Unexpected Feelings

I've spent the past three months counting down the days until I move to New York. I did not have the "best summer of my whole life" as many of my classmates claim to have had this summer. I haven't even enjoyed the hot South Florida summer weather that I usually so revere. All I could think about was getting out. I've been trapped here with so many memories I long to move on from and a personality so consumed with paranoia and anxieties that it hardly seems to function anymore.

But now, eight days away from my flight from Palm Beach to LaGuardia, I find myself scared to fucking death. Of what? I'm not entirely sure. Does it freak me out that I have no feeling towards the fact that I will never see the majority of high school friends ever again? Am I some sort of sociopath for not crying when my best friend of ten years began her eight hour drive up the state to her new home today? I'm so consumed with the life inside my head--the life away from Florida and away from people I know--that I seem to have detached from everything here that I once felt so strongly for.

I look at these other girls going to my school next year who have dreams of med school and law school; who are already signed up for advanced classes and have schedules filled with classes that have long, complicated, and unpronounceable names. I am taking intro to drawing. I am taking a class about love. A class about women. A class about art. I have aspirations of writing a screenplay about a man obsessed with Ricky Martin. Are those classes and aspirations worth going into debt over? I work hard academically so that some day when I'm famous I can say that not only am I ridiculously talented but also quite smart--just look at the colleges I was accepted to. I'm so sarcastic that I'm not sure what I really want and what is just another joke.

I was excited to leave, still am excited to leave, because I can start over. I often find myself having a hard time socially. I hardly ever go out and in the past five months or so it seems as though I have lost touch with a lot of people that I used to hang out with. When I make myself go out I spend the whole time leading up to the event wishing I had xanax to control my nerves. And, unless there is alcohol, those feelings don't generally go away once I get to wherever I am going. I've promised myself to become more outgoing, more talkative when meeting new people, less trapped inside my head. But what if that doesn't happen? What if I can't keep up with the new people I meet? What if depression sets in and stays forever this time? What if I never leave my dorm?

I used to want to be Fiona Apple--pouring my well written feelings into heart wrenching piano pop. But where did those feelings go? I've been the self-loathing, self-mutilating stereotypical angsty teen--someone I was sure I grew out of. But with situations like this--a new life looming ahead of me--I feel myself dwindling into that insecure little girl that age, hormones, confusion, love, and absence of love turned me into. Perhaps what draws back such feelings is the idea that I'm leaving them all behind. My bedroom has seen every pivotal moment of my teenage life. It holds secrets I have yet to even admit to myself. My window alone knows the cause of the majority of my mental instabilities from the past three years. It let the "love of my life" in and out every time she was in town. It brought her the night my grandfather died; it brought her in the rain, when we were happy, when were fighting, when we were over, when we were back together. I'm leaving that window in eight days and I thought I would be happy about it. But right now, I am scared.

Bad Comedy

I forgot I had one of these...but now I actually have something to write about.

I went to an open mic night tonight at a comedy club in the lovely town of West Palm Beach. It was all guys. It was all horrible horrible comedy, mainly about masturbation (minus the friend I went to see who was delightful, witty, and not at all vulgar). This was probably because none of the guys who I saw tonight have actually had sex with a real live woman--they were gross, homophobic, and sexist. Not witty, not delightful, not shockingly funny. Just gross. Extremely gross.
I generally try not to be a "man-hater" but tonight I felt overwhelmingly thankful that I have no natural inclinations to date men.
What was even more shocking however was that people were actually laughing. Apparently gay-bashing jokes are hysterical. The same guy who spent five minutes crudely making fun of gay men (including an AIDS joke...WTF?!???!? I hate people) later hit on me with this classic line..."Yea I like that plaid dress...can I have a picnic on you?" Exact words.
He was also three inches shorter than me...I'm 5'3".

I've been wanting to try stand-up comedy for a while now but I'm not sure Palm Beach County is my crowd. There were no women, no (out) homos, and no actual funny jokes.
Unless I start doing jokes about banging strippers, creating a remote control for "my woman", and not wanting to get in a fight with a gay guy because I might get AIDS, I might as well not try to make the average Palm Beach Improv Open Mic Night attendee laugh.

My Parents Never Beat Me

I don't exactly plan on anyone reading this. I have always thought this sort of thing to be quite self-indulgent but I am an 18 year old girl, so self-indulgent is exactly what I am. Yesterday I decided to start writing my memoir. Four paragraphs later and I'm spent--I'm a bit of a procrastinator. I don't have much to write about so perhaps the stuff I write in this will fuel a page or two in my ridiculous attempt to be David Sedaris. I may never write past the four poorly written paragraphs that I've accomplished thus far but I had to write something because I thought of a title months ago. So here are the first couple of paragraphs that I have written for my never-to-be-finished memoir entitled...

"My Parents Never Beat Me"
A Memoir
(Kind Of)

I know what you’re thinking right now: “I wish Cher and Celine would do a double feature show in Vegas”. Me too, me too. Or perhaps you just looked me up on Google images and as your eyes scan this page you can hardly function because your heart has been punctured by the beauty of my face—it happens. Or maybe you just found out that I am merely a college student at a highly competitive liberal arts college intended mainly for well off daughters of lawyers. This, of course, prompts the question: “How could a girl with limited years of functioning life and an upper middle class suburban childhood write a memoir?” Honestly, I’m not quite sure.
I am writing as a bored eighteen year old girl living in the limbo that is the summer vacation before her first year of college. Right now I am somewhere in Palm Beach County, Florida (the place that ruined the 2000 presidential election) and in a matter of months I will be packing my bags with shoes, graphic t-shirts, mace, and a rape whistle in order to head off to college in the extraordinarily scary city of New York. I am fairly certain that only self-obsessed people carry rape whistles.
If I am lucky I will finish this memoir before I graduate from college, leaving me just enough time to get it published, become involved in a huge scandal (it’s good for publicity) and reap the benefits of my DUI arrest as my book flies off the shelves. This will of course supply me with enough money to pay off the inevitable debt that my private college has caused me to amass while also providing me with the same street cred that stars like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan so joyously bask in. Or, more likely, I will continue to be writing this at age thirty in my studio apartment where I run an underground Cuban cigar shop and own multiple cats. Either way, if you are reading this right now and it is bound in book form (with a cover and everything) then I must have finished writing it—go me!
It is probably important that I explain the title (and although I believe it to be quite self explanatory I am aware that most people are not very intelligent—not you of course—just those other people who may have foolishly stumbled across my moderately well written memoir). The title is a fact: My parents never beat me. They never sexually assaulted me. I was not impregnated by my uncle. My grandfather did not partake in the illegal sale of foreign plants (that I know of). Frankly, I was never even verbally assaulted, I only did the assaulting. My childhood was wonderful, my schooling was the best that the public school system had to offer, and I never starved unwillingly. I even managed to be gay without ever being kicked out of my house or made fun of by my peers. This is why the third line of the title, the (Kind Of), is the most important part of my memoir. Sure, I could write an entire book about how I often curled up in a ball and blasted Alanis Morissette while I wrote depressing poetry during my middle school years. But there was no real pain and suffering in that, just a lot of angst. What is more fun about my life thus far is the one I created for myself in my own head. I’ve always been an insatiable child; my own monotonous life does nothing to excite me. This (Kind Of) memoir is a home to stories, some true, and some fiction, but most a combination of the two. I often forget what has actually happened to me and what I have made up in order to keep myself from dozing off at the thought of my own boring life—so these stories won’t try to differentiate between the two, they will just be.