Author and Columnist
I am a chronicler of stories and a means to various ends. I collect people and grow to love them because they make the best characters for this particular chapter that I am bound to observe. Who I am seems ultimately unimportant; I am a heavily biased observer.
None of that is too inaccurate. You should love them for themselves, but you love them through writing. Though it is not an original statement, you do not know how you feel about people or moments until you've committed them to the page. Regrettably, you get it backward, loving them as characters in a story, but not influences or friends. You want a better narrative more than you want a happy life. You will suffer for this, and there are not enough sparkling stories to balance the loss this habit brings.
I bring characters together and transcribe their interactions for a faceless audience of a number between myself and hundreds of people.
That "hundreds" should not be plural. Even that may be generous.
Ultimately, it is my words you put faith in to know the story.
I maintain that you are as honest as you can be -- which is not to imply that it is unfettered honesty. You are constrained by protecting your ego and not entirely pissing off your subjects. Regrettably, people around whom you have woven your stories on occasion suggest you fail with the latter.
Still, an audience must believe someone, and you are the one writing it out. You win by default.
The potential stories, as I see them:
None of your story threads are anything much. They are either faintly post-adolescent twitches or fabricated in hopes of spurring future excitement. Of the two that remain, one is Kate becoming a college student in identity as well as fact, which has been exhaustively covered and has rarely been your business, and your own integration into SUNY New Paltz. Perhaps there is a lesson in these: you should have let yourself subsume more into what it is to be in college. Not snorting eight-balls -- an example I do not choose for humorous extremity -- but being less of a prig, too cowed by your own narrative.
As scholastically and literary minded as I can be, I do not wish to earn the scorn of my fellow students by being seen as a teacher's pet or any such thing.
You are tedious in your humble bragging. You also seem to assume the spotlight is on you, an egocentric bias. No one in that class remembered your answers a minute after you said them and were probably satisfied someone piped up, so they didn't have to.
You are rarely as important as your head tells you.
I felt like she and I comprised a gossipy clique of two. She stated assuredly that our clique would grow; we just hadn't met anyone worthy as yet. What does she see?
You make a few friends, occasional mutual ones, but never a nucleus at New Paltz. You have no clique there, which informs your discontent at college. If you had more friends who would allow their experience on campus to bleed into yours as a commuter, you would have felt belonging. You could have fought harder for this rather than merely hoping, though.
After lunch, I had to go to the library and inform them that I would be unable to work for them. I was expecting something like a small scene, so I was disarmed when the supervising woman simple said, "Okay." and walked away.
Why do you think anyone would care much that a student aide declined? There is never a lack of these on campus.
Finally, sitting in front of the Humanities building, we saw a thin gay lad using entirely inward posture. We felt he clearly needed a friend. As I had just found a pig key chain, I approached him with the ever charming, "I have a pig key chain... will you be our friend?" He questioned as to what this friendship entailed, receiving the answer that irregular conversation and the guarantee of mutual recognition were what I was interested in. He asked if hugs were involved and I said this could be decided in the future. So we made our first friend.
I can fabricate the scene in my mind, but I have no idea who this boy must be. Therefore, he does not qualify as a friend.
I do envy the ease with which you, both by dint of being on a college campus and you, manage to encounter not-friends. I do not think this keychain line would get me much more than withering contempt or perhaps treated as though I were recovering from a head injury.
She and I spoke for a few minutes, until she stated that she was living in a house full of lushes and that there should only be four people living therein but six plagued her. My eyes grew three sizes as I squeaked, "Do you live with someone named Kate? And a girl named Tina?" I was rewarded with the affirmative to both.
What are the chances? It is worthwhile seeing that your perspective on that house is not unique.
We escaped her, rather taken aback by her stories of this apartment, which made it sound like a less than pleasant residence.
I suspect it would be at best uncomfortable to live there. Story-worthy, surely, but there are things in life more important than stories. Among these might be not sharing spaces with bickering twenty-somethings who have loud sex and get wasted on the regular.
My entire issue, which isn't an issue, is that Kate told me tonight that her roommate told a wholly different story of the meeting than I did and I stated that I found that odd and it gave me pause.
I would have liked you to detail what the roommate reported. Unreliable narrators and shifting perspectives have to be done well or they wear on the reader.
Save that Kate is taking the side that I don't belong on... I suppose it is an exercise in futility to delve to deeply into this matter?
Kate made a practice of choosing the side you were not on, even when she did not know the other party or they were entirely hypothetical. I never could understand why -- she did it during your relationship too -- but it reliably took you by surprise.
I disagree that you should not have explained further. While I do not want you moping over Kate, you seem to be drawn into this household that behaves like a reality show. I would like to know the charges against you.