A bout of Inspiration

Over the past few days, I've been sleeping in and neglecting all of my duties of "Substitute Maternal Figure" unless prompted to do so. I feel like a horrible mother with anger issues so I take them out on my kids. Maybe when I'm out of college and have a stable sleep schedule and don't stay out until like 1 AM every morning because I haven't seen James all day and that's the only time to see him, I'll be a better mother. But maybe, I'll be the mother who really tries to love her children, but just ends up having lots of sex with her husband and forgets to feed them sometimes.

Apart from sleeping in (and oh, it's glorious sleeping in), I've been reading some old blog posts of some kinda famous dude I've had the fortune to meet, chat with, and walk to his Jetta with. It's been fun, silly, and more and more, I feel like it would have been kickass to have been able to meet him while he was still just a normal person with dreams.

But somehow, I tangented from there. Or maybe it was because of the music I was listening to while reading his blog posts from six years ago. But has there been a moment where you wake up and out of the blue, you feel exactly what's going to happen to you in the future, but you brush it off or misinterpret it? Did you wake up one morning years ago and know how angry you would be today? Did you wake up one morning ages ago and know how much this girl will hurt you? Maybe, you were born with the knowledge of what was going to happen, but choosing to take the adventurous way out, decided to forget just so every moment meant something. Maybe we all innately know what to do and where it goes, but we can't access that stuff until some thick and dark-looking wall breaks down and life gets easy from there. But it's not because we've worked hard in this world, but because we somehow broke down that wall. Or maybe, did you wake up one day so long ago and realize that you'd fall so deeply in love that anything that came into your path was worth getting there and no matter where you ended, everything would be okay?

When I was little, I've always pictured my future romantically. Curled in bed with some nameless and faceless figure but feeling so safe and loved. Standing in a forest clearing next to the same nameless and faceless figure happier than I've ever been. I've never been one to write my first name with the last name of my most prominent crush. I did do that sometimes, but I always ripped those out and destroyed them. That's just not me. It's always been this nameless and faceless template of a man who I would eventually meet, fall in love with, and proceed to spend at least my youth with. I could never come up with a situation where I grew old. It must have been because I was incapable of picturing myself at 18 at the age of 8. I guess I've always been in love with the idea of immortality, because even as the world around me changed, I had all the time in the world to be what I wanted and to explore every whim in the world. When high school came around, the person was still nameless and faceless. I had to force myself to put a name to the figure, I had to force myself to impose a face to the figure. Even in any of my sexual fantasies I would entertain, it was dark, I couldn't really see who was with me. It wasn't until I was in Eindhoven laying in bed with a flare of hormones telling me I really wanted an orgasm that I found myself weaving a fantasy out of someone I already knew. Months after that, I had my first sex dream. The first guy I had intercourse with, I had never committed to memory and probably never met them: a nameless, faceless template. The next guy was the same guy I wove that fantasy out of: James. It is obvious I've moved onto a new chapter of life. Maybe this won't exactly work out like I want it to, but that's okay, because this will always be significant.

I'm about ready to move on from this place. I've been here for seven years now. My room has hardly changed from when it was first set up, and after moving through thousands of color choices for my walls, they remain the white that I've been living with for seven years. It feels like it's time for a new adventure in life. I want to live away from here for just a little while. If it doesn't work out, I'll come back. If I love being out there in the world working my ass off just to stay in a house twice the size of my room and half as comfortable, I'll stay out in the world and visit every Thanksgiving and Christmas just because that's what people do. Or maybe, this desire for adventure is simply a desire to curl in bed with James every night.

So, I just pulled out his senior picture that his mother picked out. It's a shame the photographer didn't catch any of the moments where he was actually laughing. That picture is so fake. I remember that being my first thought when I first saw the thing. My second was that if it wasn't a fake smile, it simply wasn't the ones I saw everyday. It looks like one of his "I'm quietly amused at your expense" smiles, one that I've hardly witnessed, and one that hardly ever came my direction. Or he looks boyish. He never really looks boyish unless he's pouting or talking excitedly in that boyish voice he uses when we are being silly. I remember standing behind the photographer while his mother was sitting just out of the shot. There could be papers written about the psychology of this arrangement. Her superficial presence: so close but still so far from her son. My presence completely absent from the domain of the set, but the photographer used me as the reason to smile. She tried to get him to look genuine, to look really happy. She told him to imagine me in skimpy swim apparel. We laughed. She snapped a few pictures after we stopped laughing. I remember seeing one of my English friends' senior picture she chose to purchase to hand out to people. It was a beautiful picture with her laughing. It fit her so well, it was natural and wonderfully perfect. I wonder why none of the pictures his photographer took fit him nearly as well as the picture of my friend.

It's kind of sad knowing that the only picture of just me that's any good and recent is the one I have as an icon. The one in my yearbook is decent, but the more I look at it, the more I think I look evil or condescending and mean. I'm not the camera-whore type, so I obviously don't have very many pictures where I'm by myself and not trying to capture the exact shade of color my hair is because I just finished dying it. I guess, in some desperate plea for attention or maybe someone to decide I'm pretty or artful, I want some slightly amateur photographer to snap a picture of me with some really old-style almost-black-and-white background and decide it looks artful and that I accent the background well enough for this portrait to be called artful.

On a slightly related note, I've kind of become bored with being "perfect." Maybe it's because besides telling each other we miss each other and love each other, we will do the whole "you're perfect," "no, you're perfect" thing. I realize "perfect" is the nice little umbrella that says I'm cute and soft and nice and caring and so on and so on, but it'd be nice to be reminded every now and then what you think of me, specifically. I've also developed a need for someone to tell me I'm pretty. I'd settle for "pretty," but if anyone throws out a "gorgeous" or "beautiful," I'm like the sad little stray that was finally given the smallest fraction of love and now is purring madly and trying desperately to win a warm meal tonight and a safe place to sleep.

Since I'm talking about what may be considered problems: I'm getting kind of tired of hanging around groups of males under the influence of substances. Ranging anywhere from clingy beyond belief and making me (a very physical person) sick with some form of claustrophobia and mild annoyance, to acting in such a childish way that it makes me not want kids for a good ten years yet, I'm pretty much done hanging out with these people. They're wonderful and interesting people while sober, but GOD. None of them seem to understand that there are more things in life than hitting up every single night and then staying late and eating obscene amounts of food. Probably the worst realization in my life was when my favorite gay friend openly admit that he did not like being sober or couldn't stand not getting high. Wait, are you saying every one of my friends pretty much became psychologically dependent on something I easily left? Me, the person my mother was so worried about because I apparently have an addictive personality, smokes cigarettes socially (meaning like never) but never craves one, and doesn't ever want to get high like the rest of my friends? You've got to be fucking kidding me. Yeah, I smoked marijuana in the Netherlands when I was there. Yeah, I enjoyed the feeling, I enjoyed spending the night high and carefree. I enjoyed killing that whiny goody-goody girl who arrived in Europe in July of 2008. I enjoyed stepping away from that murder scene newborn and ready for a life of living by my own rules. Metaphorically of course.

But I also grew up and decided that it'd be a waste of my life and time if I spent a good deal of it in an altered state of mind forever pushing through life without actually living it. I don't know about the rest of you, but I fantasize about being someone. A large part of this fantasy is being the coolest cat like ever and showing up everyone who's ever made me cry in my life. Ex-boyfriends come and try to make me use them as advertising advisers or hire them or whatever they might be qualified to do and all I tell them is how I don't need them. I show them how cool my company thing is and they walk away like a sad kid who found out the candy store was just closed forever. Another very important part is the part where I have the coolest custom house ever and I could seriously spend every night of the week in a different bedroom without overlapping or reusing bedrooms. Half of them would never be used unless I had a whole ton of guests over for some sleep-over event, but hey, I have a whole shit ton of rooms in this really cool house I can afford because I worked towards not only a goal that makes me money, but I love my job and I love doing the things I do and helping the people I help. So I guess, in some twisted way, fantasy is my anti-drug and the scary DARE adviser of this metaphor is that I really want to be someone.