Feeling: unchanged
Listening to: Vast - Winter in My Heart
Reading/Watching: Hitch, with Satan, Persephone, and mon coeur

Someone on my guestbook said they were reading my old entries from 2000 and wanted to know if I still like purple.

In answer: yes. I am still mad for it, although I studiously avoid inundating myself with it, lest I fall out of love with it and have to get a color-divorce. (Those are never pretty. Imagine what happens to the children.)

It led to thinking about a lot of the ways I've changed in the past five years. And I realized, I also haven't really changed, to my own thinking.

I still feel too young to be drinking alcohol. I feel mildly naughty every time I imbibe, as if my mom might break in and ground me.

I still love purple (see above) and butterflies, except that the other people who love purple and butterflies tend to be preteen anti-princesses ("I don't like pink! I'm original; I like PURPLE!"), and frankly they embarrass me. Stop liking what I like. Go back to your leopard print, and let me have my funky butterfly obsession back. I was funky and original before you were teething.

I still feel like I've never been kissed, and know absolutely. nothing. about. boys. at all, ever. I am still incapable of deliberately flirting. I am still incapable of picking up on whether someone is attempting to flirt with me. I am still seen as aloof, instead of inept and shy.

I still dance like a spastic monkey. And yes, it is still fun.

I still look at my class ring and think, "I am such a big faker." I still look at my engagement ring and think, "When the hell did that happen?" (and then I get distracted by the sparkly and say, "ooh, pretty.")

I still feel like a moose whenever I try to be graceful in crowded areas. So I don't try, and thus minimize the number of random inexplicable bruises on my knees, hips, elbows, and so on.

I still can't stand smalltalk. I want to jump to the meat of things. I want to know so much about people, it's verging on invasive. I hate smalltalk even as I attempt it at job interviews, wondering if the person across the desk has that same knee-jerk suicidal feeling every time they have to discuss the Texas weather, and "my goodness it is so hot outside" (probably because it's JULY, braintrust).

I still can't catch. anything. ever. Throw a football or a pillow or a wad of wet paper towels at me, and I will still bat it away as if it's an ebola-coated nuclear missile draped in frog intestine (and that's when I try to catch it).

And mostly, I still get itchy fingers, fidgety knees, and long bouts of silent faraway-looks when I haven't written in a day or two. Except now, my medium is journal, not novel. I sometimes wonder how hard it would be to switch gears back, and whether my journal would suffer.

So I may look different, speak with a greater air of confidence, and wear a ring on each fourth finger, but really, I'm a chubby homely agoraphobic writer with frizzy hair and gappy teeth in a purple t-shirt and butterfly earrings, who hasn't known how to charm people since her audacious-toddler stage.

Good thing no one knows but me.

Comments? 3 so far...
Not a Diaryland member? Sign the Guestbook.