Hello, Blogger. I haven't written in a bit, though many things have happened, because I've been very busy and getting no sleep. To tell you how busy I have been, I got more anime last week and Still have not yet watched it. I am skipping it for you, blogger, in this free time. [laughs] Also, if anyone is reading this that speaks french, I believe Google will translate it for you. I know it translates from other languages into english, though not very well. [shrugs] Ok, so whenever I last wrote, I think wednesday is when I need to start relating life. I picked up Jake and gave him a ride to the store to trade in DVDs for cash, while Michelle picked up Charles for dinner, and picked up Kat but I don't know whether that was before or after dinner. I met them all, along with Cassie, at Midnight Rodeo (Will never showed up). DJ, the wrestler bartender friend, was there, and I lent her my sweater, that I had just gotten back from Jake, because she couldn't hang out in her work uniform and hadn't brought anything to change into. I gave Kat a ride home, and Cassie left while I was gone. Matt and his girlfriend Mindy arrived just as I was headed out. Michelle left shortly after I got back (the three girls all had work the next day). I got back and danced some more, while Matt and Mindy played pool while doing PDAs, or kissed while pretending to play pool, whichever you prefer. Charles and Jake were hanging out, i.e. flirting, with four other girls. Matt and Mindy finally just left, and then it was closing time. I got my sweater back, and Charles and Jake were both drunk, but Jake too much. We took Jake home, then went out to Slick Willies, where the girls said they would be, so Charles could be drunk some more. He only had one more drink there, but it was enough to put him in the same state of drunkenness (with less lost ability to walk) as Jake. I took him to his apartment, where he crashed. I went home and slept.
Then Thursday happened. It has sort of defined the time since. Charles woke me up to come over. I procrastinated. Mom needed the car to go to the bank and the grocery store, so I got on the computer. Grace was on! So she called and we talked on the phone. When we had only been talking a few minutes, I got an instant message from the last person I expected in the world: Delphine, the girl I met in France more than five years ago. For those of you who don't know the story, I went to World Youth Day in August of 2000 with my church youth group. We went to Paris for 2 days, then took the train to Rome, and spent about eight days in Rome. On the train, they had to juggle seating/sleeping arrangements because we had 34 people and the cars each had 6 beds. Well, I volunteered for the car with 4 people from our group and 2 strangers...it turned out to be 5 guys from our group and a french girl. I had studied french, she had studied english, and we had a wonderful 14 hours together, despite both of us having significant others, so there was nothing inappropriate. I had no picture of her, and so I have had to remember her this whole time. We have talked now and then, i.e. we generally go a year or more between times we contact each other. This was the first time we have talked on instant messenger. I felt bad because I was distracted from my phone call with my girlfriend, and slightly bad because I totally ditched Charles. We ended up talking for more than 3 hours, until she had to go to sleep, since 5pm my time is midnight Paris time. I talked to Grace a little more on AIM, then went and hung out with Charles and Michelle (we watched The Grinch), and then picked up Amy for tango (she had to miss the last two weeks). At tango, I had a good time, which was very nice, and surprising, since it has been weird lately, if you remember from previous blogs. I got home and slept. And, even more surprisingly, I was happy. I am often amused, usually having fun, sometimes bored or apathetic, sometimes unhappy, but very very infrequently honest to goodness happy. It was like when you have eaten a really good meal, and you are stuffed, and you know you will be hungry again, but right now you're stuffed and contented. It was like that, but with life instead of food, happy instead of stuffed.
Friday, I had work. [shrugs] Amy had band, so I decided to go to Midnight Rodeo in the evening. I planned on leaving early, and did leave early, but I didn't get the sleep I intended. I ended up journalling on paper. I know, blogger. I haven't journaled on paper in a long time, and it was for reason that there are as many people as I can count on my hand that I didn't want to read it but I just had to say it. Plus, Ian was talking to his girlfriend, and I didn't have the heart to kick him off for the tiny bit of non-paper journaling I wanted to do. I will now type for you the part of that paper journaling that is not of any sort of sensitive nature.
"I just got home from dance class party at Midnight Rodeo. Cast includes myself, Jake (whom I picked up), Kat (whom I took home), Drew (whom I met there), Cassie, new girl Molly, bartender DJ, assorted wait and bar staff, assorted dance class people, and lots of strangers. No one cares.
"Oh, perhaps I should begin by saying that I'm happy. I'm full-happy, as opposed to excited-happy or having-fun-happy. It's the feeling you get in terms of hunger, after a delicious and satisfying meal. It won't last forever, but you're stuffed. I feel that way right now about life.
"Despite that, this evening frankly sucked. Drinking was nothing worth describing, dancing on my part was poor and my partners were only fair, at least my poorness prevented their dancing from being better; the socializing was disappointing and slightly bitter, my friends were barely passingly entertaining, and the music was the same as always: not what I would otherwise be listening to. [Allow me to add that I was a bit upset at the end of the night, and that criticism sounds mean, when it was only intended to be bitter, at myself as much as anything.] The night was emotionally painful, and I don't want to get into it, but I decided I needed to journal on paper..." The reason it was emotionally painful was because I was already feeling slightly distant, not alienated so much as not belonging. I tried dancing with Jake and Cassie, and I was given the cold shoulder, jokingly, but it still hit me hard enough that it took effort to not walk away, but just walk off the floor to where everyone else was standing. It was embarassing for my friends to insult me in such a way, when I already feel that my dancing, when I'm not partner dancing, sucks. Then, a little later, I was swing dancing with Kat and she stopped brusquely and walked off the floor, in the middle of the song. It felt like she had punched me in the face. I tried to get Molly to finish the song, but she resisted like a mule (literally), so I walked around the bar and grabbed (literally) another friend from dance class and nearly carried her by the shoulders to the dance floor, where we finished the song. I thanked her, walked back around the bar, got my drink, and walked away to sit on a couch in a dark corner. I planned on sitting for the 45 minutes left before I said I'd leave, so I wouldn't make Kat and Jake leave early. At some point, I got up for a glass of water, giving Kat the opportunity to spot me and come over, since she realized she had upset me. She had left the floor because she was dizzy, but being drunk enough to be dizzy, she was drunk enough not to say that she was dizzy but to just walk off the floor. We chatted there and she helped cheer me up, enough to make it through the evening, anyway. It was strange, though. Through all that, I was still happy. Being happy and hurt and upset at the same time is a very bizarre feeling. Anyway, I gave Kat a ride home and Cassie said she'd take Jake home, but Molly volunteered, so that worked out. I was at home, journaling, so whatever.
Lastly, this is a line from the middle of the journal, that I feel like sharing because it is important. "...in my friendships and even among acquaintences, I can feel how stretched thin I have become. How...meaningless those relationships are if I am investing almost nothing of myself in them." This is something I mean to try and change. I have had too much quantity, and it has made the quality, from my end, and therefore between myself and my friends, suffer.
So, that crazy journaling was followed by a little sleep (from about 2:15am to 7:15am, 5 hours), then work. Sometime during the day, Charles found out I was going to Galveston for a beach party, and convinced me (I was already considering it before he asked) to drop him off at his girlfriend's on the way and pick him up on the way back. So, we left work at 4:30, picked up by dad, went home, got my stuff, went to his place, got his stuff, went to Drew's and picked him up (after waking him up, since he had worked a lot a lot of overtime that week and was exhausted), then went downtown to pick up a party gift and get dinner at Istanbul Grill (I am no longer allowed to pick a restaurant when we are in a hurry, ever again, but I wasn't going to skip eating there if I was already a block and a half away and starving.), then finally on the freeway south, dropped Charles off at Denny's along the freeway to be picked up by his girlfriend, and Drew and I headed down, took the ferry, and arrived at the party at 10:00ish. The party was about 7 middle-aged people and us, since a lot of people had bailed with excuses, a few had just not shown, and very few youngun's had been invited in the first place. It was very fun; we had homemade margaritas, ambushed people with some water balloons, ate chocolate cake, danced (or that was just me and the person who invited Drew and me), and walked along the beach. It was beautiful; the moon was full, the skies were mostly clear, the wind was warm, about 10mph from off the water, making mid-size waves, and the water was warm (the crabs were crabby). I had a strong desire to just walk into the water and keep going as far as I could. I don't think I've ever had so strong a connection to the ocean, or any body of water, as I did that night. [laughs] I know, superlatives exist and are used for relatively but not absolutely superlative things. I'm sure I've had connections like that before, but not in a long time. It made me want to swim to California or France, whichever I hit first (which, of course, would be neither, as I'd drown eventually, before reaching Mexico or the Bahamas, which were in the direction I was pointed). As my heart had been happy before (and was wearing off but still mostly happy), now my soul was happy. As all good things must come to an end, so did our stay; we headed out around 2:40, but we had to wait for the 3:30 ferry. We finally got to Denny's at 4:15, and Charles was not answering his phone, having fallen fast asleep. We finally got him after we had eaten breakfast, which was lucky, since I had to get Drew home and get myself home to shower for work. We picked up Charles, took Drew home, took Charles home, and I got home and into bed at 6:45. Mom would never have let me drive to work sunday if she had known I got so little sleep [laughs] but I woke up at 7:15 (and got out of bed at 7:30) to shower.
Work was very hard, being so tired, having a good amount of business, working with James (the new guy), etc. I had to leave with a lot of stuff unfinished because I had to get to church for LifeTeen. I had been entirely confused about which week it was because I had gotten a bunch of emails concerning a particular lifenight, which happens to be next week not this week, but it worked out. I managed a 15 minute nap before we did all the preparation stuff. There were a lot of beach balls, and playing kickball with one of the teens helped me wake up before church. As usual, I greeted everyone who came in throughout mass, which meant I had to stand in the back throughout mass. It's ok, it's kinda fulfilling, besides letting me stand around and fidget, dancing around and stuff, rather than falling asleep in a pew [laughs]. The game that night was we got the teens into small groups, and they had to run up one at a time, get whipped cream and chocolate syrup and a cherry in their mouths, then run back. I ignored the cherries, but I got it all in their mouths and none all over their faces, and my team went all the way through twice. They were awesome! and I gave them the bowl of cherries to share afterward. One of the teens saved a bottle of whipped cream for personal snacking purposes, but I had to take it away later because of friend-induced attack/messes. We also did small groups for the first time, and I kinda sucked at it, but not enough that we digressed from the topic. I'll get better at drawing them into on-topic conversations eventually. I also managed to only talk about myself twice, and only because I was asked direct questions (i.e. the questions that I was trying to get them to answer). Success! [laughs] Anyway, I was pretty awake (exhausted but not tired) at the end, and I managed to get out of the post-night meeting to go "sleep", but I went with Amy to the last 45 minutes of dancing at the melody club. We saw a couple friends from last time, including the guy Stefan that Amy is trying to get to come to Crossroads, and made a couple of new friends, of whom Christina is the only one I remember. One of them was a guy who goes to Lifeteen at another church and may come to ours, since he finds his a little boring. [grins] we'll see. then I took Amy home and got to bed by 12:15. And this week is work monday, work tuesday, work wednesday [sighs]. This weekend there is another hurricane that may hit Houston, enough of a chance that Galveston is having a mandatory evacuation (its escape routes suck even more than New Orleans') and we're supposed to check our supplies of batteries, water and non-perishable foods. Anyway, I am tired of writing. I am sorry that this entry is way way too long, but at least I used paragraphs [laughs]. Talk to you laters, blogger.
Then Thursday happened. It has sort of defined the time since. Charles woke me up to come over. I procrastinated. Mom needed the car to go to the bank and the grocery store, so I got on the computer. Grace was on! So she called and we talked on the phone. When we had only been talking a few minutes, I got an instant message from the last person I expected in the world: Delphine, the girl I met in France more than five years ago. For those of you who don't know the story, I went to World Youth Day in August of 2000 with my church youth group. We went to Paris for 2 days, then took the train to Rome, and spent about eight days in Rome. On the train, they had to juggle seating/sleeping arrangements because we had 34 people and the cars each had 6 beds. Well, I volunteered for the car with 4 people from our group and 2 strangers...it turned out to be 5 guys from our group and a french girl. I had studied french, she had studied english, and we had a wonderful 14 hours together, despite both of us having significant others, so there was nothing inappropriate. I had no picture of her, and so I have had to remember her this whole time. We have talked now and then, i.e. we generally go a year or more between times we contact each other. This was the first time we have talked on instant messenger. I felt bad because I was distracted from my phone call with my girlfriend, and slightly bad because I totally ditched Charles. We ended up talking for more than 3 hours, until she had to go to sleep, since 5pm my time is midnight Paris time. I talked to Grace a little more on AIM, then went and hung out with Charles and Michelle (we watched The Grinch), and then picked up Amy for tango (she had to miss the last two weeks). At tango, I had a good time, which was very nice, and surprising, since it has been weird lately, if you remember from previous blogs. I got home and slept. And, even more surprisingly, I was happy. I am often amused, usually having fun, sometimes bored or apathetic, sometimes unhappy, but very very infrequently honest to goodness happy. It was like when you have eaten a really good meal, and you are stuffed, and you know you will be hungry again, but right now you're stuffed and contented. It was like that, but with life instead of food, happy instead of stuffed.
Friday, I had work. [shrugs] Amy had band, so I decided to go to Midnight Rodeo in the evening. I planned on leaving early, and did leave early, but I didn't get the sleep I intended. I ended up journalling on paper. I know, blogger. I haven't journaled on paper in a long time, and it was for reason that there are as many people as I can count on my hand that I didn't want to read it but I just had to say it. Plus, Ian was talking to his girlfriend, and I didn't have the heart to kick him off for the tiny bit of non-paper journaling I wanted to do. I will now type for you the part of that paper journaling that is not of any sort of sensitive nature.
"I just got home from dance class party at Midnight Rodeo. Cast includes myself, Jake (whom I picked up), Kat (whom I took home), Drew (whom I met there), Cassie, new girl Molly, bartender DJ, assorted wait and bar staff, assorted dance class people, and lots of strangers. No one cares.
"Oh, perhaps I should begin by saying that I'm happy. I'm full-happy, as opposed to excited-happy or having-fun-happy. It's the feeling you get in terms of hunger, after a delicious and satisfying meal. It won't last forever, but you're stuffed. I feel that way right now about life.
"Despite that, this evening frankly sucked. Drinking was nothing worth describing, dancing on my part was poor and my partners were only fair, at least my poorness prevented their dancing from being better; the socializing was disappointing and slightly bitter, my friends were barely passingly entertaining, and the music was the same as always: not what I would otherwise be listening to. [Allow me to add that I was a bit upset at the end of the night, and that criticism sounds mean, when it was only intended to be bitter, at myself as much as anything.] The night was emotionally painful, and I don't want to get into it, but I decided I needed to journal on paper..." The reason it was emotionally painful was because I was already feeling slightly distant, not alienated so much as not belonging. I tried dancing with Jake and Cassie, and I was given the cold shoulder, jokingly, but it still hit me hard enough that it took effort to not walk away, but just walk off the floor to where everyone else was standing. It was embarassing for my friends to insult me in such a way, when I already feel that my dancing, when I'm not partner dancing, sucks. Then, a little later, I was swing dancing with Kat and she stopped brusquely and walked off the floor, in the middle of the song. It felt like she had punched me in the face. I tried to get Molly to finish the song, but she resisted like a mule (literally), so I walked around the bar and grabbed (literally) another friend from dance class and nearly carried her by the shoulders to the dance floor, where we finished the song. I thanked her, walked back around the bar, got my drink, and walked away to sit on a couch in a dark corner. I planned on sitting for the 45 minutes left before I said I'd leave, so I wouldn't make Kat and Jake leave early. At some point, I got up for a glass of water, giving Kat the opportunity to spot me and come over, since she realized she had upset me. She had left the floor because she was dizzy, but being drunk enough to be dizzy, she was drunk enough not to say that she was dizzy but to just walk off the floor. We chatted there and she helped cheer me up, enough to make it through the evening, anyway. It was strange, though. Through all that, I was still happy. Being happy and hurt and upset at the same time is a very bizarre feeling. Anyway, I gave Kat a ride home and Cassie said she'd take Jake home, but Molly volunteered, so that worked out. I was at home, journaling, so whatever.
Lastly, this is a line from the middle of the journal, that I feel like sharing because it is important. "...in my friendships and even among acquaintences, I can feel how stretched thin I have become. How...meaningless those relationships are if I am investing almost nothing of myself in them." This is something I mean to try and change. I have had too much quantity, and it has made the quality, from my end, and therefore between myself and my friends, suffer.
So, that crazy journaling was followed by a little sleep (from about 2:15am to 7:15am, 5 hours), then work. Sometime during the day, Charles found out I was going to Galveston for a beach party, and convinced me (I was already considering it before he asked) to drop him off at his girlfriend's on the way and pick him up on the way back. So, we left work at 4:30, picked up by dad, went home, got my stuff, went to his place, got his stuff, went to Drew's and picked him up (after waking him up, since he had worked a lot a lot of overtime that week and was exhausted), then went downtown to pick up a party gift and get dinner at Istanbul Grill (I am no longer allowed to pick a restaurant when we are in a hurry, ever again, but I wasn't going to skip eating there if I was already a block and a half away and starving.), then finally on the freeway south, dropped Charles off at Denny's along the freeway to be picked up by his girlfriend, and Drew and I headed down, took the ferry, and arrived at the party at 10:00ish. The party was about 7 middle-aged people and us, since a lot of people had bailed with excuses, a few had just not shown, and very few youngun's had been invited in the first place. It was very fun; we had homemade margaritas, ambushed people with some water balloons, ate chocolate cake, danced (or that was just me and the person who invited Drew and me), and walked along the beach. It was beautiful; the moon was full, the skies were mostly clear, the wind was warm, about 10mph from off the water, making mid-size waves, and the water was warm (the crabs were crabby). I had a strong desire to just walk into the water and keep going as far as I could. I don't think I've ever had so strong a connection to the ocean, or any body of water, as I did that night. [laughs] I know, superlatives exist and are used for relatively but not absolutely superlative things. I'm sure I've had connections like that before, but not in a long time. It made me want to swim to California or France, whichever I hit first (which, of course, would be neither, as I'd drown eventually, before reaching Mexico or the Bahamas, which were in the direction I was pointed). As my heart had been happy before (and was wearing off but still mostly happy), now my soul was happy. As all good things must come to an end, so did our stay; we headed out around 2:40, but we had to wait for the 3:30 ferry. We finally got to Denny's at 4:15, and Charles was not answering his phone, having fallen fast asleep. We finally got him after we had eaten breakfast, which was lucky, since I had to get Drew home and get myself home to shower for work. We picked up Charles, took Drew home, took Charles home, and I got home and into bed at 6:45. Mom would never have let me drive to work sunday if she had known I got so little sleep [laughs] but I woke up at 7:15 (and got out of bed at 7:30) to shower.
Work was very hard, being so tired, having a good amount of business, working with James (the new guy), etc. I had to leave with a lot of stuff unfinished because I had to get to church for LifeTeen. I had been entirely confused about which week it was because I had gotten a bunch of emails concerning a particular lifenight, which happens to be next week not this week, but it worked out. I managed a 15 minute nap before we did all the preparation stuff. There were a lot of beach balls, and playing kickball with one of the teens helped me wake up before church. As usual, I greeted everyone who came in throughout mass, which meant I had to stand in the back throughout mass. It's ok, it's kinda fulfilling, besides letting me stand around and fidget, dancing around and stuff, rather than falling asleep in a pew [laughs]. The game that night was we got the teens into small groups, and they had to run up one at a time, get whipped cream and chocolate syrup and a cherry in their mouths, then run back. I ignored the cherries, but I got it all in their mouths and none all over their faces, and my team went all the way through twice. They were awesome! and I gave them the bowl of cherries to share afterward. One of the teens saved a bottle of whipped cream for personal snacking purposes, but I had to take it away later because of friend-induced attack/messes. We also did small groups for the first time, and I kinda sucked at it, but not enough that we digressed from the topic. I'll get better at drawing them into on-topic conversations eventually. I also managed to only talk about myself twice, and only because I was asked direct questions (i.e. the questions that I was trying to get them to answer). Success! [laughs] Anyway, I was pretty awake (exhausted but not tired) at the end, and I managed to get out of the post-night meeting to go "sleep", but I went with Amy to the last 45 minutes of dancing at the melody club. We saw a couple friends from last time, including the guy Stefan that Amy is trying to get to come to Crossroads, and made a couple of new friends, of whom Christina is the only one I remember. One of them was a guy who goes to Lifeteen at another church and may come to ours, since he finds his a little boring. [grins] we'll see. then I took Amy home and got to bed by 12:15. And this week is work monday, work tuesday, work wednesday [sighs]. This weekend there is another hurricane that may hit Houston, enough of a chance that Galveston is having a mandatory evacuation (its escape routes suck even more than New Orleans') and we're supposed to check our supplies of batteries, water and non-perishable foods. Anyway, I am tired of writing. I am sorry that this entry is way way too long, but at least I used paragraphs [laughs]. Talk to you laters, blogger.
posted by Seventh_guest at
5:57 PM
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