Friday, May 22, 2009

so last night, while attending a dinner party that was quicky detiorating into a drinking party, i recieved a text message from my brother that read, "i think mike wallace died."

naturally i thought he was referencing mike wallace from cbs' popular television journalism show, sixty minutes. so i laughed and showed everyone the text message as a sort of, haha, my brother is so strange! what an odd message to send.

of course, within a minute of laughing and sharing the weirdness with everyone in the room, i realized that he had to be talking about a mutual friend from high school. and, sure enough, he was. and this morning everyone from high school has facebook updates pertaining to the death and the funeral.

so the question is, how am i supposed to feel about this? i hadn't talked to ths kid in seven years, probably. (which it is another odd thought that i am getting to the point where i have "friends" with whom i haven't spoken to in almost a decade; ah, the strange land that is your mid/late twenties.) so yeah, hadn't talked to the kid in years, hadn't talked to most of the kids talking about it his funeral in years, but due to the strange pervasiveness that is facebook, i have this information and am supposed to maybe develop a thought or feeling about it. but really the only thought is about how fucking weird social networking sites are; how strange it is that i can find out the "intimate" details of "friends" who i am neither really friends nor intimate with.

not to mention that this is the second time in a year when this exact situation has happened.

not to mention that it's vaguely offensive for me to think that i have to feel anything about this occurance, considering that obviously i am so removed from the situation. but then again, does that make me a callous individual- that this person i was once very close to has passed, and my immediate concern is whether or not i have a right to think or feel about.

about a year ago this same thing happened- a good friend from high school killed himself and it was a mess and i didn't go to the funeral and people called me wanting to talk and cried on my voicemail and i didn't respond. and i felt like an asshole, sure, but at the same time i felt like distancing myself was necessary. im a very different person than who i was back then, and even back then, i was a very different person than most of my friends.

it's strange, looking back and thinking about everyone so young. and the traditional phrase is "so young and full of promise", but i think most of the people i was friends with were never really full of any promises except that yeah, they were going to get addicted to drugs, and yeah, they were going to have children way too young, and yeah, they were never going to leave our horrible hometown, and yeah, they were probably going to die way too early and from stupid accidents or from their own hands. and i'm going to be 600 miles away, spying on facebook memorial groups and trying to figure out how the fuck i escaped out of that quicksand.

Thursday, May 7, 2009

been unsure of late about all these decisions im making. the future, you know, and what to do, whether to stay in this rotting, decaying, violent city, whether to leave and start over somewhere else again, whether to take on a lot of debt and go to a fancy school, whether i want to work in community development anymore, why i am always so unsure about where im supposed to be and what im supposed to be doing and what im allowed to say about what.

ive been quite productive over the past months- makin jam, knitting presents, reading books, being altogether in a good mood most of the time and happy where i am with my life. but there's always that question of what next? i can't do this forever.