Oh summer, how I miss thy overconfidence

I was recently going through a journal I kept this summer while I was in Russia/Turkmenistan. Things I write in journals somehow always seem to amuse me. They're different from the things I type, even if it's just into a word document no one looks at but me. On paper I seem so much more vulnerable, naive, and sure of myself. Also, a page is something tangible - it is so much easier to acknowledge that it's history, that the tantrum of feelings has passed and my views have matured. Still, every now and then I come across something so gold I can't let it collect dust with the many forgotten notebooks resting on my bookshelf.

This was written on July 25, 2008:

In the seventeen years of our existence, have we figured out what we need? It seems everyone is running around hooking up, breaking up, making up, and in general obsessing over the complex infrastructure of the opposite sex. And for what? You’d think that out of selfcenteredness, the majority of us would pull stage four [talking about our psychological stages of development, stage 4 being our attempt to figure out who we are, stage 5 focusing on our significant other] out for as long as possible. But it’s having the opposite effect. In your case, stage five is the last legal type of slavery left on earth and, hell, girls are a whining sobbing nagging nerve-wrecking machine of commitment that are good for screwing and maybe making dinner. On the offhand that chick is “cool” – gets wasted in the daytime, regular cop trouble, all that jazz that makes your friends laugh and applaud – she might get an invitation to smoke at Jack’s. Yes, the infamous Friday afternoons at Jack’s. I’m not even sure Jack’s a real person, probably just a code name for a blunt.

Then there’s me. where do I fit in your UrbanDictionary of life? Search term: Masha. Results: doesn’t smoke, drinks rarely on occasion (like New Years with my mother), refuses to listen to hardcore rap, can’t cook to save her life, and says more words per minute than all your pothead friends put together have in their vocabulary. But you loved me and said you'll never stop. I didn’t buy that last Tuck-Everlasting bit then, nor do I buy it now, but I think you naively believed what you were saying.

Then what do we mean to each other? Underneath our cynical responses, our steel masks made to conceal – jealousy? pain? – our egocentric “luv ya”s and “baby, suck my dick”, our words thrown at each other like stones wrapped in fuzzy socks (dirty socks, in your case, that you leave in my room and I have to hide in my CD opener), underneath our smirks, our sarcasm, our vodka, your weed, are two people. Without an armor for our tender bodies and without any defense mechanisms. Yes, there are people that care about me more than you do, but it’s your love I want. And underneath your mad fits of jealousy, I think you need it just as much as I do. In the sappy stage four of our imperfect lives.

I’m almost seventeen years old; it’s time to find a balance.

It's funny how things are completely different now, yet somehow they're the same. We're the same old egocentric cynical self-serving creatures, we just grew up a bit.

And you know what? Between us, I wouldn't have it any other way.