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Birthday: 4/22/1988
Gender: Female
Interests: Flipping out, drinking coffee, becoming a beach bum, stealing sandwiches from little kids, strange words, surviving calculus.
Expertise: Coffee, tennis, picking fights, doing laundry, reading obscure books that randomly show up in AP English, sounding authoritative on stuff about which I know absolutely nothing, making up answers, doing strange dances in my kitchen, Brit coms, multi-tasking, being grumpy, being bouncy, walking dogs, being the last to know anything, getting called down to the counselor's office during tests, buying shoes, being productive without actually doing anything, getting myself in too deep, curling up by fires, singing songs in airports, skiing, getting sunburnt, being indecisive, being an open book, baking brownies at three in the morning, wearing hats, breathing...sometimes.
Occupation: Student
Industry: Entertainment
Message: message me
AIM:  headlinenews22
Member Since:
3/4/2005
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| I have very low blood pressure for someone who should be perpetually in a state of cardiac arrest.
Three days...
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| Of course, it's been a while, but there you go...
"...We understood each other on levels of madness..." -Jack Kerouac
I find the idea of understanding someone else to be terribly interesting and a little bit terrifying. While I generally comprehend what is meant when someone says "understand," it always raises in my mind the question of whether or not I do understand someone in a deeper sense of the word or whether, perhaps, I am merely tracing my own motives and post experiences onto them. I find myself believing the latter to be true.
My most recent thoughts on this dilemma came from reading a note on a hallmate's white board. It said something about hating Wednesday labs and then had something to do with asking us on the hall to please not make "yo mamma" jokes. Of course, the next day, someone had written one of these jokes that was in singularly bad form. Later in the morning, this girl wrote a new message, saying that her own mother had died when she was 13 and that she thought of these jokes, no matter how ridiculous they might be, as a personal affront to her mother's memory. She took extreme offense at the appearance of one on her board immediately after she had expressly written to everyone not to do so. And this seems natural.
Having said that, and having displayed someone else's misunderstanding of this girl's sentiments (and I truly believe that this was done out of mistake, not malice), I must admit that, upon reading the first note, I thought that she was kidding, perhaps expressing exasperation at a particularly corny joke that she had heard during the day. I honestly saw it as an invitation to write as many of the jokes as possible - again, not out of malice, but a little bit of teasing in, of course, the friendliest manner. But then again, I haven't lost my mother.
Not one person on this hall knew that she had lost her mother - no one even considered it. The pain and grief involved in losing a mother cannot be understood by one who has not, and I certainly won't try, because I will fail miserably. It doesn't even bear thinking about. And no one stopped to consider that she might have been serious. Because we have absolutely no conception of her life or her thoughts - only the assumptions that everyone wanders around our lives, staying on the periphery and catering to us as slightly marred or distorted mirror images of ourselves. And why should we think any differently? When was the last time we asked these strange new college friends an important question? (And when I say we here, I obviously mean me, but this softens the blow for me). Sure we have "deep" conversations with them, in between the day-to-day jargon, but the truth is, we've only tried to mold them into the positions of our friends from home, whose histories we know. So why ask these new friends the really important questions? And why volunteer to these friends the important information, because they obviously already know it?
I feel like I'm just nibbling around the edges of a question that's been bothering me for the last few weeks, or possibly even longer...But of course, I don't know what this question is because I've only got the faintest shadows of answers to go on. The most disturbing question that this disjointed and unreliable train of thought raises in my mind is, How much do I know about even my "old" friends? If I'm simply putting familiar pasts with relatively unfamiliar persons now, who's to say that I haven't done it before? Maybe I've given everyone simply some variation of my own experiences, transferring these experiences onto them to make them more "understandable" to me. What does that mean about the relationships that I've formed? I certainly don't believe that they're any less real, or even any less close...perhaps simply a little unsettlingly tainted. Some stain that I haven't noticed before or that remained unrecognized. Or it's possible that, because of one incident I'm doubting myself and overly paranoid.
And now I can't decide.
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| Damn it feels good to be a ...pirate?
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| Walked a mile and a half in a downpour today. With a bookbag. And a birthday present. In a skirt. Without shoes. Singing "Singing in the Rain." Got back to dorm soaked. Run into Danny. He looks at me. "It's weird. You're like a pseudo-hippie, but not. And it works for you."
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