a decade under the influence

I have been writing about my life on the internet for at least eight years. Today another one bit the dust, a quick fade out from someone I'd read and then met, and then read as his whole life changed. I have a collection of lives I've followed over the years, completely unrelated.

There are two written by insightful high school girls who remind me of myself, or myself as I'd like to remember it. One by a former serial dater that I've read to the point where she fell in love and got married this month. One by a lawyer who does coke, family law and puppy school, often in the same week. A couple by people who have young families. A girl putting herself through college by being a prostitute. I don't actually read any by people like me, though I do reread my own.

My boyfriend has no idea that I do this. This writing thing. Which I guess is ok given that it's not (a) swinging, (b) meth, (c) swinging on meth. Neither does anyone in my family, and this current incarnation is only read by one of my friends.

Who's to say you have to go? (I could go all night)
-taking back sunday, a decade under the influence

I'm going through this strange phase of disinterest in the following: alcohol. House parties. Pubs. I'm not saying that I haven't dabbled in all three, pretty much in the last week, but I am saying I'm not that interested when they crop up. Part of it is cyclic, once I have moving on in my head it's done before it happens. I think another part of it is that my threshold has changed, that level of quantifiable good time. I still like really normal things, but what used to be fun gets... old?

Truth or dare at the lake from ten to fifteen gave way to summer house parties and college kids with home made bongs in the city until I was seventeen, which led to being outrageously drunk at a dance bar for 1.5 years, which then became pubcrawls and college life, which then became American style summer keggers, which eventually led to bar stardom and student government line jumping, which suddenly switched to professional college debauchery surrounded by a world I didn't know existed, and ended up with champagne flowing clubs and existential nights in surf paradise -- living at the party that was everyone's best night of their life. I don't really know what comes next.

I've also found that who I'm interested in has shifted.

I used to get devastating crushes, secret ones, that went on for years. Documenting interaction in my collection of journals in inferences so obscure I'm not sure I would understand them today. I remember the way my first two boyfriends smelled, I wasn't always attracted to them in the same way I was the great young unrequited loves of my life. I think the city I was from was so small I didn't necessarily know who to be interested in, and I wasn't really aware of my capacity to actually have them be interested in me. I always liked guys who symbolized the things I wished I could have done but couldn't because I was a girl growing up in a place where girls didn't. Guys who rode skateboards and played guitars and had ironic tshirts and weed. In retrospect, I know that what I wanted was access to the world and they seemed to have it.

The first serious one I actually didn't notice existed until some hormonal star of stupidity aligned, even though I had a class with him. I vaguely remembered him as a yearbook headline for being some kind of jock, and almost dated his skateboard riding guitar playing friend - which was apparent to pretty much everyone around us except for ourselves who were too busy My So Called Life-ing to figure it out. Our relationship has retained that unrequited fifteen year old quality, I saw him two summers ago and we wandered around with 40s and fell asleep fully clothed in the same bed.

In undergrad, I was in love with a series of writers and student body presidents, both up close and from afar. Generally moody, vastly overrated, luckily pretty much unrequited. A lot of this was probably a replication of the skateboard-guitar fetishizing, but as a young adult.

Then, something changed.

I started to realize that girls are powerful and that dating does not have to be about what you would like to be, but what you wish to have. I also found myself gradually in better dating pools, if I'm being honest, where I didn't intimidate guys around me with perfect parsing and excess vocabulary. Suddenly, I could look at someone from across a room and make them talk to me. My friends found this endlessly entertaining, eventually I ended up seeing the RBH. Then, I went away.

Living in a transient place allowed me to test this newfound capacity... and suddenly, I attracted people instead of being attracted to them. It was a rush. I rarely even kissed anyone, but my friends would pick out the most desirable guy in the room and by the end of the night he'd be on the barstool beside me buying the drinks. It was like getting a copy of The Game instead of reading a crappy copy of The Rules.

But then something weird happened.

I don't get crushed anymore. Crushes. Overwhelming attractions. In learning how to attract guys, it was almost like the veil was lifted and I could see the machinery beneath, what made them operate.

The magic was gone.

And now? I like people in a slower, disaffected way.
On the whole, it seems to result in better choices.