12 XI 2001 - 23:08 - tristitia6

I suppose a good title for this entry would be "The One In Which He Admits To Being A Teenager." Except, no, because I have this nice thing going where no one can actually understand my entry titles, yaar, so I think I'll continue that.

Life's been interesting recently, both of the good and the bad. T. gets "I told you so" points for predicting correctly what was wrong with my foot; she also gets points for predicting what they'd do (freeze it with liquid nitrogen!) Torrential rain; the gutter backed up at almost every street corner in San Francisco, it seemed; the one by my house backed up probably around 6 (because I went outside to get the paper and noticed that there was a huge puddle); by 7, the water was deep enough that it was covering a good part of the sidewalk and starting to go up onto the corner lot's lawn. Also, scary hard rain during my Latin test, which I don't feel so good about. But at least this doesn't look to be a drought year (great, we'll have floods instead.) Of the bad is a little emotional issue that doesn't have to do with me and that I'm not free to talk about but which still affects me. So yeah.

And of the comic there is, you know, the one-sided UST that goes on in every teenager's life and is probably the only thing animating half my classmates at the moment (unless, of course, they're going at it in the library... tonsil hockey in the library, NOT something anyone wanted to walk in on!) Notes from a conversation I had last night re: B.-

j: "I'm perfectly sane, but you might want to have a look at this because it concerns you: URL"
j: not too good, huh?
R: well, if someone did that to me i'd be a bit put off.
j: yes
j: which means we are back to square negative one
R: well, like i said, you could be really nonchalant about it and just ask him to a movie. tho you'd need to be careful to infer that it's a date and not just a friendship thing.
j: yeah
j: I guess
j: aside from the whole he's to the north about two hours thing
R: oops. i didn't know about that.
j: yeah
j: sorry
R: so he commutes to sf? geez.
j: plus he has season tickets to the SFS concerts on Saturday nights
j: so I can't offer anything there...
j: yeah, he commutes to sf
j: which is not the worst commute
R: hmmmm. what about a play or something?
j: agh. my taste is so weird, and so stereotypically gay...
j: i'd love to, but would he?
R: well, if he's gay, then maybe his is OG as well.
R: (obviously gay)
j: (and i know he might give up going to a sfs concert. but... *sighs* plus his father has to find him afterward... but... but... maybe... ack!)
j: yeah, I figured it out, thanks
j: but that's the problem: my gaydar is just bad. it plain sucks.
j: so no idea.
j: and how the hell do you work it into a conversation?
j: "um, do pardon me, but I noticed that you seem to know how to dress yourself; that wine-dark red shirt really goes with your skin color. Are you perchance gay?"
R: so, have you practiced the third movement yet and btw i'm gay and your hot let's go out?
R: i like yours better
j: or... or...
j: :my god, your eyes are beautiful and I can't get over your arms. want to go out to see a play sometime?:
R: well...
R: i'm not exactly a fount of pickup lines here.
j: this dating thing
j: *throws up hands in despair*
R: i know!
R: i feel like all that time when my classmates were learning how to date i missed out, and now my dating skills are stuck back in grade school.
j: yes. because I didn't get to do that whole role-play thing back in 6th, 7th, 8th grade
j: so I am now blessed with two left feet
j: and conversation?
j: god forbid
j: my tongue gets tied and suddenly bitchy humor spills forth
R: i thought i was above all that dumb gf/bf stuff - then i found out i was just gay. :)
j: right
j: and you're like, oh god, i'm going to be doing THAT!?
j: not the gay thing. the dating thing.
R: right.
R: i thought i was better than that!
R: what if you just kept flirting with him?
R: (bushboy)
R: or drop hints
j: if I kept flirting with the lad? I don't know the meaning of flirting,
j: although apparently I do it effortlessly with girls
j: (just my luck, eh?)
R: lol, i know several gay guys like that. if they were straight, it'd be what we call "sexual harrasment"
j: drop hints? I have two modes: "here I come, I'm hitting you over the head" and "stealth"
R: compliment him or something. i'm no flirting expert myself.
j: what I find amusing
j: is how I turn around so quickly:
j: "I hate men!"
j: "God, you have beautiful eyes."
R: look into his eyes when you talk to him, straight guys don't tend to like eye contact. shouldn't be too hard if they're such beautiful eyes. :)

Well, I found it amusing. (Shameless extension of entries through use of copy and paste... hmm.)

And then, regarding the eye contact thing (yes, I can stereotype madly if I want to, and so can she):

> I could suck it up and do it. Just like I could in
>> some mystical
>> world get the courage up to ask him out directly, to
>> work into
>> conversation something that would resolve the
>> is-he-gay question
>> (like, "What is your opinion of Julie Andrews in
>> 'The Sound of
>> Music'?"), or a myriad of other things. Well, it
>> would probably be
>> easier to look into his eyes than to do either of
>> those things. See,
>> R.? It's all about perspective. (Not that I
>> don't like your
>> ideas. I just need some artificial courage at
>> times.)

Oh, and R.? Thank you very much for the whole reassurance thing; I'm in your debt. Actually, I owe things to a lot of people once you consider just how needy I am, but we'll ignore that for a moment and give you another great big hug and yeah.

And if the people in your choir can't catch on to the OG behavior of the little pixies in the boys' choir, maybe you don't *want* there to be any gay subculture. If they can't tell, aren't they beneath you? (Well, not beneath beneath... but like, you know, not at the same awareness level - have you checked them to see whether they're breathing and respond to stimuli?)

Um, yeah, is it really obvious that I'm avoiding my homework?

I'm going to spin around the topic that Al says she brought up because I brought it up (even though I have no memory of having brought it up: confused yet? I am-) which is: why have a public diary?

Certainly some of it is exhibitionism, a desire to get my thoughts, feelings, what have you - just out there into the ether. There's part of me that doesn't particularly care whether anyone reads it, part that's satisfied just knowing that I am a Presence, however small it might be, on the Internet.

That part that's satisfied just being out there? Very small. And it gets beaten down a lot.

Because what I crave, really, is some sort of reassurance: that I am not a horrible person, that what I have to say about something does matter, that I - and my existence - might even have some purpose, some weight, in this world. It's so many things that I want, need, try to get (in so many other ways than this diary, and it's part of what can make being around me unbearable at times)- it's the need to be told what borogoves told me; that my youth is no bar to the import of what I have to say, and that foolishness is not limited to the young; that there is some common experience of what I feel, at least in part, and that this thing that feels curiously like pain is not mine alone - (no mocking me about my pain threshold, Al, or my refusal to recognize things as pain, because it's not true); that what I say might last (then again, it might not) as a record of what I feel, say, think; and finally, that, even despite the fact that most teenagers go through some sort of this crisis, I'm told (which actually did make me feel a curious combination of worse and better, borogoves), that I am unique because I am shaped by different forces, by different traits. It makes me feel somehow less insignificant and at the same time it terrifies me with the threat of drowning in the tide of everyone else around me.

It is what Raych tells me that matters to me; that I am not a terrible person, that I am not complete a jerk, that I am not quite as irredeemable as I think I am.

It is what Al and Tiff tell me when they say that I'm too hard on myself, and it is the surprise that other people have when I praise them and their works shortly after excoriating my own.

It is the fact that what people say will often reflect to me what I know intellectually but fail to see emotionally; it is the criticism this exposes me to, both good and bad, and the voices of others who tell me that I am not alone, the voices of others who tell me that I am not insane, the voices of others who offer hope.

And gods, it helps for a while, but what I don't see is that as long as my mind takes none of it to heart, it will keep on being this way, and every respite will be only temporary; what I don't see is that it's as much my own mind flaying me as it is forces I cannot control; what I don't see is the guilt that looms large in so many other people's views of me and how it colors everything I do.

And it seems I have had many opportunities to end this cycle, but it never feels I've suffered enough - not enough self-mortification, not enough tears, and so I enter again. And so.

And in closing, I ask again the question I have asked often in this diary:

What am I doing penance for, and when will I be absolved? Rather: When will I allow myself to be absolved?

pellem detrahere (corpori) - idiom with conjugated verb detraho, detrahere, detraxi, detractum to draw down, drag down; to lower, humiliate; to draw off, drag away, remove; to slander literally, to drag the hide away from the body = to flay