My buddy list has dwindled---my steadily decreasing appearances online are mirrored by those of my friends. In fact, i actually wonder how many people are still reading this. I can't pretend to myself that they are, but everyone needs an outlet and I can't always carry a blank book with myself all the time (I try, but it gets inconvenience and muses make the most unexpected and awkward appearances).

It's okay. at this point, my life has become about as interesting as a defunct petri dish. I have little to agonize over or be dramatic about, so as a result I've been bunking up all kinds of little tragedies here there and everywhere.

I feel funny---I feel disconnected and strange and out of place, as if I've been at a party too long and now it's only the exclusive circle of friends, the circle to which I don't belong, and everyone's glancing at me when I'm not really paying attention and obviously they're ready to do their habitual thing (whatever it is) and I'm hindering them, but either I want desperately to stay and to fit or else I just don't know how to gracefully make my exit. I don't know what I'm doing anymore. I don't even think I THINK anymore. My brain makes up for it by going into overdrive on pointless things, or dangerous things that shouldn't be overanalyzed (romantic relationships, for example...where are all my invaluable guy friends who know how to cut away at my feminine projections and give me the news straight? Did i imagine these people?). I'm clinging desperately to Ani DiFranco (for which I get inordinately made fun of, and have accepted that just about ALL my friends think I have doofy taste in music. Which is fine, because I like some of the stuff they listen to, so I prefer to think of myself as more open-minded) in the hopes that, just as she reinvigorated me after my last break up---at least, she and a LOT of booze. A LOT---she might remind me why I'm such an advocate of being single.

I don't know why I've been such a mess of late. I'm upset over the most mundane things. I think one of the biggest problems is my lack of perspective, and my lack of people around who are able to tell me that I lack perspective. I need that kind of thing. I need to be told I'm a complete screwup, or that I'm wasting my time. Yes, I'll try to justify it and yes I'll get resentful, but I'll also start to work on it.

that's the funny thing about my opening line. I've dwindled into the abstract which can still be encapsulated by the "buddy list" metaphor (I think this sort of thing gradually becomes second nature to lit majors. We're so inundated with insidious and clandestine connections between themes that it's simply subconscious to slip into those themes). But here I am: My good friends are far away and the lines between us grow thinner and thinner---the people I thought I connected to the most have suddenly grown distant, and those with whom I almost actively don't want to connect are the ones most present in my life---it's the same way with buddy lists. Lately, you get online and there's never anyone you want to talk to, just the same sorry people who either leave their computer on all the time and aren't really around, or have nothing better to do with their lives, or you just don't have anything to say to. I'm not saying this to offend anyone like this, some people have different reactions to the buddy list phenomenon. But lately I don't even see people I have much in common with anymore. Or the conversation will be started and will abort due lack of interest or distraction or whatever. But these same people, with whom you cannot talk and have nothing to share with, are the only ones up on your screen, day after day after day. You waste time, money and brain cells by talking to them, the conversations you have aren't pro-active for either of you, and you're both stuck in the inertia of having nothing to say to each other but yet being so fundamentally unable to get offline, desperate to see if someone else good will get on, that you sit and talk, with increasingly lengthening intervals, about nothing, pure nothingness.

Like I was in this bar the other day. And while I hate for everyone to get the impression that I spend most of my time in bars (Because I don't, not since I finished school) there's nothing else to talk about in my life---not work, and certainly not home---so bars it is. I was with some friends of mine, with whom I have achieved what I feel to be the pinnacle of our relationships, our existences together. The time has come, I frequently think to myself, but usually only when sober. So we're having a good time...the first hour or so. Eventually we've said all we can say to one another, and now we're sitting around, swigging our drinks aimlessly (cause even if we get drunk, what's the point?) all of us resenting the fact that not a single person, male or female, has come to talk to us, and there's nothing to do, and no one's dancing....

...so it was perspective time---I step away, start talking to someone else, and look back at our table. We looked pathetic. We sat there with perpetually bored and hopeless and tired looks on our faces, dolled up as we were, and seemed completely unapproachable. I'm not saying that we are entirely to blame for our loneliness, but we certainly could have looked a little more friendly. And I thought to myself: This is our approach to life. To be bored but by our own hand, to be hopeless and lonely but because we won't make the effort to find someone, then try to blame the rest of the world for being snobbish. I climbed out of my dark and depressing phase when I was in high school. I hated it, and I'm not sliding back in. So why I am still with people whose residence seems to be the Pits of Despair?


Sans albino, of course.