Nobody Likes You When You’re 23…

The above title is a lyric from a popular song. I remember listening to this quirky song (What’s My Age Again   By Blink-182) when I was like…wow, I guess 12 or 13 (back when MTV actually played music videos) thinking that it’d be a pretty long time before I could actually relate, but well, here I am, about 10 years later…23 years old.

 

Through signing on facebook occasionally, I notice the “party of the weekend” is forever plastered in dozens of photo albums from the same groups of people that post these types of photos every week. Every week it’s the same thing, total and absolute intoxication for the entire world to see and I could careless because broadcasting your drunken weekend to the world hardly impresses me.

 

But there was a time not too long ago, where I found myself at the “hottest” party every Friday and Saturday, drinking myself into near comas with my favorite group of friends. There are hundreds of facebook photos floating around somewhere, with our koolaide smiles and glazed over eyes. No, nobody ever died, it was all in good fun and something for us to do (because we were probably too stupid to crack open a book).

 

Now that I’m older, I have bills to pay. I have responsibilities, a job and graduate school to worry about. Perhaps I’ve gotten a bit boring and predictable, but my priorities definitely have shifted and I am solely responsible for myself and my actions. My family can no longer be blamed for my epic failures as a person. No longer am I “anonymous” in this town, but now my name serves a purpose. I’m a “professional” now. No longer do I desire to go to these types of “freshman” parties. I went to one or two last semester, mainly to DD for my roommates, (who are still in their undergrad), but the parties are not the same to me anymore. I actually found myself feeling out of place, even though a good portion of the people there, were the same people throwing these parties when I was just 19. ..They’ve got to be pushing 25 and 26 by now.

 

A funny thing happens when you get older. Your priorities shift and change for the better. I’ve been “legal” for sometime now, and drinking until I can’t feel hasn’t crossed my mind in ages and why should it? I can legally drink in public and not get in trouble, there’s no need to “over do it”. I can take my time and not have to worry about cops (unless of course I decide to drive).  When I was 19 that was part of the adventure. Drinking openly in public, knowing goodness well I had no business doing so. It was something I never thought about doing back home (because I actually respected my parents and our home and so did my friends I grew up with), and something that only happened here, and occasionally at friend’s apartments in other college towns when we’d come to visit.  It’s flat out ridiculous to think we’d drive for hours just to crash at a friend’s place to drown ourselves in alcohol and fast food all weekend. One of my best friend’s at the time (my current roommate) and I would base our lives around these weekends. Looking back on it, we did some extremely outrageous things (trespassing onto the football stadium, urinating off of a bridge, jumping fences to run from the cops, stumbling around in the night holding each other up because we were to drunk to go at it alone), but always made sure that one of us stayed sober, in case one of us stopped breathing…

 

It’s not just my mentality about drinking that has changed, but my overall mind-set as well.  I’ve grown-up. I find myself losing interest in the people that I once hung around day in and day out for months on end, because they have yet to grow-up. We were inseparable. They just don’t excite me as they once did. They seem dead to me now, like lifeless skeletons in my past, only a distant memory through goofy photos or facebook messages. I hardly speak to these people, partly by choice, and partly by circumstance. I am removed from their world as they are from mine. We had good times (and some not so great times), but those times were in the past. These now 2-D people have been replaced by more sophisticated and intelligent people in my major and program, or lifelong friends from high school, who have grown up with me through it all. No, I don’t hate them, we just have nothing in common these days and I’ve grown bored with yesterday. I’ve surrounded myself by graduate students/alumni mainly because they can relate to me at this point in my life. They know how it feels to be an adult and have twenty-million things going on in your life on a daily basis. They know how it feels to have real world stresses, anxieties and concerns (outside of getting drunk). My roommate can no longer relate to me because he is in a different stage in his life, therefore we really have nothing to talk about these days besides the weather. He doesn’t get my life (yet), and I get his, I’m just moving forward.  Our lives are returning to their parallel states, as they did before we met in college. It’s funny to think of all the stages our friendship went through, to end up right where we began. Everything changes when you walk across that stage, get a job, and mommy and daddy stop paying for everything. It wakes you up and reality places a choke hold on you. It breaks you. He’ll find that out sooner or later. Hopefully he’s prepared, because it aint gonna be pretty. I warned him.

 

I’ve also gotten a better grasp on what really matters to me and what doesn’t. What upsets me and what doesn’t, who I can trust and who I can’t and I have to say that I’m getting fairly good at knowing these things from the start.

 

 I’m real. I’ve never believed in being fake in social situations. There’s no need for me to apologize to anyone for who I am and what I’ve come to be. It’s not worth it. If you can’t even be real to other people (such as your friends), how are you going to be real to yourself? As mean as it sounds, I’m generally up front about how I feel about certain situations and people. There’s no need to hide that. If I’m open enough to feel that, there’s probably a good enough reason why. It’s not that I go around hating people on purpose; it really does take a lot to get me to that point. I like to live by the motto, “everyone is innocent until proven guilty.” Some people prove that statement to be real from the get go, others epically lose my trust upon introduction.

 

I’m learning to be more selfish. In the past, I’ve done everything for everybody that I possibly could, only making myself very unhappy. I’ve learned that as the years fly by, some people are inconsolable and will never be happy regardless of what you do for them. Some people in my life actually were selfish enough not to care that they were straining my emotions and continued to do so anyway. From now on, I have to focus on making myself happy too. I have to do things for me, as well as others in my life. I have to keep in mind that I matter as well.

 

I’m learning that laughing everyday does ease the pain. No matter how stressed out I get, I have to make time to laugh and smile. I also have to make time to cry. Crying in my mind is not necessarily a sign of weakness, but a sign of letting go of pent up emotion.  It’s liberating in a weird way. I rarely have the urge to physically cry and maybe that’s my been my problem all along.

 

 

Hopefully by this time next year, I’ll look back on this and laugh at how naive I was at 23, because now at 23, I’m looking back on 22, 21, 20, 19 and so on, wondering how I made it through the ridiculous string of bullshit that I did.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

About Friends

I apologize about the lack of blogging up here, but elements in my academic, personal and professional life have hindered me from really sitting down and putting pen to paper, or in my case fingers to key board.

 

Here’s an entry I posted on my personal blog. I typically write about more personal everyday occurrences in that blog and felt this entry was “deep enough” to have a home here as well.

 

 

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Taken from my personal blog:

 

I slept fairly shitty last night, for an assortment of reasons. Number one though, was probably that discolored chicken sandwich lodged in my stomach I had while at Christine’s Birthday Dinner last night.

 

The birthday dinner was great, I don’t see many of my “band friends” these days, since I work and go to graduate school full time, Hell, I even saw my roommate for like 2 hours. That’s the longest length of time that I’ve seen him in ages.

 

Aside from this week being the typically hectic busy week at work and school, I think the strain of some events in my personal life are starting to affect me to the point where all I want to do is clam up and disclose no additional information to anyone about the comings and goings of my life. I get like this a lot when I feel vulnerable. I never like to appear weak and feeble (emotionally), so I just tuck it away in hopes that no one will notice. I guess Damian said it best once, that he feels like, “everyone comes to me with their problems, but no one has time to listen to mine.”

 

I feel like I spread myself extremely thin a lot of the time to please certain people in my life, and lately it’s gotten to the point where I’m like a rubberband banding together a stack of papers to high, liable to pop at any moment, scattering the assortment of papers everywhere. Just making an overall unorganized mess.

 

It’s those same people with their consistent issues that drain on you day in and day out, and the one day or week you’re feeling pretty low, they don’t “have time” or don’t care to listen to you…when you’ve inconvenienced yourself and others in your life to “be there for them” when they needed you all those times. It just goes to show you how some people really are.

 

A friend of mine also brought up an interesting topic to ponder on last night. He said and I paraphrase, “Being friends is hard.”

 

And it made me think for a second.

 

Is being friends really hard?

 

 

His response to a text message I sent him sent me into an utter spaz to survey of all of my friendships. I thought about every person I’ve befriend.

 

I have friendships that are flawless. We’ve gotten along perfectly, smooth sailing all the way, no problems.

 

And then I have friendships with bumpy roads. These are the friendships where we don’t always see eye to eye on everything. These are also the friendships that have made me stronger, quicker on my feet, and more observant and understanding towards other people. Ironically enough, until attending college/graduate school, I’ve never really had to deal with those “bumpy roads” in friendships. I guess all of my friends in high school were generally easy going people, with similar up-bringings, so we automatically understood each other better with little effort from either side.

 

And even my friends that I don’t always see eye to eye on with everything are just as important to me as my friends I see eye to eye on everything with. Matter of fact I like befriending people who are completely different from me. It makes me feel like I’m a better person for having “variety in my diet” so to speak. I could get all philosophical and go into specs, but you get the point I’m sure.

 

Hopefully up to this point, I haven’t offended anyone, if I have, I apologize, but these are just thoughts floating around in my mind. Feel free to stop reading here.

 

So I thought, and thought and thought about his statement. Thinking to myself, “Should being friends really be that hard?”

 

And I came up with two answers to that complex statement (not sure if he meant it to be this complex, but it could take on more than one meaning).

 

1. Friendships should not be something that drains you dry of all available emotion. The people that generally distress me to that point are also the people I vaguely consider associates (example, my co-workers) and tend to shy away from unless otherwise obligated to be around them. I generally don’t care to make an effort to hold hands and sing coom-ba-ya, I just tolerate them enough to get through the work day and go about my business. I don’t invest any real time into them.

Like any relationship (family orientated, romantic, or otherwise) though, it is something that takes effort, but shouldn’t be anything that you are straining to do or entirely impossible to handle. I like to think that the more “walls” you knock down, the easier it is to understand each other.

 

1. My second answer to this is yes: by “hard” it takes some effort. You can’t just sit around frozen and completely detached from the world and expect someone to forcefully “get to know you”. Or “understand you” until you give them some substance and reveal yourself to them on who you really are as a person. It just doesn’t work that way. I doubt anyone wants to put that much effort to anyone that frozen. I’m not saying the way I approach friendships is “the right way,” but I generally like to consider everyone innocent until proven guilty, in other words I don’t like to make assumptions about my friends until they’ve otherwise cleared them up. It can also be “hard” in the sense that you have to actually make efforts to keep in touch (go figure, eh). I have friends from high school that attend college hundreds of miles away in other states, and although I don’t talk to them regularly (because both of us are busy with our lives), we still make an effort to meet up over holidays (when we’re both in our home town) or exchange emails and phone calls from time to time just to say “hello”. No, it’s not “easy”, but it’s worth it because we’re friends. I still consider these people some of my closest friends. I have friends that live minutes from me right here in Greenville that I see less than my friends in other states (^see paragraph 2 from above). And outside elements (outside of everyone’s control) may have contributed to that.

 

So to sum everything up, yes, a friendship is not a “piece of cake” or a “walk in the park” (geez, I need to stop using these catch phrases), it is something that takes effort from both parties involved. And the effort should be mutual, not one sided, causing one person to feel strained, or pulled or neglected. No one likes to feel neglected. And although it takes effort, it shouldn’t be something painfully forced, or obligated, because otherwise, what’s the point in investing time into someone that won’t invest time into you? You’d be better off cutting your losses and saving your energy for another friend.

 

Clearly I have a lot to learn about myself and how I handle these types of situations. Perhaps I read entirely too much into his statement, but it just completely caught me off guard because I’ve never heard that before. He probably meant nothing by it, really, but he brought up a good point for me to ponder on. Hopefully this friend of mine doesn’t consider our friendship to be, “a strain”, because I really am trying to better friend to him and all of my other friends in general. Regardless of our differences, I really do see him as a good friend and I hope he sees me in the same light.

 

 

Well, if you read all of that AND understood it AND didn’t get too offended, 2 cookies for you! Whew, I’m glad I got that complicatedness off of my chest. Now I can exhale and look forward to the weekend! 2.5 days of pure ridiculousness with my best friends and after the week I’ve had, I surly do need a “mini-vacation” from my day-to-day life.

 

Here’s to good friendships , may they be ever lasting.

What happens in Text Msg stays in text msg…

In between my fumbles of getting ready for bed last night, I caught the tail end of a joke from a comedian on the popular t.v. show Comic View (on B.E.T). And the butt of the comic’s punch line was this:

 

You can say whatever you want in a text message, as long as you put “lol” or a smiley face at the end of it….Your baby’s ugly…lol….I can’t stand you, your breath stinks, smiley face with the wink….

 

This grabbed my attention because it’s so true! In any form of technical communication, it can be hard to really tell if a person is joking around or not. Particularly if you cannot read through their dry sarcastic nature (ahem)—or maybe their just generally a mean spirited person, and only choose to show you that side through a text message, allowing you to assume that they are joking, when in terms they really don’t like you (yeesh, let’s hope not!). I’ll tell you this, if I don’t like you, I doubt I’ll waste the time or energy to respond to your dangling text message. In fact I assume if I didn’t like you, you would text message me in the first place. I won’t even go into the specs of how generally awful my grammar is when sending text messages. Here I am, an English major working on a M.A. and I hardly even use punctuation, full words or appropriate abbreviations.

 

Nah, it can’t be that deep. I’ll tell you this, text messaging to me is my lazy way of getting answers and killing idle time. Gone are the days of drawn out phone conversations, face to face interaction, lengthy emails, even Aim conversations to me are becoming a bit obsolete as of late. I just don’t have time to waste my life sitting in front of a computer or having a phone attached to my head, particularly when I just need an answer. Although, I will occasionally shoot out emails to get a point across (like at work, when cell phone usage is a little unprofessional).

 

Example: Me: What time are you done with class?

                    Friend: Noon. You wanna grab lunch?

                    Me: Sure, meet you at the dinning hall.

 

Simple A & B exchange which generally takes all of a few short minutes as opposed to forcing out an awkward (indecisive and distractive) phone conversation in which one of you are generally being interrupted from something more important…namely sleep…or I my case work.

 

This sounds selfish, but I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. And I’m not anti-phone conversation or email, there’s just a time and place. And well, certain people hold the special powers of allowing me to actually care how their day went, while 50% the people in my life do not, at least not on a daily basis.

 

Like for instance my parents…they call me daily and ask me the same questions, but I know it is because they love me. How was your day? What did you do?They’ve been asking me these same two questions everyday since I started pre-school. I’ve learned to accept that they are probably going to continue this ritual until both of them become senile or just stop generally caring about my lackluster life. Either or, we’ve got a good 20 more years to go…

 

Now I know I’m skipping around here, but I’d like to point out that I’m quicker to respond to an email or text message than I am a voicemail or a hand written letter. Something about both forms of communication just seem a little obsolete to me. And well, I’m lazy. I generally hate talking on the phone with anyone. There’s always this gaping hole of awkwardness….and one person always seems to feel that they are interrupting the other one’s life. Although on the flip side, if a good friend or family member calls, I’ll generally talk to them, even if I’m not in the mood or I’m slightly tied up. I’m horrible about returning calls though, I might as well not even have voicemail, because I often forget to check it. Even with the little envelop icon flashing at me (it’s been up there for a good week). Let’s not even get into dropping calls on the network—that’s an entirely different song and dance. Perhaps I should seek out therapy for this, I’m sure it’s not normal. It’s best to just call back if it’s that important. I apologize for my forgetfulness…I’m a little absent-minded at times.

 

So in short, I prefer text messaging for the quick simple answers in life. Like, where are we going to eat? Where do I meet you? What time do you get off of work? If I have something more substantial or serious to say, I’d generally leave that for face to face interaction, because it’s hard to generally tell someone’s true mood/feelings through a computer screen.

 

So do I really mean everything I say through a text message? Do I just say mean and surly things neatly wrapped up with smiley faces or an “lol’s” for shits and giggles? Well, you’d have to be the judge of that, for I refuse to share those details on a blog post .

 

Happy texting…;)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Conventions of Blogging Part Duex.

I’ll admit my feathers were a little ruffled when I received a string of reasons of why I should follow ‘the conventions of blogging’….I guess I felt personally attacked or sought out for no reason. After speaking with a friend of mine [broken over several email, text and phone conversations] I am getting on a grasp on what he was trying to communicate to me…well, I suppose. If I missed the point again, oh well, I tried.

 

Anyway, after careful consideration & intense boredom over a 15 hour day of flying, I decided to take a friend’s advice and read up of the principals of blogging. I typically do not dive into academic reading [unless it is directly related to school since it directly concerns my major], but I needed a mental challenge. Plus being on planes for the better part of the day required some serious entertainment outside of watching the clouds roll by.

 

I believe the first article my friend gave me was entitled:

Blogging as a Social Action; A Genre Analysis of the Weblog [http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/blogging_as_social_action.html]. Although this academic article was very informative in discussing the origins of the blog, its characteristics, and a detailed analysis of the genre, it didn’t particularly tell me anything that I wasn’t already personally aware of. It was very informative though, I give it that. Yes, I agree with the article in saying that even as unconventional as blogs are, they still have conventions—only as far as things like blogs typically discuss certain topics or tell a story [through words or pictures], typically have one more authors, can be found on the internet and may have a date…all of those academic bulleted points…I’m sure if time permitted, I was in school and generally cared to write a thesis on this, I’d go on, but I’ll save anyone the boredom.

 

On the flip side though, everyone’s blogs are different. They are a personal form of expression and that is all I’ve been trying to drill into anyone’s heads since day one. You cannot tell someone that their blog has to be in chronological order [although it would be more user friendly in some environments], or has to have a certain amount of posts per page, or even follow a specific theme or color scheme. It needs to be up to the writer and what they feel comfortable with. They are personal forms of expression that open the reader’s eyes to just who the writer is as a person. Blogs are a place for the writer to openly express themselves freely.

 

I know from personal experience that I communicate better through my writing than I can through words. It’s just a simple fact. I feel more comfortable discussing the ins and outs of my life on a blog as opposed to stumbling through an awkward conversation with friends over the specific details of my life. I’m more likely to fully explain in that way than in person. I don’t particularly care to have a world-wide fan base either, in fact I  prefer to have a few close few who generally care about my well-being outside of an internet site to read my posts here and there.

 

My friend also gave me a book concerning how to write a successful blog. I read this one on my flight back from Mexico. I’ll admit I didn’t read it cover to cover, but I did read specific chapters that I found personally appealing [how to make a blog user-friendly, how to market your blog, how to make money, write with the assumption that even your grandmother may read your blog, etc.] I found the book to be useful in brushing up this hobby of mine. It helped with opening my eyes to little house-keeping things without being extremely demanding or compromising of my freedom of expression.

 

So there, I took time out of my life to sit down and humble myself. While yes, doing this did open my eyes to some new ideas, I think I’ll continue to just write as I’ve been writing….with no particular purpose or goal other than clearing my mind.

 

With that being said, onward to blogging!

 

And to my friend: The offer still stands to try out a little blogging, I’m sure you’ll fall in love with it

PS: I realize certain parts of the html transferred horribly from ms word—but I don’t care to dive in a change it.

Music Speaks

If I had to choose one thing that I couldn’t live without, hands down I would choose music. Music has gotten me through some of my darkest days, followed me through my proudest moments, reminds me of the good times, bad times and young times etc.. From morning to night music plays some sort of role in my life, rather I am listening to it, singing it, playing it or watching someone play it. Music tells a story and often speaks to people more than they think and if I go a day without it, I feel empty.

 

 I thought about that the other day while watching a friend of mine play a gig in this quirky little tea café’ downtown. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from him or the gig, seeing as how the only thing I had ever heard him sing had been Michael McDonald’s ‘I keep forgettin’, (at our weekly trivia night and it was a joke). But as I sat there listening to him seriously sing and play his own original work (on guitar and harmonica), I took a glance around the room a few times. Everyone in that room dug him. Some of those people probably weren’t even there to specifically see him, but when they stopped in and saw him performing they became locked in a trans. I don’t know about everyone else in there, but a lot of his songs reminded me of past relationships gone wrong, love interests, traveling, holidays and so on. It took me back to specific times in my life. It commanded my entire attention.

 

 Then it came to me. Rock Stars or Musicians shall I say, are some of the most interesting people you’ll ever meet. Now I’m not talking about Brittany Spears or Milli Vanilli (didn’t think I knew who that was, did you), but realmusicians. Luther Vandross, Maroon 5, Sara Barellies, Ne-yo, Mariah Carey, (…fill in the space with your favorite band here…) etc. These people have the unique gift of communicating with their audiences through song, rather it be sad or happy, they connect with their audiences all over the world, from all walks of life.

 I guess that’s why growing up I’ve always been automatically connected with other musicians. Being in band in school through-out much of my life has given me that advantage of expressing myself in other ways besides words.

 

 Outside of the tea gig, I hadn’t really talked to my friend about anything outside of the here and now. He just seemed like a typical happy-go-lucky nice kid that goes to school and occasionally likes to mimic/quote music and television shows. Almost as if I had only met his outer layer. As a musician, that kid sheds light on a lot more than what’s on the surface and becomes 3-D (figuratively speaking of course). It’s like he was telling the audience why he is the way he is. What’s occurred in his life to mold and construct who he is as a person.

 

 My point here is that music says what words cannot. It’s that happy medium for times when words just won’t do. I mean my friend could have just told me, “Yeah, I had this girlfriend who cheated on me,” but hearing that through a song places more emphasis on the situation and the emotion involved. Music conducts some sort of mood or feeling deep down inside of you, and often times helps you relate to a similar time frame in your life.

 

 Music always has been, currently is and always will be a part of my life.

 

 PS: Check out the website to hear some of the great music I described from that gig:  http://personal.ecu.edu/DMT0925/