Shorts

Last night there were friends hanging out where I live, and that was awesome. First, it's rare anyone hangs out where I live. Second, these friends were girls: Kate, Melissa, Kim, in no particular order. This is a change from hanging around only guys like 10 years ago. (My god I can speak in decades about my life! I've been dying my hair for well over a decade. Christ.) Back when I spent time with a crew of guys I didn't like to acknowledge the differences between guys and girls, probably in some defiance of my mom who worried about me being angsty and sitting in my room alone, awkwardly wearing sloppy black clothing through the end of high school. "Honey, you need to go out with your friends." "Fuck you, mom, I don't need to do anything you say, no matter what it is." Sometimes I think I was a very stupid kid, or just had a hard time growing up like most people.

The characteristics that come out of a person depend a lot on the people that person spends time with. Maybe. Which is why I dressed like a boy and rejected all things feminine for those angsty years. I'm probably blindly opening a deep psychological issue that I'm going to be embarrassed about later. (Kate, when you have your degree and are even smarter, you can hit me with what's really been bothering my psyche all this time. Or break it to me that I'm normal.) I think I sometimes, or often, weird myself out, being around new people, seeing characteristics I'm not used to seeing in me, the way that different people draw out different behaviors, and I'm newly naked. A friend and I were talking about this once, how some people seem to be the same person all the time, no matter who they're around, but both of us were different depending on the company. I even eat differently, want different food and drink, depending on the company. I wonder what those sturdily steady people are like at home alone. Do they cry? Being alive is such a weird thing.

I feel psychotic today, raw, questioning too much and everything--manic, unpinnable, absorbed in self and indefinitely contemplative--and then laughing at that--erratic, simultaneously like a young insecure girl and like my grandma. Both ends of the Dichotomy are at war again. This is a difference between boys and girls, generally speaking: the sensitive, chaotic brainwork that is more on the surface in girls than in boys, which I conjecture sometimes causes boys to be stodgy, insensitive, psychotically distant motherfuckers who need to be a psychotic girl on occasion. I guess everyone's psychotic at the end of the day.

Last night Kate, Melissa, and Kim saw a picture of me wearing long white-denim shorts. Now that's love, a real sharing. Maybe I feel shameful for my shorts and that's what's eating me today.