Ryan, Heather, et al apparently got back from Summer Camp late yesterday, so I got to kick it with them today. Summer Camp sounds like an investment I need to plan for next summer -- Les Claypool played, as did The Wailers(!!). It's a hefty investment (Ryan dropped $350, including the admission price), and I'd need to buy food to eat, et cetera -- but it's certainly something I can save up for over a year, and it would be a nice "school's over" treat. Hopefully I'm at an okay place financially next summer and can go with them.

I don't have to work tomorrow, so I drank a considerable amount tonight. I would have much rather indulged in other habits, but that was not to be. Whatev. I was downing coffee all night as well, but it still hasn't helped me stay awake. My teenage years are officially over: I can no longer switch sleeping schedules over by ten hours just because I have a day off. Staying up very late will probably be an extremely rare occurrence this summer, I guess.

Magenta and John broke up recently, which is totally weird to me... They've been dating since I started hanging out with Ryan et al -- I suppose I've only really been spending a lot of time there since winter, and six months isn't a long time, but still... the dynamic is a little toxic right now. Apparently the break-up was one of the more amiable, considering both parties are in extremely bad places emotionally right now (John is bipolar and Magenta's doggie just died). Still... weirdness!

C came over for a little while, but left very quickly. She went out of her way to say goodbye to Dan and didn't even exchange pleasantries or a goodbye with me... but yeah, again, maybe I'm just reading too much into that situation. It worries me, though. I think I should make it a goal this summer not to rely so heavily on her for companionship -- maybe she's just getting tired of that reliance (or of me in general), and no wonder -- she's got a lot on her plate and a lot of her own shit that she has yet to deal with. I expect she's not in the most confident of places, despite appearances: when Dan told her that he and I might be rooming together come this winter (or next Spring), she felt the need to ask him if we were fucking -- since apparently the fact that I have a boyfriend and have never cheated on anyone in my life (and understand the delicate nature of her relationship with Dan) counts for absolutely nothing? Also: cough, there is no physical chemistry between Dan and myself and that is easily observed, cough. Sigh. I need to stop writing about this stuff and just talk it out with her -- I'm afraid to, though... I've never really had a serious conflict with her, and she is not the person to get into an argument with (and I have reason to suspect that a conversation about these things would definitely turn into a conflict of some sort). I'm sure if she ever read what I write here, she'd be incredibly hurt. Within the context of interpersonal conflict, she is capable of very effective and objective logic, but she also has a penchant for detached cruelty when she feels like it (which, when she gets into it with Dan, seems to be a regular occurrence -- I suspect that no one in his life has inspired and brought him down at the same time anymore than has C). It's not really fair of me to worry about that, though, since I've never really been a victim of it. We'll see. We'll see.

I'm looking forward to waking up tomorrow and doing an assload of work on "my little film". Dan told me to call him as soon as I wake up, but I think I'll need a few hours to edit and shiz before I get together with him -- I want something really substantial to give him tomorrow. When I talked to my mom recently, she chastised me for not just handing over the whole thing, rough edit and all. No one knows my writing habits better than my mom does -- she hasn't read much of my stuff, but she's seen me agonize for hours and days and weeks and months over editing and working toward a place where I won't be completely ashamed to let someone see my work. This is especially nerve-wracking for me with Green County -- I'm completely unused to seeing my work being performed by people, and I've never taken a playwriting class in my life (yikes!). I was up all through the wee hours on the eve of the first auditions, editing and sweating and puking from nervousness. When I did get to sleep, I had wicked, stereotypical nightmares of actors reading the lines and just laughing at their absurdity. Thankfully, that's not what happened -- the first audition went very well. We had a lot more people show up than I thought we would (still less than we needed -- hence the need for a second audition), and everyone seemed to genuinely enjoy reading the material back and forth. I remember when Paige was trying to do a play a couple years ago, she had a hard time finding people to audition -- and I have no doubt that she is the far superior playwright. Dan's experience helped me out a lot in that respect, though -- I think Paige could have benefited from someone who had a lot of acting connections back then. It would have been nice to act for her. Like, really nice. Even if I had to co-star with Lauren, who I still had major issues with back then.

Ah, well, I'm in a strange place tonight -- probably feeling a bit too sorry for myself. There's nothing like having a best friend who always picks up but never calls, and a wonderful boyfriend who happens to be 200 miles away to make you understand and truly feel the wasted potential of certain situations. Just enough satisfaction to make me feel utterly unsatisfied, you know? I hope that doesn't make me a completely unreasonable person.

My upper back is stinging with muscle pain. I played Halo with Gene for a couple hours tonight. The game is fun, but I think first-person shooter games are a little too real for me -- they make me incredibly tense. Takes me back to the good old days when my brother used to play me just to find creative ways to take my life(!).

Mei, Heather, and I had a really involved talk about sex today. I don't understand why nymphomania has such bad implications to it. Shouldn't female nymphos be every straight (or bi) guy's dream? Am I the one stereotyping now? And yet I have to offer the disclaimer that I'm hardly a nympho myself (fie, social conditioning!), but it's to the point that many men classify women who simply enjoy sex as nymphos. Personally, I have yet to meet a man I couldn't overwhelm in terms of sex-drive, but I guess since I don't widely advertise that fact (until now, I guess), it's not held against me. But, seriously: how backward is that? I hardly think that women have "weaker" sex-drives than men, even at my age (apparently, I'm not supposed to peak for another 15 years, and the men I've slept with peaked years ago - at 18). I think it gets mixed up in the mass conception because of the emotionality most women experience to some degree in the context of sex. It's not that we don't want to have a bunch of it, it's just that sleeping around without any sort of discrimination is extremely emotionally draining for us vagina-possessing folk. Of course, I know some women who can just turn that off, but not without causing some degree of emotional damage to themselves regardless of their remoteness.

Maybe I shouldn't waste my time thinking about such things -- they hardly seem important in the grand scheme of things these days. All I have to do is look at Tim's blog to be humbled by the political turmoil that drives him to the keyboard every day. I'm at the point where my focus in that context is just so consistently negative that I can't focus on it for long. I make a decent attempt to stay abreast of current issues compared to most people I know, but there's so much corruption and evil and mismanagement that it's hard to pick out any one thing to criticize from day-to-day.

I sat outside The Coffeehouse with a guy named Matt who used to work there and Yonathan, a young man from Ethiopia. He had a lot of questions about the way the economy is set up in this country and the structure of government. We had a very long, involved conversation, and I learned a lot about Ethiopia, but in the end it just left me feeling so down (albeit intellectually stimulated), that I just wanted to go home, lose myself in a few hours of music downloading and forget about the world outside my window.

Well, it's after 11:30, and I promised I'd call Jimmy back before I went to bed, so I should probably cut myself off before I ramble myself to death. Peace.

Labels: Chrissy, Dan, Green County, Hetherington, Magenta, Paige, politics, Ryan et al, Summer Camp, Tim, Yonathan

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