shake along with me

[two hundred sixty-six]

I will not be writing a post for tomorrow or Sunday until Monday, for a very good reason to delay.


I taught myself to braid. I taught myself during Christmas at my grandma's house on top of pink carpet, beside the christmas tree, because they have ornaments from everywhere. There is a santa with a hula skirt from Hawaii and much more, and I braided my hair over and over, and sat thinking about my cousins and how they liked my sister a lot better than me because she was a baby, which I didn't and still don't find fair, but they did they loved playing with her and putting clips in her hair, well the girl ones anyway, and the boy ones played with each other, sort of ignoring me all together. So I sat and braided my hair.

And to this day I suck at braiding, but I still do it sometimes, I still braid in pigtails and make wrinkly curls, or I just leave them in, but I don't go out because they are ugly. I like them though, it makes me feel like Laura Ingelles, she was one of my friends in elementary school when I had no other friends, when the girls wouldn't play house with me because I was different, and the other sporty girls wouldn't talk to me because I didn't like soccer and sang in the choir. I was super loved.

I wrote about things a lot those days, I wrote in this white binder that had slips in it so I could put papers into it, and draw pictures, and I'd write about the pioneer books I'd read, or the kingdoms and knights that I dreamt about, or the certain wizarding characters who I identified with. I spent a lot of time pretending I knew elvish, too.

Nobody likes the chubby girl with glasses who writes about world wars and knows Bring it On and Moulin Rouge off by heart.

I think the worst part about being in elementary school was when, that one recess, that the girls asked me to play house. On the top of a hill by this huge tree that I loved because the roots were big and bumpy and smooth, and there was a bench, and I went to play with them and they made me do things that I didn't want to, but I wanted friends you know so I did that I went to them and played, I didn't want to be the lost cousin from Peru who doesn't speak English, or the mute, or the other things that they made up so really I wasn't walking around writing about them, or so they thought... And I just wanted to write again.

I tried once asking this girl Carly to play a game with me. Instead of playing house, I wanted to play..wow, this is going to be stupid, but play women in a war torn country like Germany or France (countryside, of course) during the second world war, and we had to be in refugee mode and work with the weather and all kinds of things, and really I just wanted a friend, and she sort of didn't understand the game but she got to pretend to have a baby and I was sort of nice to her so she liked that, it was a nice game, everytime a plane crossed the sky I would pretend it was blitzkrieg and scream, she didn't understand that either.

Why I was so weird when I was little makes no difference to me, I loved my imagination and to this day continue my dreams and stories alike to these, because I don't want to forget how it felt to be alone, isolated, because it makes me grateful for my friends and stories now. I have to be normal now, we have to conform now, I think I'd rather let them all bite me, now.

So what if I want to wear high waisted shorts, a plaid overshirt and ankle boots to a country bar? So what if I want to wear leg warmers and a high side ponytail? Why do people assume that I want to spend time with them every moment of every day? Why do people assume I like coffee? Why do I have to listen to top forty music and wan to dance? and have sex? and play drinking games that require me to have one insane, disgusting binge night that makes me puke, puke like a freshman?

Why does the society we live in in this day and time, this contemporary bullshit mess, have to be so chaotic?

Why can't I just sleep myself into novacaine?

It's because I need to be a highly functional, beautiful, skinny, gorgeous, genius, brilliant, happy, psychotic, furiously fast member of society, of course.

yup,

Jess :]