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the more i change, the more i stay...
July 11, 2005
i looked up at the wall, the ceiling behind the bar at red fez, music pumping, vision swirling, and again, like so many times, i think, here i am again. i think of the ubiquitous einstein quote, about the definition of insanity being doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result. but me, i do it over and over again, how many nights like this, expecting maybe the same result, but thinking each time that there's something i'll get right this time, that maybe i can just watch closely, that i'll see my tell, the dead giveaway to the weak hand my heart is holding.
shannon wanted to go home. i closed the tab, ran out to meet her - she was going to walk home, maybe a good mile or so. i told her that wouldn't do, that i'd drive her. we talked a lot. shannon doesn't have it all right - i don't honestly know anyone, not a single person, who does. but she's sharp. she's sharp enough to see me in ways i don't like to admit or acknowledge, but that i know are stark reality. she's also blunt enough to tell me about it, and compassionate enough to understand.
it's still there, hanging about me, the look of looking, the want, the need. i hate it, hate myself for it, and they see that, too.
it's me, it's my problem. but i hate the world and the system for it, too. where's my confidence, my sense of self that is so much more attractive, that will draw people closer, just enough that they can know what i'm worth?
i didn't have, wasn't allowed, the luxury of adolescent arrogance. i wasn't one of the beautiful ones, the athletic ones, the stationed ones, the confident ones. i wasn't among the ones who knew at such an early age just what to do, and who to be around, what to wear, or who would be so easily forgiven for the inevitable mistakes and missteps on the walk of coolness and social acceptance. and no, looking back, i wouldn't want it to have been that simple, and the people i love,who love me, and the ones i want to love me aren't into that.
but still, i lack the same damned ingredient - that confidence, that sense of self-possession, that most people learn in their youth, from their parent's approval, from not being the favorite kid to pick on in school, from not losing all the fights that other people started, from having girls like them, from not being the fat and naive sixth grader wearing a fucking boy scout uniform to school instead of an izod or a polo.
i've worked since those days, done it all, played football, changed myself, stopped using big words beginning on one day in sixth grade, learned to play dumb, to ask questions i knew the answer to so i wouldn't stick out, and still, still, still, i don't fit in with most guys, and i don't appeal to most girls. a lifetime devoted to change, to moving down a path, and if i'm not all the way there, i might as well be nowhere.
yeah, i've had things to drink. yes, it's late. yes, i hate that in five hours, i have to get up to fill in for people at the coffeeshop. it doesn't matter. it's just another day: seventh grade, high school, senior year in college, monday at any job, it's just another day, because just as emerson said "they take ruins to ruins," i take myself to every day, despite my best, most honest efforts. i wake up every morning, and the blank ceiling is as a mirror, and there i still am.
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ok, so i pounded this out when i got home saturday morning, at 1:45am. the next morning (five hours later), i woke up, feeling rough, thinking about what i had felt, what i had wrote. not the first time for the second-guessing. but this time in particular, i knew there was still something to what i had written.
still, it was, perhaps, a little angrier than it really needed to be. i pulled it down. tonight, other than correcting a few drunken typos, all i needed to do was edit out the f-bombs. some degree of anger is ok, even deserved - i think it's right and alright for me to feel a little angry, at things i missed, at things that were maybe taken from me, that made me a little more likely to have failed and ended up where i have, to have the flaws that i have. but i also know they are ultimately my own failures and flaws.
i'm 36, and still trying, still trying to change it all just as much as a i was in sixth grade. hopefully, i understand it all a little better, have better support, a clearer idea of what i want and what i can have.
Posted by Rob at July 11, 2005 12:45 PM