As always, you’ve got to read those three posts from bottom to top, or else you see me come to some strange irrelevant conclusion before i take all the proper steps to make it both strange and irrelevant.
by krisis
Archives for October 2001
Scattered. Last night was a weird scattered night because i went from being virtually invisible on Friday night to being central, and it was a wholly different feeling than i usually have and i think that’s why i had a good time. I went shopping for supplies, i ran out to make sure we had supplementary drinks, i got everyone together at the party for a little group chat, and i suddenly knew all kinds of party things i had only ever barely observed when it came down to it. At the point in the party where i am usually miserable and ready to implode i was serene and just wanted to stop pounding at my brain with anything i could get my hands on and head home. And, so, we did.
It was so very different… like the difference between being a ghostly cipher of a person who can barely make his presence felt as a tiny whispering breeze and a real tangible thing that can touch and feel and manipulate anything i can get my hands on. I had an effect on events. I am inextricably woven into the story. I am a supporting character that is so regular that i appear in the opening credits.
I should be on the credits. After all, it is my show.
Scattered scattered scattered.
Yesterday was all about scattering myself like a dandelion in the wind to see where i wound up. I didn’t like many of the places, and so i kept scattering again and again until i had nothing left but sleep, and so that’s where i finally wound up.
Some things amaze me. There was a girl flirting with me, and she seemed nice enough but to me she was very unattractive. She was thin, and pretty, and talkative, and everything — but she absolutely didn’t mean anything to me at all. She took a hold of my necklace and asked me if i knew how to hold the reigns of a horse and i found my body suddenly sliding out from under me and two minutes later i was locked in a bathroom hiding.
The funny thing is, other guys at the party were eager to flirt with her… in fact, nearly all of them were, considering that she was blonde and single. I just couldn’t understand it; am i broken somehow, that i’m a boy yet i don’t immediately want to even so much as kiss someone if i’m not implicitly interested in them? Am i supposed to want to kiss just for the sake of kissing, and to see where it leads?
Do you know that some boys really still tally up their sexual partners like proverbial notches on a bed-frame? I always assumed that teevee-bred frat-boys and other such miscreants did it all of the time, but it’s a strange otherworldly feeling to be in a room full of boys who are having that conversation where i keep thinking… why would i want to give some of myself to so many different people? I can’t even begin to talk about the whole ordeal because it wholly involved the private-me and not the internet-me, but what i can say is that there is someone who i used to quite like as a person to talk to who i now can’t even look at because he disgusts me on such an inherent level that my stomach is currently churning. It’s not just sex… it’s disregard for self-worth. And personal safety.
In the same way that i never thought of my own friends as those sorts of boys, i never saw the Players’ dating habits as indicative of college as a whole. We are thespians, after all. However, suddenly there are all of these new girls floating around and i am old enough that i am separate from them at the parties we attend, and they make me wonder. Are they flirting with nearly everyone because they like the sudden power they have over men? Do they have their own notches and bedposts and bragging conversations that i am blissfully unaware of? Or, are they somehow hypnotized by the plain old bunch of us just because we’re older and have apartments and wet-bars and roles in plays?
I wonder if i acted anything like they do when i first got here… i always thought i had found my real friends for the first time in my life, but maybe it was just that i had finally found a social structure that i could weave my way into. Maybe for me it wasn’t the beer and the pot and the escape from the dormitories so much as the feelings that i was braiding myself into a continuing history that had existed before me and would go on without me, and that forever-after a smattering of those rambling tales of wild weekend nights would inevitably include me.
I am so scattered right now, but i’m trying to reel some of it in through writing it down, so bare with me.
Today when i finally opened my eyes my sloping ceiling was hanging right above me and everything was so fuzzy that it seemed like endless white feathers strung to make a giant boa suspended as a giant web — I was trapped like a fly in fuzz.
Two little girls just ran through the quiet lounge reading from tiny business cards that were really invitations, and they decided that they couldn’t attend because the date was this past Thursday. They looked like they could’ve only been five or six but they read out loud like nine or ten year olds would, so my perspective is wholly confused. We just had an informal reading of our newly picked Winter play, and i am torn between wanting to play the angsty 15-year-old who curses and whines in every line, or the Steve Buscemi-like spinster who’s into conspiracy theories and masturbation. Last of the Formicans reads like Cocoon siphoned through one of the zany episodes of X-Files and plunked down into an adjacent suburb of Roseanne. The funny thing is, i don’t know which of the two characters i want to be, let alone who i identify with. The 15-year-old hates everyone and everything he’s been shoved into but hasn’t got any reason for it, but the older man has constructed his own web of feathery explanation that greets him every morning when he wakes up.
Of course, i burned a ton of theatrical bridges this term, but throughout it all i maintained that i’m in it not for the acting but for the characters. I’ve never wanted to be in a play… usually i just sortof blunder into a fun role. This time, i think i’ll be crushed if i don’t get what i want, and i don’t know if i can do anything about it…
So, the party was bland. It’s funny… not doing the play and not being the biggest social butterfly in the world means that none of these crazy new freshmen have the slightest idea of who i am. I introduced myself to one of the major people from the play and she just tilted her head to the side and oozed “Well, it’s very nice to meet you Peter.” In a way it’s all rather amusing, because no one has any context for me, but in an entirely separate way it’s incredibly depressing because everyone is so busy fawning over their usual focuses and on the muscular and busty new players that i am just wallpaper. Flavor. Amusing. It’s not as though i need to be a center of attention, i just prefer not to be invisible.
Are you starting to get the sense that i don’t like parties very much? Good, cause i’ll be on my way out to another one in about an hour. I actually have high hopes for tonight’s soiree… Ross and I sped out of our crew call in the shop to spend more money on liquor than i did on my guitar, and i’ve been drunk once already so far today (more than i can say for last night), and the shindig tonight is a mostly upperclassmen invite-only affair staffed with no beer (well, a little) and a Daylight Saving’s power-hour. Yeah. Should be fun.