Unloading Part 4 (aka Here Comes the Barrage of First World Problems)

• Sometimes I'm casually cupping my chin, pen in hand, looking all attentive in class, when I decide I want to shift positions. And then the pen gets caught in my hair. And it makes a long journey to the end of that strand of hair. So I'm essentially brushing a lock of hair with my pen. In class. 
• Passive-aggressive bathroom behavior is all the rage here in the realm of communal restrooms. For example, I might need to go to the bathroom in a... special way, and coincidentally there's a girl brushing her teeth. So I'll brush my teeth too and try to out-brush her, in an attempt to get her to leave so I can do my business in peace. 
• Houston weather is bizarre. It will change over the span of twenty minutes, from heavy sheets of rain to stifling sunny heat. Everyone pretty much always has to have an umbrella on him/her. What an inconvenience. 
• As a Spotify newbie, I am very confused. I don't really get how the queue thing works, and how many times is one allowed to skip songs? After a while I can't skip anymore, and it's frustrating! And is there any way to just note which artists I want to listen to in the future without adding their whole track listing to the 'queue' thing?! 
• I love sleep. A LOT. Yet, I sleep ridiculously late for no reason in particular, and so I wake up like fifteen minutes before my first morning class begins. That means no time to properly do makeup, and no time to sit down and actually eat breakfast. Basically, I eat a bagel every morning. It's quite sad. 
• If one is without a car (and don't feel like mooching off of someone with a car), one must wait till Saturday every week to make a trip to Target for snacklets... and other things (although what else do you need besides food, really?). 
• Finally... there is a plethora of potentially brilliant classes one could take, yet there is simply not enough time. Even if somehow it's possible to wedge in the maximum number of hours, it may come at a high cost (of sanity). Ah, life is hard. 

A Long Time Coming

You sway the grassiest ripples of my heart 

soft, pliant, cast with a sheen 

heat the top of my head like a disc of sunlight

I've always wondered what it's like to love and be loved in return.

(The ache of mystery has been resolved.)

Catching a glimpse of your dusky skin is like seeing 

light glancing over inked text 

Falling for you is like wondering what's it's like to fall from air, from the window of an aeroplane 

There's the clench of the stomach, but an absence of true throat-squeezing fear.

Losing you to time--that enveloping, oozing entity--is like the dissipation of ideas 

Helpless to stop it, I can only hope to grasp 
a few of the remaining, drifting, flaxen strands, 

all the while watching the rest fade to forgotten nothing.

When I was younger I tried to make patterns out of velour carpeting, futilely lifting 

my own stories out of embossed fabric.

Now I trace lacy designs on the sinewy, raised canvas of your palms 

your face, your angled shoulders 

Lost, in the plains and ridges

I paint.

It's Hard.

(No, not like that!)

Do you think a boy ever understands how difficult it is to be female?

Being female entails quite a few suffocating constraints that one can never truly escape, despite our movement towards a more "modern", equalizing era. The sad thing is, we're always going to be pressured to look a certain way. We're always going to be belittled in some way by some misogynistic fools. There will always be sexism, the same way there will always be racism and homophobia. Those bigots will always be thriving and strong in some filthy, disrespectful corners of the world.

Being female means insecurity, from the start. Are there any girls ever who have never felt the soul-crushing, all-consuming pressure of being generically thin and beautiful? We have to be thin and beautiful. It's a requirement, we tell ourselves; it's practically a berating demand that we be so, in any way we can achieve it. And then we go after it for all the wrong reasons, these unhealthy notions instilled in us from the start; we exercise not to be fit, but to be attractive, and then diet not to be healthy, but to be pleasing to others. We'll hunt for that golden mean, in whatever shape or form we can find it in–well, in whatever shape or form that will allow us to be "pretty". It takes a considerable amount of commitment and time and effort to make oneself "pretty", if not naturally born such a way. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder (yeah, keep telling yourself that), but that's not what society says, ever. Society is nearly always dictating.

Never does society say that it's okay to be disproportionate. Even if it was okay to be a bit on the plump side at a certain point in history, those women were still in perfect proportion with their more generous hips and rear end, possessing womanly voluptuous curves. And then those small-breasted girls in the '90s were stick skinny everywhere else, to form that highly coveted "willowy" body type. And then, worst of all, there was the "sexy supermodel", in the form of Gisele Bundchen and Cindy Crawford and so on. They just smashed every single girls' ego into disrepair, into dust, essentially, from young to old, all across the board.

Then there's the whole biological clock thing, which is completely unfair. Males never, at any point, have to worry about being too old to reproduce; their sperm will always wiggle away happily to reach the egg (unless they have low mobility, in which case, blame your genetics, maybe?). Females, in sharp contrast, are under constant pressure to settle down and get on with marriage, then get those kids marching out like some sort of clown car. We might live in a modern era where stay-at-home dads are not all that uncommon, and we may have near-obliterated the image of the "barefoot in the kitchen" domestic wife, but we can't play God and change the course of biology. Facts are facts. Women have to get moving fast if they want to have healthy children. 

Being a girl sucks sometimes. It sucks balls. Sometimes literally. 

Gross.

Aerial

For the first time in years, he looked out the window of a plane high, high, up 
And he saw

Those tiny lives, housed in the crooked, jagged formations of vehicles puffs of gasoline 

inscrutable from such height 

harmless from afar, perhaps

A tennis court half the size of his palm 

empty at the moment

And he wondered what it'd be like to witness a crime from above 

a simple mugging perhaps, in the narrow strip of a stringy alleyway, 

man versus man

Would it really be so different from seeing the crime down below, on land? Up close? 

Would he stop it then?

And the sudden dip of the plane smooths out the jarring whistle of air 

The landing, the rejoining the return of reality and everyday comings and goings 

A seamless blend with the glittering lights, lives.

Hello, my name is:

I'm a cliché.

There, I said it. After years of trying futilely to dig up random nuances that would prove that I'm a unique little star, a marbled grain of sand among billions of uniform specks, I've recognized it–I'm a cliché.

Yeah, so I thought I was pretty cool, with my little imagination and identity crises and "I'm totally not like other girls" attitude. Eventually my brain started yearning for a return; it was shouting at me, "hey, who the hell do you think you are, throwing me out and replacing me with some wannabe?"

I'm that girl who pretends not to be a romantic, but secretly yearns for the fireworks and explosive passions of angsty 90s dramas. I'm that girl with an inflated ego, but sporting a crushingly massive inferiority complex. I'm that girl who can be pushed over the edge, to near-tears, with a couple of emotional phrases. I'm that girl who thinks she's the best listener in the world "because I'm an introvert". I'm that girl who says "okay" listlessly but doesn't do. I'm that girl who thinks she can fix what's been broken beyond repair. I'm that girl who's "lost".

Or–I was?

Ha, nah, I still am. My brain wants to come back, sure, but here's the thing about me and pretty much everyone else (because I'm a cliché, there are others like me, right?)–we hear the logic. Oh yeah, we can hear it banging and clanging away from the outskirts of our extremely thick skulls. But we love to ignore. If there's something we're–I'm–truly, genuinely good at doing, it's ignoring. Willfully.

The only thing remotely special about me is that I've somehow mastered the art of balancing the ratio of milk to cereal. That's pretty fucking awesome, if I do say so myself.

Which obviously I just did, because this whole thing is about myself. Here I am, talking about myself like a self-absorbed brat masquerading as a thoughtful, introspective soul with the wisdom garnered from aging, teenage years. What a cliché, right?

The Strop

We are in a strop.
I don't care what you say
For it is what it is.

We are in a strop.
The bitterness of words left unspoken
Sit rancid on my tongue.

When our eyes meet
It's a tacit statement of everything we don't say
We just can't be the way we were.

As soon as I
See you, I think
Repulsion resentment regret

When you see me
I see it
Apprehension ambivalence aggravation.

We are not
We were never
A perfect unit, everlasting, connection.

I despise you.
I tell myself that every spare moment
Coaching my errant brain

Only way to cope
With the stagnant pull between us
Is to hate and hate more, to insert something anything--

Did you know?
History does repeat itself.
How many times has it been?

Once, twice, thrice--oh, third time's the charm
This time
It will be to break for good.

Inevitable
We fooled ourselves into thinking
We could bridge the distance, the distance that always was

Because
I thought the distance was the temporal
But it's the connection that proves ephemeral.

We could never stick
Like half-dried glue on styrofoam
We always peel apart.

And it's not that we are in a strop
We are the strop.

You
Me

It's not you me

It will always be

You                                                                                                                   Me

The Ultimate Show of Passive-Aggressive Behavior

I randomly found this while surfing the Internet the other day, and man is this a gem! I normally make it a point to avoid passive-aggressive behavior at all costs, but this is actually amazing. It's "How to Wait Out Your Friend's Boyfriend." Look ahead for serious larfs. 

1. Act blandly surprised whenever she asks if she can bring him to an event, no matter how long they’ve been together. “Oh, Dave’s coming too? Sure, that’s fine.”

2. Suggest Sleeping With The Devil for movie night.

3. Learn exactly one thing about him; make that the subject of conversation whenever you see him. It will not be necessary to learn two things.

4. Always grab the bill before he does.

5. Whisper “I will bury you” into his ear while he pours you wine.

6. Behave so irreproachably that no one will ever believe him.

7. Suggest Sleeping With The Enemy for movie night.

8. “I think it’s really important for a man to recognize how magnificent you are, Meredith. I’m glad you think Steve sees that in you.”

9. Never get his job title quite correct. If he’s an Associate Something, call him an Assistant Something. If he tries to correct you, he’ll seem both petty and vain for making sure you get it right.

10. Avoid criticizing him at all costs, but if you must, put the words “It’s endearing how” before your criticism so he takes it as a compliment and the seeds of doubt are planted carefully in her mind. “Something I really like about Greg is [subtly horrifying trait.]”

11. Bring up topics that only you and she know a great deal about, so that he’ll be forced to say something ignorant in order to stay in the conversation.

12. Make sure you tell her how much you like him in front of him, so that he never suspects.

13. “He has great energy. I love how whenever I run into him at he’s in the center of a little clump of women, just regaling them with stories.”

14. Suggest Fried Green Tomatoes for movie night.

15. Steal something small but significant from her apartment every time the three of you are there together, but never when it’s just you and her, so that when she starts to piece together a pattern, she’ll ask you instead of him to fill in the blanks. Also, leave the toilet seat up.

16. Say “I love how you ALWAYS have a Groupon, you’re like Suze Orman! But…I know Rachel really wants to go to [better restaurant], let me treat you.”

17. At her birthday party, immediately after everyone has finished shout-singing “Happy Birthday”: “I think it would be great if we went around the room, and all of us said something we truly love about Annie.” Then deliver a touching, self-effacing tribute to Annie that will leave her in tears. Kick him savagely under the table as he starts his, while smiling warmly at him.

18. Always respond instantly to her texts. Delete hers from his phone if left unattended.

19. “Find” an OkCupid account that has a picture of him she took after they started dating. He’s in “a complicated relationship,” he just wants to meet “friends and activity partners” and to have someone to talk to about life.

20. Suggest Waiting To Exhale for movie night.

21. “Arthur seems to be really open with his friends about your relationship. I guess that’s refreshing in a man, to share the ups and downs.”

22. Always invite the friend of his she likes the least whenever you all get together. Point out their similarities.

23. Kill her dog when you know he’ll be out of town so he can’t be there to support her during the most painful time in her life. Be there for her every step of the way.

24. “Isn’t it wonderful how, when you meet the right person, there is never again a single moment of doubt or questioning? You literally never wonder if there could be another person out there, better suited to you.”

25. Suggest Thelma and Louise for movie night.

26. The next time he leaves his phone unattended, rename two of his contacts Blonde Afternoons and Redhead Yoga Girl.

27. Point out how much other people have noticed that the two of them look like brother and sister. “I didn’t see it at first, but now I can’t stop noticing it! You guys even wear the same size jeans!”

28. Encourage him whenever he suggests an outing she’ll hate.

29. Wait until he’s drunk or sulky, and say, “Isn’t it amazing to think that we’ll all be parents in a few years?”

30. Put a box of tampons that are neither your brand nor hers at the very back of the space under his bathroom sink, opened, and with two-thirds of the contents missing. If she ever brings them up, say “don’t worry, I’m sure lots of guys keep a box of tampons around for guests.”

Original link: http://the-toast.net/2014/05/27/wait-out-your-friends-boyfriend/ 

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