I’m so sorry.
I want to go to sleep, but I can’t, because I keep staring at the photo of TB and saying, or sometimes just mouthing,
“I’m so sorry.”
I’m so sorry that you’re gone. I’m so sorry that your family is losing you. I’m so sorry that your friends are losing you.
And I’m so, so sorry that I — someone you never met, someone who is 20, someone who has only taken 5 journalism courses and has no expertise in news, someone who is too preoccupied with how her hair looks or if she’ll get a C in Poli Sci to give a shit about much else — had to treat you like a news piece for eight days.
These days I’ve been waking up like a gunshot to the latest news about you, flying furiously (but whizzing dizzily) through the day until suddenly my body smacks back down into bed and it’s over, for a few hours, until the next day. And I sleep like an exit wound (whatever that means, right? But I know what I mean, I know what I mean too well.).
According to the report, they pulled your body out of the lake at about the same time I was looking for my sock and trying not to wake him up. What the fuck is this world? Who am I to decide how your friends and family will learn how you died, where you died, when you died? I’m a kid who can’t find her sock.
But I had to decide, and I hope, I swear, that I did okay by you. I know it’s always about reporting to our audience. I just never thought the reader I’d care most about would be dead.
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Note to self:
Don’t put in contact lenses after handling garlic.
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Tags: agony, pain, waterboarding
Just checking in, Mom/blog.
I’m alive and happy and clean and in Evanston. And have been for quite some time. To come:
- Die Sarah Palin die
- Apt 3D adventures
- Drinking to not feel uncomfortable misadventures!
- The first night of publishing – tomorree!
But tonight is NS’s birthday (technically all day is, but I know what I mean), so enough of this. We’re going to an Ethiopian restaurant on Chicago Avenue and then coming back here to hang out out. Oh and ET arrived today. And I just realized that his initials are ET and that makes me happy.
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Tags: birthday, die sarah palin, no point
It’s too hot in South Florida
Today is the first day in a long, long time that I have woken up and barely left my bed — still wearing the clothes I slept in, reading a book, on my laptop, only having gotten up to go to the bathroom and make a sandwich.
I used to do this every day, all summer, until I was about 15.
I’m annoyed that people keep asking me what I want for dinner. I’m annoyed that dinner has to be a group decision. I’m annoyed that we can’t eat this or that because we ate it last night, and why don’t we do something else tonight? It’s strange — I know I should be happy to relax and let my parents take care of me, but I’d really rather just cook myself some pasta and tell them to do whatever they’d do if I wasn’t home. I really like taking care of myself. Another life lesson from my summer alone.
I’m re-reading The Perks of Being A Wallflower, and my vision got worse, and it’s already time to start packing for Chicago and I’d really rather just not.
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Goodbye, DC
Well, I’m all packed in an upstairs room in AT’s house. My cab comes in an hour and a half. My flight leaves in four hours. My Nine Week Solo Adventure in DC has come to its end.
I’m already upset at how quickly I’ll forget the details that were so stamped on my everyday life here. I will forget the number of the bus I took to work every day — the 425 Fairfax Connector. I will forget that I liked to sit on the right side, in the middle section, in the last seat, next to the window. I will forget the names of the Opinion interns who sat near the front, left — Molly, who thought herself to be a heroine in her own novel, and Ben, who looked for me when we got off the bus and let me rattle on about my latest mishap; the other two interns’ names I’ve forgotten already, if I ever knew them. I’ll forget the crocodile smile of the driver on the 9:45 a.m. bus, I’ll forget the creepy older Asian man with the red cap on the 4:54 p.m. bus home. I won’t forget the boy who I used to make shy eye contact with on the 4:54, because that is the type of thing I romanticize and hang on to forever.
I will forget that, for the first seven weeks, I lived in Strong Hall #500, and that my roommate’s name was Emma. I will forget that, because I’d started showering in the morning regularly for the first time in my life, I was always falling asleep on sheets damp from used towels left there all day. I will forget locking myself out of the room with all my cookies supplies, and no shoes. I will forget cooking on the roof, boiling water, burning garlic, that time I started a fire when I cooked in the basement. Ha.
I will forget the mechanical white woman voice of “Step back, doors closing” as I took the Orange Line from Foggy Bottom – GWU to West Falls Church, in the direction of Vienna, then back in the direction of New Carrolton. I will forget the copies of the Express littering the seats and how I would rest my temple on the glass after a hard day. I will not forget how sad I would get every time the train tunnelled back underground between East Falls Church and Ballston.
I will likely never forget the stress of taking a cab — the Yellow Cab company — to and from the Metro station after I moved out to McLean for the last two weeks, though I will forget trying to master AT’s dad’s bike to replace the cab, and failing. I will remember my checking account hitting $32, the lowest since I opened it three years ago.
All the stuff at USAW — the Margaritaville contest, the celebrity research, the silly interviews — there are e-mails and clips to document all that stuff. It’s the mundane, the side course, the real world that I’m afraid to but know I will lose, just as I don’t remember what time the bells rang in high school or which classes I took in the tenth grade.
Now that I’m at the end of it, I think this was the defining moment of my summer:
I was in the kitchen with AT’s mother, aunt, 17-year-old sister and two preteen cousins. We had just finished eating and were washing up. I was standing around, trying to help, while AT’s sister and cousins started shrieking and throwing things. AT’s mom snapped. “OKAY, ALL THE KIDS OUT OF THE KITCHEN, NOW.” I didn’t know if I should leave. The cousins left. The sister, just a couple years younger than me, left. And as I lingered, still wondering, AT’s mom and aunt started chatting again with me, and we washed the dishes together. I was not one of the kids. I was an adult. I could stay.
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Tags: adult, dc, internship, leaving, remember
Orange Line to Vienna…
Something strange just happened on the metro.
I had parted ways with DT at Metro Center, and after a seven-minute wait I boarded the Orange Line toward Vienna. A couple in their early 40s, I’d guess, sat down in front of me. The man had his arm around the woman, the woman was leaning on his shoulder. I was enamored with how in love they were, for a relatively older couple. Usually when I see couples like that, they’re complaining or generally looking miserable. Not these two.
But then, about ten minutes in, the woman leaps back across the seat from the man, and makes a face like “Come ON.” She holds the glare for a long long time while the man stares back at her. Finally she straightens up (she had been leaning into the aisle, away from him), and he asks her what he did. And the woman whispers, “You were looking at that girl.”
“What girl?”
“The girl sitting behind us.”
I am the girl sitting behind them. The woman does not realize I’m between songs and can hear her. The man, whether he had been “looking at me” or not, now starts trying to nonchalantly look behind them to see me, the homewrecker she’s referring to. I squirm for the rest of the metro ride while the man tries to get a good look at me, probably to take note of one of my deformities so he can relay it to his wife and make her feel better.
The adult world is very, very strange. I darted off the metro.
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Tags: adult, i should grow up, metro, orange line, uncomfortable
I can’t keep up with this blog.
Everything’s personal to me. Honestly, I don’t see the point in writing something if it doesn’t mean something intensely, not just in and of itself, but means something about me. My biggest facination — maybe my only fascination — is human nature, psychology, why we do the things we do and why we don’t the things we don’t. It riddles me completely with crippling self-analysis, but I wouldn’t change that. I think writing is only beautiful when it reveals something about the human condition, and I just feel shallow and stupid when I write about external, material things that resonate nothing deeper than their shells.
Which is why I can’t keep up with this blog. Because I can’t write about personal things in this, because 1) I don’t want to be a 13-year-old Xanga Chick, and 2) I fiercely believe in secrets. I’m a guarded person, and I often find that sharing my thoughts, feelings, etc. just cheapens them because they can never possibly mean as much to anyone else as they do to me. I like to hold the things that make me, me, tightly to myself, wound up in a ball to my chest. This is why I was horrified when I showed up to a party the last week or two of school and AM grabbed me and said, “Why didn’t you tell me?” She was mad I hadn’t told her about my involvement with a boy. Everyone at the party knew. It is horrifying to be the subject of that scrutinity. It is horrifying to know that your feelings are entertaining as gossip to other people.
I really want to keep this up. I just have to find a way to write about things that matter — things about humans, about us, about me — without being the Xanga chick I so like to mock.
So here’s something: Last week was the other interns’ last week, so our boss and a few co-workers took us out to lunch at the Cheesecake Factory. I thought it would be painfully awkward — I hate polite small-talk chit-chat, I’m terrible at it. I think sitcom humor is appropriate in most situations, and most people just think that’s awkward when they’re not watching it on The Office. But it ended up being okay, and here’s why:
We talked about laundry. Everyone has a story about doing laundry. Everyone at one time learned to do laundry, everyone dealt with scrounging for quarters in college, everyone fucked up and put a red sock in with his/her whites. So for nearly an hour, that’s what the conversation was. Shared experienced are like a loosely-bound book we flip the pages of when we need to find common ground with anyone. We could have talked about laundry or 9/11. They’re the same thing when it comes down to it.
I had a terrific fight with my mother last night. I don’t understand where people get their idea of a mother-daughter relationship nowadays: from their own mothers, or from Gilmore Girls? I’m thinking Gilmore Girls (and so is Chuck Klosterman, Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs). I just don’t see the point in striving toward some made-up ideal. We are what we are, whatever, amen.
I’ve been plotting NBN non-stop. It’s like double-dutch to me. If I stop doing it I get terrified of jumping back in, afraid it won’t work out. But when I keep going, it makes perfect sense.
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Tags: laundry, mom, nbn, personal, writing
Tired.
Do you ever mentally debate the pros and cons of saying something only to realize that you’ve already started saying it?
And by “you” I mean “me, hey there Lisa, hi myself” because that is essentially who I am talking to.
Well yeah, I was typing my password into this thinking about whether I should shower tonight or tomorrow when I realized I had just gotten out the shower. My hair is wet, I’m wearing Bobb-McCulloch boxer shorts, I’m an idiot.
But the reason for my idiocy would be last night’s all-nighter (woo!). No, not that kind of all-nighter (woo?). I was working on NBN until nearly 4, then I had to pack and move out of GW by 10 a.m. and into the suburbs of northern Virginia. After sleeping all day, I’m sufficiently out of it. Enough to still be thinking I should take a shower tomorrow instead.
I’m rambling! I’m so tired.
What I wanted to say, and what I’m going to talk about when I get the energy to write a longer post, is that it’s eery how tastes and smells and sounds can instantly snap you to different points in your life. The moment the VitaminEnergy fruit punch drink hit my mouth last night, it was 4 a.m. on a Sunday night in my Bobb bunker, making nervous cracks with AC about which Backstreet Boy I should compare my history paper’s level of suckage to (Lance Bass?). And whenever I hear a blink-182 song or smell a certain woodiness in the air or get that nauseous-void feeling in my stomach from being out of my comfort zone, I’m 13-years-old at Camp Coleman in rural Georgia developing the kind of sadness that they diagnose and treat.
I have a feeling that my summer in D.C. will be remembered by the taste of olive oil and the smell of garlic, the damp feeling of sheets where I left my wet towel, the polite but forceful “Step back, doors closing” of the Orange Line Metro.
Goodnight, finally.
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Tags: all-nighter, dc, olive oil, sleep
I’ve always been one of the thinnest people I know, against all odds. And by “against all odds” I mean I eat greasy food and junk food without abandon and never exercise. Okay, one time winter quarter I went to the gym — it was worth it when a chick at Hundo drunkenly bleared, “Hey, you look familiar. I saw you at the gym, didn’t I [hic]?” — but that made no significant impact on my physique. I guess the bottom line is that I never turned something down that looked tasty or entertained thoughts of calories or trans fat.
But now I’ve decided to be “healthier.” I bought a few free weights (five pounders, I’m so intense), I’ve stopped snacking (the Oreo Cakesters on my bedstand just sit there, uneaten, glaring at me), and I have vague plans to start running. I even bought, like, five cartons of fruit (berries are delicious), and I start each day with a zip loc baggie of organic cereal and a carton of skim milk.
I’m not sure why I’m doing this, exactly. I don’t want to lose weight — hell, I’m underweight. I guess it just occurred to me that I’m destroying my arteries and I’d like to live past 40. I also like the idea of being stronger, more toned and more-inshape… at least able to walk up a broken escalator without panting.
But I hate the image of “the healthy girl.” I loved being the chick in the Sargent grill line who, when everyone else is getting grilled chicken to chop up and put in a salad, ordered a double cheeseburger. When my roommate would point out the grease dripping all over my plate, I’d grin and take an exaggerated bite. I love snorting at the prospect of the gym, ordering dessert, chowing down on eight pounds of eggs and sloppily-made grilled cheese in the frat kitchen. I’m really attached to the image of the laid-back girl who doesn’t give a damn what she eats, and I’m not sure how much of this “healthy lifestyle” I’ll be willing to maintain at its expense once school starts up again.
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Tags: food, healthy, sure don't want to do work
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