Hello, I Dislike You Intensely. Have a Nice Day.
Entries #64 to #70.
Winter break and now I’m thinking it’s more a curse than a blessing. I didn’t know what the fuck to do with myself. I’ve done everything I possibly could to try and find something out. But texts and pleading to an answering machine (Hello?...Oh hey...Oh really?...Yeah, I'd love to let you go on, but see, the thing is, I'm not actually here, this is just a recording. Sorry 'bout that. Leave your name and number if I don't already know, and I'll get back to you for real sometime soon. This is Alex's phone, by the way. It killed me in new ways) have still yielded no results.
I punched a wall. It didn’t make me feel better, it made me feel weaker. I thought about binging, but food bored me after a while. I tried blasting music and dancing but I was too tired. I tried lying down and singing along to soft songs but I kept going hoarse.
I just…
--
Christmas night. Stared at parades on the TV and slept through the day. The knit gloves and scarf set I’d bought for Alex, along with a four-page long love letter of sorts I’d written, sits rejected on my desk. My mother gave me a pretty cloth-bound notebook, a poetry anthology, and a nice, thick cardigan coat. The comfort of material things did make the pain a lot more tolerable, I’m almost ashamed to say. Money is a good analgesic. I gave her a canvas bag with Munch’s Madonna screen-printed on the side, and a new cell phone because she was always complaining about hers. Dad will probably send us some fancy brand of coffee machine or something of the sort. We sent him a perishable wreath and a hokey signed card.
We don’t have a tree because Mom hasn’t been a practicing Catholic since she was 10 and she hates secular families who make a big deal out of their “Christ”mas trees when they don’t even believe in Jesus. It’s definitely ridiculous and probably even hypocritical. I mean, you don’t see everyone buying menorahs on Hanukkah or black-people-menorahs on Kwanzaa (yes, I’m politically incorrect), or whatever. You get my point.
--
I mean, the more I think about it, the excessive commercialization of holidays has just become really, really embarrassing. It’s not like stores that hold “Christmas blowouts” even need the money, and they probably don’t even truly appreciate the holiday. But on the other hand, everyone (and therefore every store) has the right to celebrate something. And the logical way for a store to celebrate is by having sales.
Maybe it’s the increasingly commercialized culture. America is the largest consumerist culture in the world. Indulging in the thing that defines one’s culture is a perfectly legitimate way to celebrate something. Of course the media and capitalism have something to do with it too. There’s the bombardment of advertising that no one is immune to, and the reason those stores are so huge is because of capitalism (and corruption always helps too). Maybe the commercial association is no fault in our psyche, but as a resulting of conditioning. The advertising is so pervasive – storefronts, TV, radio, buses, mail, billboards – that in our minds correlation has become meaning.
America gets rich by making people feel bad about what they don’t have, and it’s thanks to the media. Wearing the guise of celebration is perfect. (I get that the media is a good thing too. It’s just ridiculous excessive here.) And what is it all for, anyway? What does the money even mean to them anymore? I get having enough money to be comfortable and not having to worry about going broke. I actually think the monetary system is a good one. But again, it’s come to mean too much. (I know Mom is all for utopian societies, but I’m not that noble. I don’t want to mow someone’s lawn or babysit their kids for something they gave me if I can just hand them a few slips of paper. I wonder if there’s possibly a way to combine the two systems.)
Anyway, I’ve lost track of what I was trying to say. Or what the point of this even is.
Commercialization is a side effect of America; it’d be silly to go out and protest it. After all it’d be almost like calling for the dismantlement of the advertising business, the economic system, and our cultural values. Not going to happen. Lives aren’t even at stake. All it is, is depressing.
--
This is hopeless. It’s been four days. I feel like he’s never coming back.
--
A week. There’s nothing to say anymore, nothing that I’ve not already said. I’m just marking time. Clocks and light and shadow are meaningless to me. They all go in circles; for all I know I’ve been living the same day over and over for days now. There’s no linear form of timekeeping around here. My calendar is from 2008, I only kept it because each month had a painting from a famous artist. And even then, why do I want a linear way to mark the time? What is it leading to? If anything, don’t I want time to not lead to anything? Not if he won’t be there. What could it lead to? His possible return, that I just can’t feel optimism for. Already he seems like a dream – how is that possible, after all we had? It scares me. Time could also lead to my getting over it. But I don’t want to. I just can’t, not right now, not anytime close to now. Living with it is excruciating, yes, it’s like living in a medieval rack, feeling cartilage rip and my limbs slowly drifting farther away; or alternately that my body is an ever constricting cage of bone, crushing in on my organs and the possible existence of a soul. But being “over it”, being out in the world and smiling and singing and dancing and laughing and ordering food and paying bus fare and not letting it hurt me any more – that’s an absurdity to me. There’s nowhere to go.
--
12 days. I’m getting a new shrink because even Mom sees that this Woodrow Carpenter guy isn’t doing anything. Well, I guess that’s not completely true. He only works off of what I tell him, which is not much. And of course I didn’t tell him about Alex disappearing, otherwise known as the reason I’m suddenly worse.
--
School starts again the day after tomorrow. No, please, this can’t be. I never want to go back there, never want to smile again if I don’t mean it, never want to make small talk with people I don’t care to know, never want to take notes about something that’ll never do me any good, never want to hear again the seven monotonous dings that dictate when to go where and punish you if you don’t follow them exactly, never want to hear people saying bullshit just to look cool in front of people they want to impress, never want to walk down the halls during passing periods looking at everyone who is more confident in their walk than I could ever be in all my actions combined, never want to be around the people who gauge someone’s social status before deciding how to act, who to be, around them, never want to see the cholas that shave off their eyebrows and draw on pencil-thin lines and wear lipliner with no lipstick, never want to hear the popular kids talking about shit that makes me wonder why they’re even popular, at best they’re really just average people but why does everyone make that distinction, I don’t get it, never want to see the goth kids who claim to be the archenemies of the popular kids but they’re just as clique-y and bitchy about it, never want to see the thespians, dancers, art freaks because they’re all exhibitionists, never want to see the indie kids who make sure to loudly mention some impossibly obscure band or writer whenever someone not of their group passes by, never want to see the band kids or Asians who never hang out with anyone else, never want to see the fashion victims whose outfits are really kind of terrible but who shoot down your outfit if you say anything about it to them, never want to see the junkies with their needle scars dry-heaving proudly by the bike racks, never want to see the gangsters who can’t lay off on the cologne and whose underwear is in my face every time I’m stuck behind one of them on the stairs, never want to see the teachers with receding hairlines that all had dreams of being something instead of a teacher, never, never, never want anything to do with any of them again.
And now I feel like I’ve given myself a brain hemorrhage.
But who am I kidding? I’m just as bad as any of them.
I punched a wall. It didn’t make me feel better, it made me feel weaker. I thought about binging, but food bored me after a while. I tried blasting music and dancing but I was too tired. I tried lying down and singing along to soft songs but I kept going hoarse.
I just…
--
Christmas night. Stared at parades on the TV and slept through the day. The knit gloves and scarf set I’d bought for Alex, along with a four-page long love letter of sorts I’d written, sits rejected on my desk. My mother gave me a pretty cloth-bound notebook, a poetry anthology, and a nice, thick cardigan coat. The comfort of material things did make the pain a lot more tolerable, I’m almost ashamed to say. Money is a good analgesic. I gave her a canvas bag with Munch’s Madonna screen-printed on the side, and a new cell phone because she was always complaining about hers. Dad will probably send us some fancy brand of coffee machine or something of the sort. We sent him a perishable wreath and a hokey signed card.
We don’t have a tree because Mom hasn’t been a practicing Catholic since she was 10 and she hates secular families who make a big deal out of their “Christ”mas trees when they don’t even believe in Jesus. It’s definitely ridiculous and probably even hypocritical. I mean, you don’t see everyone buying menorahs on Hanukkah or black-people-menorahs on Kwanzaa (yes, I’m politically incorrect), or whatever. You get my point.
--
I mean, the more I think about it, the excessive commercialization of holidays has just become really, really embarrassing. It’s not like stores that hold “Christmas blowouts” even need the money, and they probably don’t even truly appreciate the holiday. But on the other hand, everyone (and therefore every store) has the right to celebrate something. And the logical way for a store to celebrate is by having sales.
Maybe it’s the increasingly commercialized culture. America is the largest consumerist culture in the world. Indulging in the thing that defines one’s culture is a perfectly legitimate way to celebrate something. Of course the media and capitalism have something to do with it too. There’s the bombardment of advertising that no one is immune to, and the reason those stores are so huge is because of capitalism (and corruption always helps too). Maybe the commercial association is no fault in our psyche, but as a resulting of conditioning. The advertising is so pervasive – storefronts, TV, radio, buses, mail, billboards – that in our minds correlation has become meaning.
America gets rich by making people feel bad about what they don’t have, and it’s thanks to the media. Wearing the guise of celebration is perfect. (I get that the media is a good thing too. It’s just ridiculous excessive here.) And what is it all for, anyway? What does the money even mean to them anymore? I get having enough money to be comfortable and not having to worry about going broke. I actually think the monetary system is a good one. But again, it’s come to mean too much. (I know Mom is all for utopian societies, but I’m not that noble. I don’t want to mow someone’s lawn or babysit their kids for something they gave me if I can just hand them a few slips of paper. I wonder if there’s possibly a way to combine the two systems.)
Anyway, I’ve lost track of what I was trying to say. Or what the point of this even is.
Commercialization is a side effect of America; it’d be silly to go out and protest it. After all it’d be almost like calling for the dismantlement of the advertising business, the economic system, and our cultural values. Not going to happen. Lives aren’t even at stake. All it is, is depressing.
--
This is hopeless. It’s been four days. I feel like he’s never coming back.
--
A week. There’s nothing to say anymore, nothing that I’ve not already said. I’m just marking time. Clocks and light and shadow are meaningless to me. They all go in circles; for all I know I’ve been living the same day over and over for days now. There’s no linear form of timekeeping around here. My calendar is from 2008, I only kept it because each month had a painting from a famous artist. And even then, why do I want a linear way to mark the time? What is it leading to? If anything, don’t I want time to not lead to anything? Not if he won’t be there. What could it lead to? His possible return, that I just can’t feel optimism for. Already he seems like a dream – how is that possible, after all we had? It scares me. Time could also lead to my getting over it. But I don’t want to. I just can’t, not right now, not anytime close to now. Living with it is excruciating, yes, it’s like living in a medieval rack, feeling cartilage rip and my limbs slowly drifting farther away; or alternately that my body is an ever constricting cage of bone, crushing in on my organs and the possible existence of a soul. But being “over it”, being out in the world and smiling and singing and dancing and laughing and ordering food and paying bus fare and not letting it hurt me any more – that’s an absurdity to me. There’s nowhere to go.
--
12 days. I’m getting a new shrink because even Mom sees that this Woodrow Carpenter guy isn’t doing anything. Well, I guess that’s not completely true. He only works off of what I tell him, which is not much. And of course I didn’t tell him about Alex disappearing, otherwise known as the reason I’m suddenly worse.
--
School starts again the day after tomorrow. No, please, this can’t be. I never want to go back there, never want to smile again if I don’t mean it, never want to make small talk with people I don’t care to know, never want to take notes about something that’ll never do me any good, never want to hear again the seven monotonous dings that dictate when to go where and punish you if you don’t follow them exactly, never want to hear people saying bullshit just to look cool in front of people they want to impress, never want to walk down the halls during passing periods looking at everyone who is more confident in their walk than I could ever be in all my actions combined, never want to be around the people who gauge someone’s social status before deciding how to act, who to be, around them, never want to see the cholas that shave off their eyebrows and draw on pencil-thin lines and wear lipliner with no lipstick, never want to hear the popular kids talking about shit that makes me wonder why they’re even popular, at best they’re really just average people but why does everyone make that distinction, I don’t get it, never want to see the goth kids who claim to be the archenemies of the popular kids but they’re just as clique-y and bitchy about it, never want to see the thespians, dancers, art freaks because they’re all exhibitionists, never want to see the indie kids who make sure to loudly mention some impossibly obscure band or writer whenever someone not of their group passes by, never want to see the band kids or Asians who never hang out with anyone else, never want to see the fashion victims whose outfits are really kind of terrible but who shoot down your outfit if you say anything about it to them, never want to see the junkies with their needle scars dry-heaving proudly by the bike racks, never want to see the gangsters who can’t lay off on the cologne and whose underwear is in my face every time I’m stuck behind one of them on the stairs, never want to see the teachers with receding hairlines that all had dreams of being something instead of a teacher, never, never, never want anything to do with any of them again.
And now I feel like I’ve given myself a brain hemorrhage.
But who am I kidding? I’m just as bad as any of them.
♠ ♠ ♠
Sorry if there were any typos (I feel like this one has a lot). Typo-paranoia. Yes.