californication

Currently Listening To...
Graduation, Kanye West

Warning: This post isn't like my other posts. It's a tad introspective and self-indulgent. You have been warned.

As I sit here in my freezing cold apartment (my roommate hates high PG&E bills) I can't help but let my mind wander about summers past. It seems like the older I get, the less tumultuous my summers are. I prefer it that way, but i feel like pretty soon my summers will be so dead that I will find myself passed out on the couch watching Everybody Loves Raymond reruns. And I hate that show.

Last summer I interned at the San Francisco Film Commission at S.F city hall. Amazing experience, let me tell ya. My (female) boss had the dirtiest mouth and was married to an actor (Peter Coyote) who would call the office and ask for " my wife, the bangin' hottie". It was a colorful summer, albeit uneventful aside from that. Oh, right, I also went with my mom to Paris and Sicily. My mother teaches art history at our local community college and is a guest lecturer every year at what people like to call "The Ivy League School on the West Coast". So ever since I was still in the womb I have been going to Europe. Mom calls it "research". I call it "free travel". We all win.

Summer-before-last I was a sales associate at JCrew. Not a good time although my good friend from high school, "Cassie", worked with me and we would talk shit about our fellow employees after work. That made the situation live-able. One of our bosses was this pretty, preppy girl who had a name like "Kelly" or "Karen" or something and always wore argyle and had a smile plastered on her face. One day when I was walking back from my lunch break I saw her standing in this hidden corner of the outdoor mall, chain smoking and swearing like a sailor about the guy she had fucked the night before.

Two summers ago I was preparing to go away to college. I'm pretty sure I didn't do anything remotely useful with my time, apart from cause some major drama among my peers. I slept with my closest male friend. Actually, I took his virginity. I had broken up with The Ex (capitalization means he's the big one. The important one. The high school sweetheart. The First, yes, that fist), 2 days prior. It was the third and final time I would break up with him during the span of our time together. More on that later. Anyway, aside from that, I don't remember much about the rest of the drama other then that it was completely unrelated and ended with another one of my ex boyfriends hooking up with my best friend of four years and then lying to me about it until my ex finally broke down and told me. I couldn't understand why they kept it from me in the first place. It wouldn't have mattered had they not lied. I forgave my best friend for lying to me but nothing was ever the same and that was the beginning of the end of my friendship with her. A lot happened after that, and we slowly drifted despite my desperate efforts to salvage the little we had left. Now we don't speak.

The summer before senior year of high school was the worst in my life. We will end with this one because no summer prior to this one will be of any interest or importance compared to this summer. This was the summer that I went off to summer school in D.C for a program for really politically nerdy kids. The day after I came home I was told that my father was leaving our family.

Broken.

Since that summer my life has never been the same. Over the next few weeks after it happened I dealt with it by not dealing with it, which is something I have been paying for over the past couple years. In the first week after it happened, I broke up with The Ex (for the first time), went to too many parties, did the stereotypical teenage angst thing for a few days, closed myself off emotionally to all of my friends, and discovered a new-found interest in kissing lots of boys (see above).

Some of you may say "oh, boo hoo, the worst of her problems is her parents getting divorced. Every one's parents get divorced." Until it happens to you, especially if it comes as a shock and when it comes when you are 17, you have absolutely no idea what it is or what it feels like. Just because something happens frequently doesn't mean that it is any less painful or a big deal. Example: one out of three females in the united states has been molested in some form before they turn 12. Just because it happens so frequently, does that mean it is any less disgusting or shocking? No. I rest my case.

Really what this post is about is time. Looking back at these past summers has made me realize that when we are young, things change so very quickly. The difference between being 17 and 20 is absolutely astronomical, and this fascinates me. I have grown, the people who surround me in life have come and gone, and I am a different person then I was then, but I am dealing with the same issues. We don't grow up; we grow through.