I’ve never really been one to jump on the bandwagon, but hey I have facebook now so anything’s possible, eh?
Anyway, Timmy and Cat have their entries so I feel like purging mine as well. Maybe this is something you just end up doing when you can no longer say that you go a long way back with the people you still see on a regular basis. And by regular basis I mean at least once a month. Everyone’s new, but their being new doesn’t undermine the sincerity and depth of whatever relationship you’ve formed.
It’s because of this that I rarely trust relationships formed through mere circumstance; being thrown in a room with certain people on a regular basis doesn’t automatically turn them into your friends. Working side-by-side for extended periods of time doesn’t mean you’ll be more than groupmates at the end of the ordeal, and this becomes clearer the closer I get to finally graduating. What I noticed is that meeting people in large groups usually leads to a consensus among strangers about who you are and what you’re like. More often than not, I’m pegged as the bubbly mildly androgynous colegiala type because I’m a short-haired laughslut who speaks in English.
Still it’s usually the people I meet when I’m out alone or in a small intimate group that I end up keeping close and trusting with my life. They know me well enough to tell me who I am (which more often than not is “a shot-haired laughslut who speaks in English +++”).
Usually when I bitch about something or complain about bearing the brunt of someone’s hatred, Cat tells me “but you’re Alice!” and I have no idea what to say to that. I’m one of those people who has a lot of trouble talking about herself–really talking, not just coming up with cop-out answers like “I’m just me hehehe” or “I’m really good at being myself yayayayay”. I like leaving the descriptions to the people I trust because somehow they only become real when I hear them said out loud. Like how you need to see pictures of yourself to come to grips with what you look like; which doesn’t say much about me because I’m always mildly crazy-eyed in pictures, except for this one where I/we looked absolutely delighted to be where we were:
(The morning after the final leg of the RJUR bar tour and I couldn’t get into my own house because someone bolted the gate. Not sure what’s up with Amaya though…Maybe she doesn’t like having to be an extra in an episode of Gossip Girl)
It’s when it’s my turn to speak that I clam up. I panic. Someone asks me what I do and I fumble before finally managing to stutter “Stu-stuff. I do stuff. You know, with my, uh, life”. I feel put on the spot but I manage to weasel my way out of not answering questions or entertaining certain topics because I TALK SO DAMN MUCH it’s word bulimia (case in point: this entry). But I try to be concise because it’s something I value in good writing. The operative word there is “try”.
Its when I’m asked what I like that I’m able to go at it, fluidly. I like food, I like cupcakes, I don’t like hip-hop unless it’s British, I put cheese on everything and chase everything with chocolate so my throat is always sore. I like work and have embraced my inner capitalist a long long time ago. I’d like to blame capitalism taking over for whatever contact I’d lost with my so-called “self”, the way show-bands say they do it for the money.
But part of me knows this is probably it.
Alice Sarmiento 