So, that happy-fuzzy post-date glow died today. After like, three weeks, which was a lot longer than I expected it to last. I haven't been a solid happy for that long in . . . a long time.
The HFPDG lasted quite well, actually. It lasted through a bus accident that killed a band teacher at school; not somebody I knew personally, but I have a lot of friends in band, so it did make me sad to think of them. (Incidentally, the bus accident was the same night as the date. I found out the next morning.) It lasted through the first pomegranate of the season, now happily digesting in my stomach. (I pretty much live for pomegranate season. There's nothing like the smell of a pomegranate right after you first cut the top off and the juice oozes from a popped aril onto the cutting board.) It lasted through term finals, barely.
In fact, its death is my own fault. NaNoWriMo—National Novel-Writing Month for you newbies—is almost upon us! Objective: write 50,000 words in a month, equating 1667 2/3 words a day or 8 1/3 pages with 1-inch margins, 10-pt. Courier New double-spaced.
Naturally this is something I simply MUST do. So I started brainstorming characters and plot options earlier this week (Monday, to be precise) and decided on my character from the first role-play I participated in. That meant, however, that the whole motley crew from RPv1.0 gets dragged along for the ride. Most of them I can deal with—a former-captain/current-runner-of-the-galaxy with emotional issues, a thief as her egocentric-yet-not-self-confident lover, an apathetic mechanical wench/cyborg genius, and a family-oriented older brother with a death wish. They're all fun and games.
Then I started thinking about our antagonist, Kain. Kain is charismatic, manipulative, imposing, cunning—all the good things a bad guy is supposed to be. John, his creator, portrayed him so brilliantly, so perfectly, that Kain was impossible to hate in that twisted way we reserve for the evil forces with the best intentions at heart.
How could I match that? How can I use Kain in my story while still keeping him Kain? He seems so out of my league, beyond my abilities, that there's no way on Earth I can do him justice. I don't think I have it in me to accomplish such a perfect villain, to give him that same level of fear-striking coolness, that pure evil that John gave him.
After that first moment, of doubt, everything else I had planned kind of crashed down around my ears. I can't do this. I can't take the creations of others and use them for my own purposes. I can't control this plot—it's too complicated, too delicate, too hard, too threadbare, too long, too too. Who am I to think that I can do all this, create this world and put these people through hell? Who am I to play God to these people?
Well, I'm me. And I'm going to do this. The villain may suck, but this is a first draft. Nobody has to see it. I can print it out, mash it up, and make new paper out of it. I could eat it. I could line the litter box with it. This is my story. I'm telling it, come hell or high water.
Friday, October 23, 2009
Sunday, October 11, 2009
The First Date, in Three Acts
Act One: The Before
Just in case you all haven't noticed, I'm prone to A, violent mood swings; B, being over-dramatic about my life, despite my efforts to keep things in perspective; and C, I can't think of anything but feel this list needs three parts.
ANYway, so my friend Tanner's boyfriend read my last post, which was written during one of my melodramatic low phases, and, being the good gay boy I've never met, immediately set me up on a date. (Thank you from the bottom of my everything, Jay!) So here I am, set up with somebody I've never met by somebody I've never met. First things first: Billy tracked me down on Facebook–because Facebook is the center of all life now—and we started to get to know each other.
The parental units, however, may or may not have been difficult about the whole going-to-a-dance-with-a-guy thing, so I avoided the whole thing by saying Tanner had an extra ticket to the The Used concert at the Saltair tonight. (For a while he had me thinking he had already bought tickets and now was going to Cyprus High's Homecoming instead. It confused me at first—on the one hand he was so excited to go to the dance, and on the other he was so excited to go to the concert. Unless Tanner mastered bilocation without me, something was wrong there.) My mom asked no questions other than "When will you be home?"
Friday evening merited a rather unexpected question from Jay. "I'm just curious, but are you planning on, you know, getting it on?" Well. Um, no. I don't plan to have sex with people. If it happens, it happens. "Cause I kind of think you should." (Jay was still under the impression I was hopelessly depressed or something, which is caring and sweet and all, especially coming from somebody I've only talked to online. But still. As amused by the question as I was, it still was just a little awkward.)
As I discovered the night before (aka yesterday, aka Friday), I had outgrown my old pair of black jeans, something Billy and I agreed on wearing so we at least semi-matched for the semiformal dance. Of course, the lack of acceptable jeans merited only one thing: a shopping spree to the mall with one of my two best girlfriends, Rikki. Jeans (and an unplanned excursion into Bath and Body Works) and smoothie in hand, we left the mall feeling rather ecstatic about tonight—me for my first ever real date, her for the Snow Patrol concert with her steady boyfriend.
It's amazing how time flies when you're having fun and/or nervous. All of a sudden it was 3:30, and I had half an hour to shower and otherwise get ready. Tanner cut me short from switching out earrings, plucking my eye (well, uni) brow(s), and doing my nails with the sparkly stuff I got at Target like seven months ago. In any case, we were off, whether I felt ready or not. At least I managed to put on some of the new Midnight Pomegranate perfume from B&BW.
Act 2: The During
After picking people up and getting random caffeine—coffee for Billy and me, Cherry Coke for Jay and Tanner—we were off to Golden Corral with four more people. We all ate some, talked some, laughed a bunch—Jay's friend Shaylie was quiet frank with the waiter about how cooked our rolls were—and headed over to the dance.
Jay and Tanner pretty much spent the whole time at the dance trying to ditch me and Billy, something I really have no problem with because it was so obvious they wanted to be alone together. So Billy and I spent the whole time dancing together. At first it was very clean, at least two Book-of-Mormons between us at all times. By the time "Love Game" by Lady Gaga came on, though, we had a love game of our own going on. For those of you who have seen me at our school dances with Kelley, picture that to begin with. Now slide us closer. Make it last for an indeterminable number of songs, cause I lost track after four. And last but not least, throw in a lot more traveling hands, something that Kelley and I pretty much never did. That is me dancing with Billy. That is me having the night of my life.
Probably the, like, semihighlight of the night at this point was having a small chat with some of the school's administration. "Look, I have no problem with you guys dancing with each other. But several people have reported seeing you make out with each other. Is that true?" Um, no! I mean, as much as I wanted that to happen, nothing along those lines had happened. (Well, unless you count the relatively explicit motions we began doing on that song "You spin my head right round, right round / When you go down, when you go down, down". That was sure to merit a lot of gasping.) "Cause the same rules apply to you guys—no PDAs here." We laughed and walked away. That was very blatant discrimination, as there were about twenty straight couples making out as he spoke to us, but there was no point in arguing and I didn't want to anyway. At this point I was pretty much lost in Billy. He was fun. He was funny. He was giving me the time of my life and probably didn't even know it. It was so mindblowing and all-at-once that I mostly just went with it because what else could I do?
Act 3: The Afterwards
After we left the dance we went to McDonald's, some for food and stuff. Billy and I got more coffee, something I'm sure is contributing to my buzz right now. Anyway, then we went back to Jay's house for some pictures by his mom, and then Tanner and I left. It was so hard to say goodbye to Billy—I'd just met him, but he was so fun and wonderful to talk to and just, just, just so much. Somehow Tanner and I made it into the truck without any hitchhikers, and then we were off.
The ride home was mostly silence. Not that silence when it's just nobody can think of anything to say. We were both just so lost in our own thoughts. The radio was just a background noise, so all that was really there was us not talking. Tanner and Jay had apparently discussed whether or not we were going to have sex or not—other than me quizzing him on that, there was no real conversation. He dropped me off and we both squeed at each other, before I fumbled around with my house key and he drove off. (His mother made him be home by midnight—otherwise I'm sure we would have stayed until one or two.)
So, really. Is this how everyone else feels all the time? It's that Boys Like Girls song. I'm so love drunk right now I can like, hardly think straight or anything. I'm definitely something drunk. It's just this gigantic warm thing inside my chest that honestly feels like it's going to explode at any given minute, and my ribs are stretched to the breaking point trying to contain it, and I'm just going to spontaneously do something—I can't even think what I'd do if I spontaneously like, overflowed with this feeling. Obviously I'd probably be on the floor or something, but it's just this big unknown as to what all would be happening. Love-drunkenness explodes, and then there's static. Tune in next week to find out.
So oh, my god, this is just—it's beyond words. I can't even describe it. Even my everything-else-I've-written-on-this-thing can't do any justice to my current state of being. Impossible in like, everything. I don't know why I've bothered trying up to this point. Really. People should just have to deal with my utter incoherency as they ask how it went, cause I'm sure all the response they'd get is this vacant stare and a lot of loud, happy noises.
Well, whatever this is, and however it works, I'm not going to be sleeping much tonight.
Just in case you all haven't noticed, I'm prone to A, violent mood swings; B, being over-dramatic about my life, despite my efforts to keep things in perspective; and C, I can't think of anything but feel this list needs three parts.
ANYway, so my friend Tanner's boyfriend read my last post, which was written during one of my melodramatic low phases, and, being the good gay boy I've never met, immediately set me up on a date. (Thank you from the bottom of my everything, Jay!) So here I am, set up with somebody I've never met by somebody I've never met. First things first: Billy tracked me down on Facebook–because Facebook is the center of all life now—and we started to get to know each other.
The parental units, however, may or may not have been difficult about the whole going-to-a-dance-with-a-guy thing, so I avoided the whole thing by saying Tanner had an extra ticket to the The Used concert at the Saltair tonight. (For a while he had me thinking he had already bought tickets and now was going to Cyprus High's Homecoming instead. It confused me at first—on the one hand he was so excited to go to the dance, and on the other he was so excited to go to the concert. Unless Tanner mastered bilocation without me, something was wrong there.) My mom asked no questions other than "When will you be home?"
Friday evening merited a rather unexpected question from Jay. "I'm just curious, but are you planning on, you know, getting it on?" Well. Um, no. I don't plan to have sex with people. If it happens, it happens. "Cause I kind of think you should." (Jay was still under the impression I was hopelessly depressed or something, which is caring and sweet and all, especially coming from somebody I've only talked to online. But still. As amused by the question as I was, it still was just a little awkward.)
As I discovered the night before (aka yesterday, aka Friday), I had outgrown my old pair of black jeans, something Billy and I agreed on wearing so we at least semi-matched for the semiformal dance. Of course, the lack of acceptable jeans merited only one thing: a shopping spree to the mall with one of my two best girlfriends, Rikki. Jeans (and an unplanned excursion into Bath and Body Works) and smoothie in hand, we left the mall feeling rather ecstatic about tonight—me for my first ever real date, her for the Snow Patrol concert with her steady boyfriend.
It's amazing how time flies when you're having fun and/or nervous. All of a sudden it was 3:30, and I had half an hour to shower and otherwise get ready. Tanner cut me short from switching out earrings, plucking my eye (well, uni) brow(s), and doing my nails with the sparkly stuff I got at Target like seven months ago. In any case, we were off, whether I felt ready or not. At least I managed to put on some of the new Midnight Pomegranate perfume from B&BW.
Act 2: The During
After picking people up and getting random caffeine—coffee for Billy and me, Cherry Coke for Jay and Tanner—we were off to Golden Corral with four more people. We all ate some, talked some, laughed a bunch—Jay's friend Shaylie was quiet frank with the waiter about how cooked our rolls were—and headed over to the dance.
Jay and Tanner pretty much spent the whole time at the dance trying to ditch me and Billy, something I really have no problem with because it was so obvious they wanted to be alone together. So Billy and I spent the whole time dancing together. At first it was very clean, at least two Book-of-Mormons between us at all times. By the time "Love Game" by Lady Gaga came on, though, we had a love game of our own going on. For those of you who have seen me at our school dances with Kelley, picture that to begin with. Now slide us closer. Make it last for an indeterminable number of songs, cause I lost track after four. And last but not least, throw in a lot more traveling hands, something that Kelley and I pretty much never did. That is me dancing with Billy. That is me having the night of my life.
Probably the, like, semihighlight of the night at this point was having a small chat with some of the school's administration. "Look, I have no problem with you guys dancing with each other. But several people have reported seeing you make out with each other. Is that true?" Um, no! I mean, as much as I wanted that to happen, nothing along those lines had happened. (Well, unless you count the relatively explicit motions we began doing on that song "You spin my head right round, right round / When you go down, when you go down, down". That was sure to merit a lot of gasping.) "Cause the same rules apply to you guys—no PDAs here." We laughed and walked away. That was very blatant discrimination, as there were about twenty straight couples making out as he spoke to us, but there was no point in arguing and I didn't want to anyway. At this point I was pretty much lost in Billy. He was fun. He was funny. He was giving me the time of my life and probably didn't even know it. It was so mindblowing and all-at-once that I mostly just went with it because what else could I do?
Act 3: The Afterwards
After we left the dance we went to McDonald's, some for food and stuff. Billy and I got more coffee, something I'm sure is contributing to my buzz right now. Anyway, then we went back to Jay's house for some pictures by his mom, and then Tanner and I left. It was so hard to say goodbye to Billy—I'd just met him, but he was so fun and wonderful to talk to and just, just, just so much. Somehow Tanner and I made it into the truck without any hitchhikers, and then we were off.
The ride home was mostly silence. Not that silence when it's just nobody can think of anything to say. We were both just so lost in our own thoughts. The radio was just a background noise, so all that was really there was us not talking. Tanner and Jay had apparently discussed whether or not we were going to have sex or not—other than me quizzing him on that, there was no real conversation. He dropped me off and we both squeed at each other, before I fumbled around with my house key and he drove off. (His mother made him be home by midnight—otherwise I'm sure we would have stayed until one or two.)
So, really. Is this how everyone else feels all the time? It's that Boys Like Girls song. I'm so love drunk right now I can like, hardly think straight or anything. I'm definitely something drunk. It's just this gigantic warm thing inside my chest that honestly feels like it's going to explode at any given minute, and my ribs are stretched to the breaking point trying to contain it, and I'm just going to spontaneously do something—I can't even think what I'd do if I spontaneously like, overflowed with this feeling. Obviously I'd probably be on the floor or something, but it's just this big unknown as to what all would be happening. Love-drunkenness explodes, and then there's static. Tune in next week to find out.
So oh, my god, this is just—it's beyond words. I can't even describe it. Even my everything-else-I've-written-on-this-thing can't do any justice to my current state of being. Impossible in like, everything. I don't know why I've bothered trying up to this point. Really. People should just have to deal with my utter incoherency as they ask how it went, cause I'm sure all the response they'd get is this vacant stare and a lot of loud, happy noises.
Well, whatever this is, and however it works, I'm not going to be sleeping much tonight.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
With a Flourish of Angst
*The following has been rated R for profanity, sexual references and a flourish of angst.*
I am such a masochist. I think I should get that out of the way before we move on. Not a sexual masochist, where I'm turned on by my own pain, but incredibly incredibly emotional masochist. Despite knowing I will kill myself inside later or how much it hurts right now, I love doing things that I know hurt. Like rereading Breaking Dawn.
My friend Angie borrowed a trilogy of books about three gay high school students being angsty and falling in love with each other and shit like that. "The gay Twilight," she called it. The books have been living at her house for nearly two years now, and so of course I had to reread them now that I'd gotten them back. How the hell could I forget that everything turns out great in the end? That everybody gets who they want, and everything gets sorted out, and the only casualties along the way are a bruised ego or two and a turned-down college? That nobody gets a broken heart for more than fifty pages at a time? That everybody ends up with "peace, joy, love, and lots of hot, groovy sex"?
It's a fucking teen movie, for God's sake. I want my life to be a teen movie, with the cookie-cutter characters and see-through plot twists and ending scene where we're making out on somebody's hood at night as the camera pans out to reveal the secluded forest around us, with some sort of soft-piano-solo song playing in the background. (I've even started compiling a soundtrack for my life.)
I want it all so bad. I want the safety and predictability of it. I want the knowledge that I will get who I want in the end, no matter how unlikely it is that they'll end up with me. Fuck it, I just want something in return.
I am getting so damn sick of giving and giving and giving and giving. I'm being sucked dry here, attacked from all sides. I've got the straight girl friends who bitch about their tragic romances or lack thereof. I've got the stupid bastards making my life miserable with the names and slurs and looks that make me want to die. I've got the constant effort it takes to at least look happy most of the time—actually achieving happiness takes so much more. I've got this sense of advocacy to deal with, trying so hard to make a change against something that isn't giving, trying to make a difference to my school and the people in it. Everything is taking, and all I'm doing is giving.
Why the fuck can't I get something back? What's wrong with a little reciprocity here? Why should I be doing all this work and getting none of the benefits? Why am I even bothering at this point? There's no damn reason to keep working to change things, or be the constant shoulder to cry on. I shouldn't have to offer "words of wisdom" to people who need a boost in their life—find your support elsewhere for once.
And everything keeps adding up. Coming out? Still not done with that. Every time I meet new people I have to go through that again. My aunt today sent me a note on Facebook: "have you decided to be gay? just privately wondering. " I've got a family gathering tomorrow for LDS Conference—what am I supposed to say to her? What am I supposed to say to anybody?
I feel like crying and throwing up. I want to hurt myself. (Don't worry, I never do any more. Your concern is appreciated.) I want to get rid of this huge pit in my chest, the one that eats away at everything I am until I feel like there's nothing left of me. I want to read the teen-movie stories again. I want to watch the teen-movies. I want a family that can sit at the table together without having a fight. I want some order to my life. I want to go back to fucking second grade where sex and hormones didn't matter and it was just friends with everything.
I just want too damn much.
I am such a masochist. I think I should get that out of the way before we move on. Not a sexual masochist, where I'm turned on by my own pain, but incredibly incredibly emotional masochist. Despite knowing I will kill myself inside later or how much it hurts right now, I love doing things that I know hurt. Like rereading Breaking Dawn.
My friend Angie borrowed a trilogy of books about three gay high school students being angsty and falling in love with each other and shit like that. "The gay Twilight," she called it. The books have been living at her house for nearly two years now, and so of course I had to reread them now that I'd gotten them back. How the hell could I forget that everything turns out great in the end? That everybody gets who they want, and everything gets sorted out, and the only casualties along the way are a bruised ego or two and a turned-down college? That nobody gets a broken heart for more than fifty pages at a time? That everybody ends up with "peace, joy, love, and lots of hot, groovy sex"?
It's a fucking teen movie, for God's sake. I want my life to be a teen movie, with the cookie-cutter characters and see-through plot twists and ending scene where we're making out on somebody's hood at night as the camera pans out to reveal the secluded forest around us, with some sort of soft-piano-solo song playing in the background. (I've even started compiling a soundtrack for my life.)
I want it all so bad. I want the safety and predictability of it. I want the knowledge that I will get who I want in the end, no matter how unlikely it is that they'll end up with me. Fuck it, I just want something in return.
I am getting so damn sick of giving and giving and giving and giving. I'm being sucked dry here, attacked from all sides. I've got the straight girl friends who bitch about their tragic romances or lack thereof. I've got the stupid bastards making my life miserable with the names and slurs and looks that make me want to die. I've got the constant effort it takes to at least look happy most of the time—actually achieving happiness takes so much more. I've got this sense of advocacy to deal with, trying so hard to make a change against something that isn't giving, trying to make a difference to my school and the people in it. Everything is taking, and all I'm doing is giving.
Why the fuck can't I get something back? What's wrong with a little reciprocity here? Why should I be doing all this work and getting none of the benefits? Why am I even bothering at this point? There's no damn reason to keep working to change things, or be the constant shoulder to cry on. I shouldn't have to offer "words of wisdom" to people who need a boost in their life—find your support elsewhere for once.
And everything keeps adding up. Coming out? Still not done with that. Every time I meet new people I have to go through that again. My aunt today sent me a note on Facebook: "have you decided to be gay? just privately wondering. " I've got a family gathering tomorrow for LDS Conference—what am I supposed to say to her? What am I supposed to say to anybody?
I feel like crying and throwing up. I want to hurt myself. (Don't worry, I never do any more. Your concern is appreciated.) I want to get rid of this huge pit in my chest, the one that eats away at everything I am until I feel like there's nothing left of me. I want to read the teen-movie stories again. I want to watch the teen-movies. I want a family that can sit at the table together without having a fight. I want some order to my life. I want to go back to fucking second grade where sex and hormones didn't matter and it was just friends with everything.
I just want too damn much.
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