Toto, we're not in college anymore.

So it's time to grow up. It's time to enter the "real world", and have "real world dreams." As of right now my real world dreams involve re-entering the dreamy world of academia, where I can flounder some more in complicated philosophy and abstractness. I enjoy the challenge.  I enjoy the work and the thought.  Plus, I need to get away.  My life is akin to Accutane right now: all the bad stuff that was burried deep under my skin is being brought to the surface, it gets ugly, and is hard to deal with, but ultimately it will clear things up.  What I posted in my last entry is my biggest revelation. I'd never seen things in that light, I'd always just blame myself, or become enraged and not understood exactly why.  Now, finally, I have control through understanding and that feels pretty damn awesome. There is still frustration and hurt; I'd have to be demented and disturbed not to feel that way upon occasion.  That aside, I can see through the bullshit and I'm ready to get on with my life.  I'm not the crazy one.  I'm all grown and I got my real world dreams to conquer.

"Even God can't change the past." - Agathon.

Well...

Well, I've been writing longer posts.  They take the more committed audience to read. I enjoy the shorter ones just as much, maybe even more.  They're more catered to our A.D.D. generation of tweets and status updates, where the amount you write is curtailed by the vector you've chosen.  It's true: there's power in briefness.  And it's also true: there is advantage in catering to others (to some extent).  So, here I am, posting something short.  Just to mix it up.  Again.

Something To Do

Well, despite the fact that I have a very, very limited audience (maybe 1 person, and even then, I'm sure they only tune in upon occasion), blogging is something to do.  It's different from physical journaling (where I have consistantly indulged in and mulled over my own personal melodrama's from the time I was 8 years old till now) simply because here, on the internet, there is the possibility of an audience.  Sending a message in a bottle out to sea is a good analogy.  Maybe someone will read this, or maybe they won't.  That simple fact significantly changes the tone of my musings.  This might seem obvious, but I still find it interesting.

The other day I was reading over my journal from 8th grade.  Most entries are personal. They're the sad and self depricating thoughts of my pre-pubescent, confused, lonely self.  6th, 7th, and 8th grades (10-13 y.o.) were very painful times for young Sophia.  One typical entry read as such: "Dear Journal, I am disliking my life right now.  I don't think I'll go out for recess tomorrow.  I don't like going out for it, or at least not right now. XO Sophia." The majority of the journal continues in this sad, vague manner, until entries written during an 8th grade sleepover trip to Washington D.C. These entries assume a significantly different tone: "Dear Journal, I have so much to tell you!  Washington is so fun!"  I was lying; Washington was no fun at all.  I was lying because I feared (or maybe hoped) a classmate would snoop and read what I was writing.

A little background: I had been enrolled in the same small school from the time I was 5 until 13, and at age 10 I had lost all my friends and remained a loner until I switched schools for 9th grade.  To describe my past loneliness in a nutshell, I often tell people this debacle: during lunch time our grade of 30 kids were assigned to sit freely at 4 different tables; all the other kids would squeeze into 3 tables, and I would sit at the 4th.  Each day various kids would shyly or carelessly come up and ask me if they could take an extra chair so that they could squeeze into a more sociable table. I wasn't exactly a geek, and I certainly wasn't popular, I was just alone.  And so my journal became my sole confidant.

The D.C. entry continues: "Well, first we went to Burger King, which was fun, but I brought my own lunch because I don't really eat fast food.  I went to the bathroom with Katie, Lindsay, and Marley, and we were all gossiping about boys, which was funny.  I found out that Javier and Marley are dating! But then when I came out of the stall they had all left and then I couldn't find them, so I went back into the bus and at lunch there with the teachers.  Next we went to the hotel, and none of our room keys worked, so we all had to go get different ones! Cheap hotels, haha!"  You get the subtext.  I was trying to seem light, positive, just in case someone was reading. 

During those years the words of my mother constantly reverberated in my head: "Nobody likes a downer," and my inner thoughts were almost always "downers."  I'd have to have been mentally slow, or completely removed from reality, for them not to be.  But I wasn't, and reality was hating recess, trying to spend the majority of lunch time in the nurses office or in the bathroom, and watching from a distance as my hopeless crushes flirted with other girls and occasionally slipped me snide remarks about my bad skin or deficient softball skills.

Anyway, the point is: personal reality is always distorted when there is even the chance of some sort of audience.  And, with language, there is always an audience.  Even personal journals are a projection that don't fully capture a persons interiority; words themselves can't capture that.  As Beckett said: "The danger lies in the certainty of identifications."  Our own insides can never be fully verbalized, considering we often can't understand them ourselves, and language will never fully suffice. Yet we try, and we try, because we're social animals. Even alone at a lunch table, or sequestered in the nurses office faking an illness to avoid peer contact, we're still social animals.  And we'll still try to get ourselves, or others to understand. 

I feel like people are analogous to rooms across the hall from each other: close enough that they're able to open the doors and talk, maybe even venture into the other persons room for some brief, telling moments, yet they'll never know what it's like to live in the other room.  Some hopefuls, who believe in soul mates, think that some people have always lived in one proverbial room ("Two people, one thought,") and just have the task of finding each other.  I'm not a complete pessimist, but in my honest opinion, this kind of connection could only exist with significant construction, and a lot of demolition.  And even still, with ourselves as our audience, most people seem to be in the closets of their own rooms.  Closets of denial, distortion, and delusion.  Ok, this analogy has gone on long enough.

So Here I Go Again, On My Own

"Walking down the only road I've ever known.  Like a drifter I was born to walk alone. And I've made up my mind, I've wasted enough time..." or something.  Those are lyrics from a once popular White Snake song, "Here I Go Again," which was my mantra and personal moto for many years.  Perhaps it still continues to be.  It's a nice rationalization, or musical verbalization, of that alone feeling I often get.

At one point the song was also my favorite ballad to request at the Swan's Tuesday Karioke Night.  The Swan was an "older persons" bar over on West 15th street that served food during the day and catered to old, alcoholic regulars at night.  The owner would often be stumbling around, drunkenly ranting about the bar's new wall paper and his wife's inability (or unwillingness) to leave their apartment upstairs.  He was drunk and old enough to allow people to smoke cigarettes inside the bar, despite the illegality of it, and this is what initially attracted my friends and I there. Then we found out that Tuesday's were Karioke night and we became once-a-week regulars.

My boyfriend at the time, an aspiring singer and musician, would usually get up sing some Sublime song:
"Early in the morning, rising to my feet, light me up that cigarette and I got shoes on my feet."  He sung it with such passion, as if to prove his validity as a singer to a bar full of no-one-listening-except-me.  Even though his seriousness peeved me, I would always congratulate him with a kiss and a few words of praise.  Personally, I was, and still am, too bashful to sing in front of an "audience" without being 3+ drinks deep, so I would often pass the responsibility onto an Asian bartender with a good voice.  This bartender enjoyed Karioke, sung whenever customers weren't, and would sing my favorite White Snake ballad when I requested him to.  He once complained that it was a difficult song to sing, but despite this he always sung it amazingly.  In my head I would sing along and secretly criticize myself for relating to an 80's hair-metal song so intensely.

Sometimes, if had surpased my 3+ drink threshold, I would get up and sing Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart," but that was on rare occassions.  I remember believing that my boyfriend was embarrassed of my bad voice, and while feeling slightly discouraged by this insecurity, I would sing in defiance to it, wanting to prove to him that Karioke was basically invented for drunken fools with bad voices, and not only aspiring singers.

Alas, much has changed since those days.  That was in highschool, and during the first two years of college.  We stopped going to the Swan when Tuesdays were converted from Karioke-Night to Tranny's-Fraternize-with-Sexually-Deviant-Old-Men-Night.  My friends and I discovered this the hard way, by walking into the bar and being glared at by a community of people we clearly did not belong to, and feeling extremely out of place for around 30 seconds before leaving and saying to eachother, "What the fuck was that?"  But we all knew what it was: it was the end of our Tuesday tradition. 

Whether the Swan still exists or not, I don't know.  Last I heard it was going out of business.  Perhaps the Tranny-Night was a last ditch effort to attract a new and more lucrative crowd.  Who knows.

I do know that I ran into the Asian bartender approximately a year after the Tuesday tradition had ended.  I was out one night, at some "hipster" bar like Sweet & Vicious, and spotted him in the back of the room.  I ran over to him excitedly (and certainly over my 3+ drink threshold of bashfulness) and asked him if he remembered me, the girl who always asked him to sing Whitesnake at the Swan.  He looked at me, nodded, and turned away.  I don't know if the nod was meant to communicate "Yes I remember you," or "Whatever you just said, I don't really care," or "Don't mention my Karioke fetish in front of my friends."  But I took the rejection quietly and slumped away, thinking of how odd it is, the different resonances that the same moments have, shared amongst the same people.  He was just a man, singing on the job.  And I was just a girl, looking for answers in a ridiculous song.