. You chose, probably the most challenging girl to lure in this whole party, because she doesn’t respond to cheap charm or petty conversation.’

Then she just killed his ego, because he kept talking about his band, and really was just a sadistic bitch, and I loved her for it, because at least one of us got to be mean.

Finally, she tells me that the guy who’d been talking to me had asked her ‘Hey, why is your cousin so serious’, which lucky enough for him, he didn’t ask me, because the sure-fire way to consent to my being mean, is to ask me ‘Why so serious?’, when there’s been no previous acquaintanceship established, or when it’s not meant as a Batman reference.

I end up saying something bitchy like “Because you don’t amuse me, and I like to be amused’, or I vaguely remember throwing some chips at a guy’s face after he asked my cousin that while I was standing right next to her.

So my cousin told him that I didn’t like the sort of music that was playing (none of us did), and that it seemed we had a lot in common (sarcastically, of course), and so the guy decided to go hit on me.

So he was hitting on me.

And I need to get off this Easton Ellis novels kick soon, because it gets me all paranoid when it comes to the way guys think (male characters are misogynists driven by infatuation, females are uncaring femme fatales)… and makes me generally cynical and apathetic when it comes to certain things.

Already finished ‘Rules of Attraction’ (favorite thus far) and ‘Imperial Bedrooms’. Currently on ‘Glamorama’. Missing ‘Less than Zero’, ‘American Psycho’, ‘Lunar Park’ and ‘The Informers’.

Only movie I haven’t watched is ‘The Informers’, so we’ll see how that one goes after it’s done loading.