I Am Actually A Girl.

I saw a friend of mine from back home last night. He was in Chicago with his rugby team and had a night to hang out, so he shot me an e-mail saying he wanted to meet up. This e-mail excitedly began by referring to me as "jaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!!!" (I may not have appropiated the correct amount of a's or !'s, but I believe you understand the general idea here). Now, the traditional spelling of my nam contains only one A, and the sheer magnitude of A's led me to believe this was no accident. This greeting expressed an excitement to see me, as though I were some kind of crazy party animal who simply exudes raucus good times.

Well, that certainly wasn't so. We met last night and did nothing. My usual Friday night, only this time I had a spectator to see just how pathetic my life is. We walked around downtown and ran into some interesting fellows on the train and street, who really only furthered to prove just how uninteresting I am. My friend is here from back home, haven't seen each other in a while, he's all excited to see me, and I can't deliver. I have nothing. My conversation is weak, with no stories of recent interesting things that happened to me. "I went to a concert." "I walked by the lake." "Say, did you happen to see that episode of SVU?" Whoop-dee-shit. We met up with my roommate later, who had a more boisterous conversation, and though they also talked about nothing in particular, it was clear that my friend preferred his snippet of talking better than mine.

One of my main goals in life is to keep down my depression. Not to supress it into the back of my mind, but simply to not let it show so it doesn't bring down other people. They don't need that shit, and I don't want to put it upon them. It makes for awkward situations and boring evenings. I don't really have anything worthy of being sad over anyway; turn on the news and immedietly you see someone in a worse situation than yours. I'm lame when I'm sad. No one wants to hang out with Grumps McDougle. No one wants to party in a corner, listening to Downward Spiral and conversing about how God hates humans over a snifter of peach Crystal Light. I am lame, deep down, but my goal is to make it seem less obvious so that those who sometimes are around me don't get circled into my rodeo.

I tend to feel like everyone in the world is having more fun than I am. I hear all these stories while eavedropping of "I was so wasted" or "That chick was so hot", etc. And while I truly want nothing to do with these people nor their actions, I feel like despite their annoying attributes they're having a better time than me. You hear all this stuff about one-night stands and drugs and illegal activity, and even if the moral of their story is that immediate pleasure does not make up for the consequences, at least they had that immediate pleasure. What do I got? I read an article about a man who was a heroin junkie. It read like basically every other "I did drugs and live to tell you about it!" story, one of those "Don't do what I do, kids" sort of exposes. But as I'm reading it, I notice the aftermath, the consequences, of the heroin use took about one or two paragraphs to relay, whereas the "Everything feels right with the world!" segment lasted essentially the rest of the article. So you hit rock bottom and fell to the kitchen floor wiped out on H. That sounds more entertaining than pacing the floor of your apartment pretneding like you're looking for something, then sitting back down when you pretend like you couldn't find it. Most anti-drug stories essentially are saying you shouldn't do drugs because I did them and look what happened to me. Yeah, look what happened to you. You're the editor of a major magazine, you have written many books and pieces for major publications, and you'll always have a story to write about. If you had taken your own advice from the start, chances are you'd be pulling moderate grades at some university and playing chess with the computer on Saturday nights. You'd be where I am now.

Satisfaction of life is based highly on stories. If you have something to say at the end of the day, you've done good. You can have an "Oh my God, you would not believe what happened to me..." lined up in case a friend comes to visit. I feel like I'm not really depressed even, I'm at a neutral state. If there were something horrible going on in my life, I'd be worse off than I am now and actually be able to pinpoint a reason why. If something great were happening, I'd be happy as a clam and be able to enjoy life. As it stands, I have neither, and thus am simply malaise. Bored. Down. I'm feeling like I need something drastic in my life, good or bad, in order to shock treament myself out of this funk. But, as is the nature of a funk, the funk itself prevents me from getting out of it.

I had the worst headache I can remember last night. I had it basically the whole time my friend was here, but it really started to kill me as I went to sleep. It was the most painful experience of recent memory. So here I am, curled up into bed, head pounding at an alarming rate, people punding the floors moving in upstairs, tears streaming down my face, thinking about how pathetic I am. It's just like the two paragraphs of rock bottom in a drug tale, but without even the enjoyment of being on the drugs.

Such is life, I suppose.