A Promise Broken

I pride myself on not breaking promises. Here is the story of one I did break.

It was in eighth grade, one light spring day spent at my friend Jenny's house. I forget what we were doing. Probably some kind of schoolwork. But I remember one thing: it came out in passing that neither of us had ever seen Breakfast at Tiffanies. I laughed, and said we have to see it together sometime. For the rest of the time there, I looked and found no video store with Breakfast at Tiffanies. It was left unwatched when I left England.

I broke that promise last summer. One swelteringly hot day after camp, when I was stayng at my grandparents. My grandparents know how much I love movies, and so took me out to rent one. It was right there, Audrey Hepburn beaming at me from the case. I picked it up, and thought: I've still never seen it. But one nagging part of me thought: I wish I could watch it with Jenn.

I watched it. But somehow the taste of emptiness had flooded my mouth. (I haven't had any urge to watch Breakfast at Tiffanies again, nor will I probably.)

Does wanting to move on, and not be bound by the past make me a weak person? I still sometimes wonder, because there are many parts of me that still are. I haven't e-mailed Jenn in over a year, though I wish I had now.

It's like cutting off a part of you with your fingernail, this desire to forget and remember at the same time.

I so need to update more. Yeah. If you go to my livejournal, you will find more constant updates. Plugged noses are the devil, particularly when you have to wake up at six in the morning with them, and have itchy eyes to boot. It's so hard to feel poetic when there's snot coming out your nose.

"...the agony in stony places, the shouting and the crying..."

Warning: overly dramatic histrionic ramblings. You have been warned.

Do you ever have that feeling that something's there, something good, and someone's put a metal cage around you so you can only grab at it and not get it?

Yeah. That's been the last few weeks for me.

It's so frustrating. My friends are changing on me, no longer interested in what I have to say, no longer giving me any attention, and I feel (to put it like a 12 year old) left out. And I'm sick of feeling it. I've never really known what it was to fit in untill I was 12 and walked into Mr. Allen's homeroom on August 28th 2001, and I don't want to go back.

Now it's as if I'm a pane of glass, someone's afraid I'll break if they bother to think about me at, instead of seeing out of me. This is the second rant I'm typed up today. The first one's on my livejournal, but somehow I couldn't say anything because the people invovled would read it (as they belong to LJ.)

So, here's the bottom line: I have a group of friends, four in particular, A, S, J, and B. They've been my buddies this year, and however much they teased me I knew it was just teasing. But lately the teasings stopped. Now, if I get a word at all, it's "Oh, hi, Marnie."

GOD DAMNIT!!!!

I don't know how much more I can take. I really don't. It used to be fine. Up untill a week or two ago, it was fine. It's been happenining so slowly I didn't have time to see it: they don't like me anymore. It's such a basic and horrible realization. They don't talk or think or want to know about the same things I do. I think about books, movies, anime, things that aren't real, and all they seem to think about is Key Club and jokes.

Maybe they're turning away from me because I've been tired lately. I have. I've been cranky, moody, depressed, probably dramatic a la Norma Desmond. But you know what? Today I got two e-mails from old friends not from here, one from England and one from camp. And they talked about things I wanted to talk about! They didn't write in netspeak and they didn't just exchange jokes, they were so frivolously Henry Tileny-ishly amusing.

I miss them. I miss my old friends.

There. I've said it. I WANT MY OLD FRIENDS BACK! Maybe I'll regret thinking that. But right now, I mean every word of it. I'm sick of having to show act interest in stupid jokes and Key Club. The simple fact is this: we have nothing left to talk about. I feel like after almost a year of friendship with these people I don't know them at all.

I know tomorow morning I'll go in the room we all hang out in, and try to lap up some attention like a dog picking up scraps on a hard wooden floor. And I know I'll hate myself for it.

But what else can I do?

Eventually procrastination will eat me. And my little dog too.

(Except that I don't have a dog.)

GAH.

Gosh darn History papers.

After Loosing a Speech Meet

They tell me in the middle of it that you have to learn to loose before you can win. GRRRR, I thought, that is such crap. My first round judge screwed me over (and I still think that, but in a lesser sense).

So. Yeah. Speech meet yesterday didn't exactly go my way. Last meet I got first place, and this one I didn't even get a ribbon! (It's the first time I haven't place all year, and the first time for a loooong time I haven't even gotten a ribbon) I think I got like 10th or 11th place. The other boy in Poetry (my cateogry) from my school got a ribbon ( I was so proud of him! He's such a darling!) and he was only one meld point ahead of me.

So. Yeah. Sorry. Still bitter. (Damn Moorhead!)

But then I thought as I was kinda moping listening to that boy's Phantom CD (He has so many musical awesome CDs that I like to borrow them on the bus) that I needed that. I needed to get knocked off my high horse. Because I looked around, and I saw that there were plenty of people on my team who really (for lack of a better phrase) got screwed. This boy who had gotten second place at the last speech meet didn't even get a ribbon either. A girl who got first in her category last week barely got a ribbon.

The hardest part was the people who won, I had beaten. The girl who got fifth had gotten second place under me last week (she was in two of my rounds yesterday, and she was really really nice). But the hardest part was seeing a girl who HADN'T EVEN PLACED last week (and I don't think she got a ribbon) got 3rd. That just made me mad. Because every round I've EVER had with her, I've beaten the pants off her.

But she was so happy when she got it, that I couldn't help feeling good for her, even though I did let it run through my head that it should have been me getting that third place, and not her.

Ok, enuogh histrionic speech ramblings. I was going to tell you all how I learned that loosing is a good thing.

Well, I may not quite be able to say that yet (still feeling bitter and jaded), but I can say it is educational.

All my comments are gone. :: sobs ::

GOD DAMN FUCKING HTML!!!!!!

(Sorry, Maren mad.)

I HATE HTML. I WANT IT TO DIE.

God, I'm so frustrated from this god damned template I'm in tears.

It just decided to not work today!!!!

Erg.

AHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

(Lets loose many screams and much anger.)

I don't know no love songs, and I can't sing the blues anymore...

Black cats in the Matrix. Round and round we go. Where she stops nobody knows.

It was as if I had taken a line from a book I had once known as well as my own name, and someone had said it to me for the first time in a long while. Things that once I know, but discarded. Or, in this case, lost. In this case, a speech meet.

This year my poem is "The Wasteland". I ended up tying for fourth place. For which I earned my first trophy, well, ever.

The minute I stepped on the bus, I didn't know when I was. It could have easily been last year. But this year, all of my close friends were there (I got three of my best tenth grade friends into speech this year) and it felt like a shaft of sunlight in a cloudly week.

Oh, god, it's wonderful to be happy again.

There are so many different kinds of happiness. There are the times when you are happy because there is nothing to be unhappy about. When things are like dulled knife edges and smoke without ash. There are times when it is a giddy piercing feeling like going down on a ferris wheel, and finding life a turning bend. There are times when your heart is just bursting, you are sure the whole world can hear it through your chest.

But this was the type I liked best. The green type. The type of the fresh, the new, or the relived.

Of deja vu that's real.

Sweet. :

You Are a Pundit Blogger!

Your blog is smart, insightful, and always a quality read. Truly appreciated by many, surpassed by only a few.

What kind of blogger are you?

"Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in a forgetful snow..."

Eyes, look your last. Eyes, close yourselves. Eyes, fight imsomnia and run it through with a bayonet. Eyes, give me my rest, give me my tears, give me my sleep.

Finding oneself stranded in a small American town is not the best realization in the world. In fact, it is nearly the worst. IT really happened yesterday, when my parents brought up something I hadn't thought about in months: my brother went to China, Zambia, and England last year. Where did Maren go? To Wisconsin.

It's not so much jealousy as it is a feeling of injustice.

God, my brother was so adament to come back, and he's the one who got to leave? He's the one who had friends here, not me, and he's the one who had things to come back for. As far as I was concerned, I would have been able to leave this town without coming back.

One problem faced by those uprooted is not settling in, but regrowing the roots. No one seems to understand how long that takes. I've been here over a year and half (been back almost longer than I was away) and yet there are times I feel so utterly different from these people around me that I could scream.

"She will love deeply-she will suffer terribly-she will have glorious moments to compensate..."

Someone could have been writing that about me.

O&O&O&

Histrionics aside, life is fine. It goes, it comes. A veritable Ol' Man River. Know the feeling?

The snow is lovely. I don't get tired of it, don't get tired of the prismatic arc of colors that twinkle in it, don't get tired of its different textures and tastes. But there is now also dirt with the snow, now also slush with pristine white. That is something to get tired of easily.

The slush makes sidewalks almost impossible, and one finds drivers understanding when you have to walk on the roads.

Minnesota in winter. A thing in its natural element.