Jun 13-14 24
Gen stayed out all night with her friends and so I woke up at 5 confused but she had texted me. I went back to sleep a little bit but don’t feel super rested. I was supposed to go to the hotel today but I got an email from them before my shift that the times had been reversed. I was offered to come in and get the hours anyway but I can only imagine how pointless whatever stupid make-work1 thing they’d have me do would feel, so I decided to take the day off.
Genevieve said we should go to the beach, which sounded nice. I went to meet up with her and the people she was with. I didn’t really think about the context of it all- meaning in particular that she was with a bunch of people who were up all night drinking and everything. I met up with her and two of her loudest friends and everyone was drinking when I got there and I felt immediately a bit like I was tagging along on other people’s bender. The plan to go to the beach was immediately altered after several hours of hanging out in a couple dark dimes square bars to take the ferry to Redhook. When I’m in this situation I’m a good sport- its just hard not to totally feel like I wasted this day to follow around a bunch of people having a really fun raucous time at some bars. Genevieve asked me a few times if I was annoyed or if I’m grumpy or whatever which is always worse because I don’t feel like it would be reasonable or helpful to say yes. I also don’t know what would have fixed my annoyance, and I didn’t want to take the dramatic step of deciding to leave in the middle of the day by myself.
At a certain point prior to today I would probably feel left out and jealous but now I just feel a bit out of place and alienated. Genevieve took me aside and checked in which is nice, but it made me assume that I’d been acting like a grouch and a spoilsport. Maybe I had been, I’m not sure. I do think I’m overall becoming more surly and irritable. I havent really felt that comfortable or enjoyable socializing in a good while. I also get positive reinforcement when I’m surly. People find it charming and funny, which of course only makes me more annoyed. I said I felt like I was wasting my time and I think it implied that I would rather be doing something else productive. I assume if I had stayed home and tried to accomplish something I wouldve felt an immense pressure to be incredibly productive, which not only wouldve failed, but also made me feel like an unsociable loser and a grouch and spoilsport.
Catch 22- similarly I felt like I couldn’t leave even though I didnt want to be around them anymore. They just got drunk and we went to another bar and I ate alaskan king crab (which did make me much happier for a time) and then they got more and more excitable and drunk until people started looking at us. I said I was gonna get the last ferry when it was coming time and the crew started to come with me and they stole an oversized moscow mule cup and a golf club. I saw the waitstaff looking sort of irritated and aghast as they screamed in titillation and walked off with these worthless trinkets. It just felt embarrassing and entitled.
I’m partly sincerely jealous of the ability not to care about other’s thoughts to the point where I could yell and steal stuff. Maybe I had that when I was drinking, but in my memory I mostly became inwardly focused, self hating, strange, and insecure- a big part of the reason I drank mostly alone and then eventually only used solid chemicals. I never really drank in bars even when alcohol was working for me. It just seemed like almost as much of a waste of time as it does to me now. I liked to drink and do the normal regular stuff I do throughout the day, and bars seemed like a contrived and silly waste of time. I fear constantly that I think of myself as above other people, or that I have a rarefied sense that I’m extremely unique, specially endowed, or even just particularly strange. I think what I’m writing comes across that way. I think in particular because I’m complaining about the fun had by some hot cool girls I must seem sort of Chuck Palahnuck, but I guess so be it.
I wish I was having a good time all the time. I think I’m remarkably easy going, but I’ve been recently more bothered by other’s behavior, and have been pulling back from certain things. I think today sounds fun in its bare description- I love taking the ferry, I like the idea of going to redhook and eating crab on a summer day off work, catching views of the sunset behind the financial district from the middle of the east river on the way back. I had a stupid and mildly miserable time. My first girlfriend back in high school didn’t say that much that I remember, but something I always think about was when I was in children’s rehab and she was having a bad time in Paris and she was trying to get me to understand her plight, which seemed at the time to pale in comparison to my ordeal. She said that it never matters what you do it only matters who you’re with. Its not a particularly profound statement, but many true statements don’t happen to also feel profound. I like all the people I was with- I bear no ill will towards them, and noone did anything wrong (except for petty theft and public drunkenness). In particular noone brought anything negative to bear against me. Nonetheless I was disturbed and irritated and brought down in spirits by the events of the day.
Genevieve and I aren’t bickering about it but she feels bummed out that she ‘ruined my day’. In the morning she apologized to me in a way that made it clear that I had made her feel bad, which I didn’t want to do. There isn’t a clear thing that I could advocate for now or in the future, it was just a situation which didn’t go my way and was inconvenient and uncomfortable. The same could be said about the vast majority of situations I’ve been in throughout my life.
After we got back to the mainland, I let them bring the most over-served2 among them back to her house for safekeeping while I got the train back to my house. Kevin asked me to go see him and Gunner at a restaurant around the corner. The invitation came at a good time. While I was walking back I was thinking how I had totally mismanaged the sheer fact of being a social being, and I had made acquaintances only with the dregs of the human species, but I was then proved to not be correct. The next morning I just didn’t feel that sour about it at all. Today I’m working an event, and probably could find something to do out in the city after I get off work, but I feel already like leaning towards doing nothing at all3.
I have a good job all told, but I really am struggling with how much of it feels asinine and wasteful. It makes me aware of how improperly sorted all this energy has been by first world society.
Genevieve also sort of pushed back on me complaining about some of her behavior which I found disturbing and discomfortable, because she has been undergoing a bad period in her life, the details of which I will not disclose even without her identity. Maybe I was being unfair, but I don’t generally think bad of people for getting really wasted. Lord knows I love it, but I just don’t like being around it. I’ve never felt good at all with the overfamiliarity of the intoxicated, and I’m not equipped to handle the extreme vacillations of emotional tenor that it can elicit. Sometimes it seems a fitting punishment for me specifically to sit with an acquaintance in the advanced stages of getting drunk as hell, because I’m sure I have put many people through the very same torture, and I probably still disturb some with my own vacillations in intimacy and emotional tone within a conversation.
I ended up getting out in time to go to an AA meeting, which was only notable because I saw a guy I havent seen in a while and he told me how he had travelled to Japan with his parents and had hired many different sex workers. I would never in a million years tell anyone I did this. I am doubtful I would ever hire a prostitute, but I certainly would never volunteer this information to anyone. crazy ass world, this