Please Don't Read This If You Don't Know Me Very Well

Sarah once told me about this exercise she had to do in a Beginning Acting class. It was supposed to teach the importance of symbols, I suppose, and how to develop empathy for the character you’re playing. The student would hand the professor his or her wallet and then stand up in front of the class. The professor would pull out random objects and ask a question about each one, until he suspected that he’d hit a potent emotional nerve. He would keep asking questions until he had followed the entire path of memory and feeling back to the object’s emotional core. She told me tales of football leviathans breaking down inconsolably.

And here I sit, not with a random picture or receipt or to-do list out of my wallet, but with that damn speech medal from 2002.

The YD-CR debate went quite well, but it’s turned me into an emotional wreck over the past few days. Fuck me. I know better than this. Public speaking carries too much baggage for me...weird, no? And right before finals.

Ha! Right before finals! Yes, on Friday I realized that I wanted to go home for a couple of days – that I couldn’t take being in this shitty apartment anymore, that I was constantly on the verge of crying, that I missed my mom and I missed my sister, and I missed Sabrina and my brother and my dad even though I wouldn’t get to see them, that I missed the goddamned cats and the high school that’s just a few blocks from my house, that I missed thinking about Sidney Carton and what I would do for the girl I loved and about the naif politics of "overcoming suffering" while smelling the smell of the backyard when the sun is going down; I realized that my dad was serious when he said that after Chelsey graduates he might move to Longview or some place where he’s not even in the same city as my mom, and that that devastates me despite my… strained relationship with him and the fact that he’s right about not having any reason to live in Tumwater anymore, because I’ll graduate from college the same year that she graduates from high school, and I’ll go God knows where and my brother will go God knows where and my sister will go God knows where, and my dad will live someplace new that reminds him of fucking Montana, and my mom will stay and maybe even sell the house, and that then, finally, passively, tranquilly, in a quiet way that everyone will probably keep to themselves, my family will kind of be over.

Today’s Musical Insight (Never Let Me Get Married, Because Getting Divorced Would Absolutely Kill Me Edition):

“So fuck you, fuck you, fuck you and all you didn’t do. I said bleed it, bleed it, bleed it, there’s nothing in you anyway. And do you hate me, hate me, hate me, hate me so much that you can’t let me out, let me out, let me out of hell when you’re around?”