Learning to Love Disappointment

Happy, Healthy, So Disappointing

I’ve become too healthy for my own good.

There’s nothing dangerous about eating vegetables all the time. Nothing hot about finding it difficult to handle more than a strict 2 drink max. Most disappointing is that I’m certain I couldn’t handle living dangerously even if I tried. 

Gone are the days of smoking and looking like a femme fatale.

(in my own mind)

Gone are the days of hitting on strangers.

(while wearing a beret)

Gone are the days of going to bed without removing eye makeup.

(Yah, I did that sometimes)

My wild oats have been sown. My dangerous years are behind me. It’s exercise and the occasional, indulgent scotch for me from now on. I will never clothe myself in outdoor-wear fleece though. I will never become that person.

Touchy Revisited

The only thing more disappointing than people not reading your “Don’t Touch Me” vibes is making a personal resolution to be more open to touching and deciding to share this resolution with others by giving them a reassuring touch on the arm, but you realize too late they are totally. not. down.

You get the look. You know the look because you give it so often: “Get the fuck off me.”

And today I realized that touching, like winking, is a subtle art fraught with the potential to fail.

Touchy

Usually I lament the fact that people think I don’t like to be touched. Apparently I just put off “no-touch vibes,” a saddening fact until someone I dislike doesn’t pick up on the vibes (or plunges straight through them) to give me encouraging squeezes and pats on the shoulder every time I see them.

If I could die of cringing it would have happened by now.

Not being able to yell, “Get the FUCK OFF” because of silly things like “social etiquette” and “job security” is soul-crushingly disappointing. 

more disappointment

You know what’s disappointing? when friends call you out in public. Well, considering the readership of this blog, I wouldn’t call it ‘public’ but you know what I mean. 

- not sam

Memory Box

Overtaken by the need to sort through all of my crap and throw stuff into a “FREE SHIT” box to be placed later on a street corner in my neighborhood (yah, it’s one of those neighborhoods), I began rifling through some “memory” boxes from my angsty adolescent years. I figured it might be more productive than sitting in my bedroom repeating, “How did I get this much shit?” over and over again while rocking in the fetal.

I was not prepared for what I found in the “Rocketdog” platform-sandal shoebox that housed my keepsakes from yesteryear. 

Now, I knew there would be notes, but sweet Jesus, there were so many notes. Is that all I fucking did? There were intricately folded ones. Colored ones. Quickly scrawled during class ones. Big ones. Small ones. Some the size of your head.

Needless to say, after glancing at a few of them, I tossed them all. I felt so aged—reading dusty, old inside jokes, vaguely remembering their context, and wondering what in God’s name lead us to find that as hilarious as we so clearly did (you could tell from all of the exclamation marks).

But, none of these notes were from me. The horrific prose and spelling errors were those of my “BFFs.” It certainly would have been strange for me to ask for my own note as a keepsake. So, still feeling just fine about myself, I tossed these little gems from my school yard buddies and shook my head, quietly thinking, “Poor things—they didn’t know any better. I mean, I’m sure I was just as silly as they were, but…” while secretly shivering at the company I kept, when clearly I could never have been that vacuous.

Ah, hubris. As the very thought entered my head, I discovered my dairy from Middle School. Expecting to chuckle lightly at my quirky, precocious, young writing style, I snuggled into bed with my old diary, leaving the piles of shit (really though, how could I have that much shit?) to sit on the floor in front of my closet. It only took about three or so entries before a haunting sense of mortification descended. Here’s a break-down in percentages of what I beheld:

80%—OMG why do I like my crush so much???

10%—OMG I’m so bored right now!!!

5%—OMG, so (insert BFF name here) did this today!!!

5%—OMG when am I going to kiss someone??? (…I was a late-bloomer, okay? I suppose I know the reason for that a little better now.)

And the clouds parted (or the rose-colored tint faded, depending one what metaphor you prefer…I like the clouds for the dramatic effect and the implied religious awakening) and all became clear.

Precocious? No. Witty? No. Even just quirky, please God? No.

I was as average as they come. The image of a miniature me at thirteen (me as I am now…just a little underdeveloped and less cynical) lay shattered amongst the piles of shit all over the floor, now contributing metaphysical shit to the shit that had to go into the trash and the “FREE SHIT” box. And then it dawned on me: If I was so horrifyingly mediocre then and didn’t realize it, what about n….

Nope.

-Sam