Notes - for fellow diarylanders!
Guestbook - for outsiders!
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2002-02-06 - 11:16 p.m. My hair is now purple, rather than blue. The colour was starting to fade so I went to get more dye; they didn't have the "blue velvet" that I'd used last time so I got the darkest looking blue bottle on the shelf; "blueberry hill". Of course, blueberries are actually purple. - While I have been a recluse or social misfit of one sort or another for most of my life, there was a period when I was pretty close to being a social butterfly, or sorts. - When I was at school in Bx then I was universally reviled because I did well academically and was bad at sport and made no effort at all to fit in to the narrowminded parochial "scene" at my school. When I moved from Bx to Sydney then a sort of minor miracle occured; I discovered that it was possible for other people to like me. And not just one or two people, but whole groups of them. I was accepted and even admired and, having never had a girlfriend in all my years in Bx, had a girlfriend within two weeks of arrival at my new school in Sydney. And even when she dropped me, it was ok because someone else was interested and I had another girlfriend within two weeks of being dumped. (This was the aforementioned SB. Note also that this ego-inflating pattern did not continue; there was a five year gap between SB and the next time someone expressed an interest in me. Ego returned fairly rapidly to a more manageable size.) - Anyway, after school ended everyone was kind of still pretty tight-knit, still seeing each other regularly and going to the pub and getting drunk together and inviting each other to all the parties we went to... but my life was otherwise pretty empty because I had some kind of ridiculous idea that I wasn't going to go to uni because I wanted to experience "the real world" or I wanted to avoid following "the course of least resistance"... but anyway, I still felt good and happy and satisfied with my life because I had all these wonderful friends, all these different people who cared about me and whose phone numbers I had, that I could ring at any time and chat or find out if anything was going on or whatever... - And then the realisation came to me that in fact the only thing in my life was this network of friendships, and that without it I would be nothing, and all of a sudden I couldn't bear to call anyone anymore. I suddenly felt like a leper; asking to see someone was like asking for a favour. I couldn't bear the humiliation, I couldn't bear the idea that I needed them more than they needed me. I had paranoid images of them sighing after they put down the phone to me. I tried not calling anyone to see if, if I didn't call them, they would call me. When I was with people, I would be shy and awkward and strange, because I was scared of asking for too much... in short, I fucked everything up. - Oddly enough, though, I am still friends with some of those people. I guess some friendships can survive almost anything. It's lucky for me. Even though I now have some sort of legitimacy because of uni, I still feel that without my friends I would be nothing; the difference, if there is any, is that now I'm a bit more accepting of that fact that being unimportant to what is important to you is part of life. There's that poem, the Auden one, have I mentioned it before? "How should we like it were stars to burn/ With a passion for us we could not return?" It's still hard for me, I don't think I have an answer yet, but then, maybe it's better that I don't. Maybe it's better that the way that friendships works stays mysterious. - "I've found my thrill On Blueberry hill" - Fats Domino
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