A late night story about me, since I'm up and feeling sort of bitter.
The Nathan's down at the big theatre tech convention, having no reason/desire to go, I did not go. So I'm here, and he's there, and I IM'ed him a good night about twenty minutes ago. According to him, it's one AM there, he's a little drunk, and he's sort of hoping that he didn't see one of his ex-girlfriends with whom he was passionately in love and to a certain extent still is in a fond memories kind of way.
That paragraph right there makes me really regret a lot of my own life. The boy, by dint of three years between graduating high school and coming to uni (real uni, he did go to pretendy uni just short of his AA), has some semblence of a past. I, on the other hand, do not.
In high school, unless it was an organised function- a concert, a rehearsal, a fundraiser, what have you, I didn't go. It wasn't exactly that I wasn't allowed to go, but I pretty much knew that in the end it was just as easy not to go as to work out the logistics and go. "Who is it? Will their parents be there? What will you be doing? How are you getting there? How are you getting back? What time?" These were questions that had to be answered, and when you don't know the answers, then the question becomes "So, why do you want to go?"
Rather than try to come up with answers and justify a very weak desire to be somewhat normal, I would give up and go read Middlemarch, or whatever ponderous novel I was in the middle of at the time.
So even now, I don't go anywhere or do anything much. The concerts the other day were the first thing in months (definately the first thing this year), and Nathan had to drag me to go to the second half. All this is not my scene. I am much better suited to the classroom set-up: a room full of people with whom I can converse and discuss a variety of intellectual topics about which I have a significant store of information. I know that's not suited for getting drunk and "jiggy wi' it".
Half the time I don't mind, but every now and again it irks me. Like tonight, Nathan is so often deliberately anti-social, even when it's just him and me in a room together, and then he can go and be normal...? I don't understand how that works. On and off ever since I've come to uni I've thought about being drunk.
We had a project for a play a few years ago all about binge drinking. It was vaugely supposed to be an anti-campagin, but the show was basically a bunch of drunk stories that ran from mildly embarrasing to hilarious to the abortion clinic... Everyone in the cast and crew had something to contribute (did I mention only maybe three out of twenty were actually 21?), they all knew stuff first hand, except me. So sometimes I just want to do something about it and get it all over with, but like Paul McCartney said about drugs, "like this funny little thing that takes over your head and you can never get back home again. It was a scary thought," and I think the same thing.
It's definately an inner battle that I think needs more clarification yet. I wanted to try and make a little bit more headway on it before going to bed, or else I knew I'd never sleep. 90% of the time, it's not even a thought, but the rest of the time I just want to have a Julia Stiles in Ten Things I Hate About You moment, even if it does involve a concussion. Until the voice in the back of my head pipes up that I could die, or I could end up like all the other drunken hoes I have known...
The battle rages on.