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She had been working for the optometrist for something like a week. And she quit. Last night. At 1AM. And is refusing to speak to them.
I feel that, should I ever feel the need to run away from life, the precedent has been set down here.
I do not think you should run away, but you should know when to turn your back on something that isn't working any longer.
This is not advocating adopting your mother's tack. She is retired now and, though I cannot know for sure, she might wish she had more contiguous work experience than another diamond ring.
How she lived some aspects of her life, like retail therapy, unsettled you. The idea of addiction always did because you sensed that it was in you, too. The wrong stimulus at a weak moment and you would succumb to something that would take you over (here might be a point where a less kind future self would allude to your romantic history). You fostered an unhealthily strong superego, telling you to be overly reasonable when there would have been little harm in having more fun.
You knew people whom you considered out of control. You referenced Melissa often, who had by this point been in and out of rehab at least twice and possibly in the mental hospital once. You were not inclined to take drugs, but her example made sure you wouldn't. Why, a single jazz cigarette and you might be competing in a cocaine-snorting competition! (The "jazz cigarette" bit is a joke, but the cocaine-snorting competition is not. Melissa would tell guys that she could do more coke than them. They would make two lines and snorting would commence. She pointed out that, even if she lost, "free cocaine!" She did not lose often.)
Giving over to the id had seemed threatening, but there is a reason you have one. The complete person can handle all their aspects, not scorning the less respectable parts.
I am, however, greatly more confident and outgoing because I see the cellophane over all social interaction. The consequences to my approaching some random person I find interesting are minimal. They may decide they find me off-putting and decide they do not like me.
You were always this confident and a little weird. Someone in your high school freshman year -- I cannot remember his name, but his scruffy, kind face leaps easily to mind -- saw you anxious over talking to a girl. He said something to the effect that you were a great guy and had no reason to ever quake, so why were you freaking out. Clearly, this stuck with you, as I am recounting it (with some vagueness) now.
Your high school dating history alone serves as a testament to your abundance of social daring.
The Faire didn't do this to you. All it did was pay you to exploit that trait. High school drama probably broke the part of your brain that hesitated in social situations.
Conor was asked by Bard College not to return this semester. Last year, he fell so ill that he couldn't move his head just before finals. Well, that and the first year college party syndrome. But for this narrative, as I wish for you to be sympathetic toward the wonderfulness that is Conor, we will wholly assume it was all about the former.
Bard isn't far from you. About an hour from your home and 35 minutes from New Paltz. I do not know why you treat it as a huge burden to get there. I can and have biked there, but I do live in Red Hook.
Conor is complicated. I assume he had mental health issues he either did not disclose or fully accept at the time.
Bard kicks him out a second time later. I do not think it was a physical illness twice. I cannot guarantee that all his professors would have been unsympathetic to a brutal sickness -- some surely would -- so you are trusting a secondhand narrative meant to comfort his ego by taking some of the blame off his shoulders.
While I had complete faith in the boy, I do not think all the combined faith in twelve Baptist churches could have invoked the proper miracle to complete all of his work.
While you suffer an excess of the superego, his mind may give too much sway to his id.
College isn't easy by design, I'll grant you. However, I teach freshman English to my residents. A few paced themselves or even got work handed in on time. Others haven't even started, and we are a month in.
Somewhere between leaving and arriving at my home, Emily informed us matter-of-factly that the strange ducks and geese I had taken to befriending on campus were the progeny of genetic experiments conducted by the New Paltz biology students in the 1970s.
It is quite a tale, but those are perfectly normal -- if lumpy -- birds. They tolerate people because we are the givers of snacks.
It might give you pause how plausibly Emily can lie for the hell of it.
we also purchased cake mix and frosting. For what is a zombie movie without fresh cake?
While I think better of lingering on the topic, I regret that I do not have what you do here. I have my own well-appointed kitchen and culinary skills. I could bake a cake from scratch (and possibly make the frosting provided it was vanilla, I was sure of my powdered sugar situation, and I had enough butter) and a three-course meal to precede it. The trouble is that it is a trial to get people to come over for dinner and a movie. It is painful to get them to come over at all.
I do not mind the physical changes of aging (I mean, I'm not thrilled...) as much as the absence of ready company for cake and zombies.
I stepped out of my room wholly bedecked in the splendors that one can only purchase through International [Gay] Male. Emily took - how shall we say? - kindly to the ensemble.
Given who you are and how you grew up, this faint homophobia fits you worse than the outfit (and that outfit is two sizes too big for you, to say nothing of the coat reaching the floor).
I think she pretty much gave up here and told us not to make a mess and that I should get out of my nice suit. Mothers have a way of shutting away anything that doesn't make sense quickly. At least mine does.
Your mother raised you. I assure you that trying on clothes while you cook isn't in the top thousand things that she could name that were weird about you.
I do not know why you underestimate your mother.
Leaving campus today, I realized just how much I truly wish to be in this college community and indulge in their less than scholarly antics.
Yes, that will become a major psychological complex that nags at you for years. I wish you had more intrapersonal intelligence and tried cognitive behavioral therapy on yourself.
I worry that, sans this cultural experience, I will be somehow deficient socially.
You would feel less deficient (though still deficient) if you didn't perseverate on this. You romanticize the discomfort of that life. It serves a purpose, and I am sure you would have appreciated it enough, but your adventures shaped you in a way they would not have cosseted on campus.
If you hadn't clung to Kate, you might not have wanted to go to New Paltz. If you went to SUNY Purchase, let's say, you would have been far enough away that it might have made sense for you to live on campus. It's only an extra half hour, but it would have been enough.
Without New Paltz, you don't meet Emily, so that's a huge string of fate to cut.
Someone. Write me. Tell me that you read this. Ask me about small facts that pique your curiosity. Beseech me to tell you a story from my life. I want to share. Writing is my therapy and an addiction that I fear ever quitting. Without it, I despair. Elicit my stories. Friends, ask me to tell some story from your life as I saw it. Be known and loved. For me?
I congratulate you on never changing how hungry you are for an audience, even in absence of evidence that you have one.