It’s funny how greetings work.  For every person and situation, there are socially appropriate responses, which would be frowned upon from another perspective.  A four-year-old could run up to someone screaming and laughing and hug him or her around the knees, but if I did that at seventeen, I would be met with raised eyebrows, to say the least.  Neither can I, as a middle class white girl, say “Yo, ‘sup dude?” without evoking a considerable amount giggles from those around me.

Usually there are no issues with greetings, as long as everyone knows who they are and who society expects them to be.  There is no confusion.  Each of us follows his or her own little role that has been laid out.

However, every now and again a strange situation arises in which neither party is completely sure of the appropriate response to another person. I introduced my boyfriend to a friend he didn’t know at a book launch, and there was an awkward moment of hesitation before he reached out and shook her hand.  In that semi-formal situation, neither of them knew whether they were to act as an adult or a teen.  Even when the decision had been made, there was still a feeling of strangeness—am I old enough that I should be greeting others my own age with a handshake?

It inspired a strange hesitation about where I stand in life.  We all like to live by society’s rules and regulations, even though each of us has the few with which we do not agree; in general, they give us a sense of structure and correctness.  Despite the prevalence of this, it is a common phenomenon to refuse acknowledgement of our social bindings—so-called nonconformists are a typical example.  Everyone has joked about nonconformity being its own kind of conformity, but in this world, we are all the attempted nonconformists, and thus conformists.  We use words like “different” and “unique” but there isn’t a person alive that doesn’t feel, on some level, just like every surrounding person.  The really funny thing is how much we all, including myself, care about distinguishing ourselves.  That being said, I still won’t greet someone by screaming and laughing and giving them a knee-hug.

Where am I? I wonder if I will greet a new acquaintance my own age with a “hello” or a handshake.  Do I try to follow the rules governing the teenage realm or that mysterious land of adulthood?

What am I supposed to conform to?

A poor lonely little post-it note

 

a poor lonely little post-it note

ground into the carpet

crumpled a bit, yes, but not

ripped

definitely dirty, a footprint or two

remaining

my eyes hurt to look at it and wonder

from whence it came

and by whose hands it came to be ground

into the carpet.

Spin a tale, tell a yarn, push those words forward, through, and out of the delicate fingers flitting over the keys, speaking words to the screen, telling them how to form and what to say.  This is what nobody tells you about writing, nobody mentions the labor of extracting the words in the form most accessible to reading, because if we could all just spit our emotions and stories down onto paper for the rest of the world to understand we would, believe me, convenience pays.  We have no form of spit-communicating, though, so I continue to write, and let my fingers keep drifting as I close my eyes and let the aching behind them cease, as I feel the world at strange angles beneath me, tilting, tilting.  A brief glance to check the correctness of the letters jumbling forth and then it’s back to my land of darkness in which the world shakes and trembles and quivers and there is noting but dark.  No, nothing moves, shaking is inside the darkness, a part of the body of the darkness (but yes, darkness has no body, only that horrible infinity), I let it go.  In the darkness one can feel so much more acutely, it makes me wonder why we don’t all go blind.  Sight is beautiful but this nothing is beautiful too, and feeling my muscles ripped tense with the simple act of keeping fingers to keyboard.  And I want to let them slide away, and let my body slide to the floor, and feel the hardness and he flatness and the rough texture of the relatively cheap carpet beneath my cheek, but I won’t slide to the floor, because what if I never got up and was stranded there? And everyone just walked over me and left me on the floor.  Well I know that won’t happen, but it is a nightmare anyways.  Another check, and then one more foray into the dark, into the deep, into the depths of the exhaustion and then move away, rip open those eyes, get up, leave the words behind, go away, go toil elsewhere. Just don’t slide, slide down down down to the carpet.

So I know this is a topic that isn't mentioned often on Xanga (or at least, I haven't seen it).  Does anyone else have insane problems with PMS?

It's just the past six months or so that things have started getting really bad for me.  I get really bipolar-style-moody, where the littlest thing can set me off into an inane depression.  Of course, I can't figure out WHY I'm depressed, which in turn makes me more upset, and stressed, and... depressed.  It's like a vicious cycle.  I cry a lot, and I hide from my parents.  The one person I DO talk to has to deal with my insanity, and I feel so bad for him because I take a lot of it out on him, no matter how much I tell myself I won't.  Sometimes I even get bodyaches, too, like I have right now.  If it didn't go away for three weeks out of every month, I'd think I was bipolar.

Of course, maybe I'm blowing this all out of proportion.  I tend to do that during PMS, about almost everything.  But it's such a hard toll on my mind and body and relationships with everyone around me; I don't know what to do.  Maybe I have PMDD, hah, and will be able to take that medicine that's always on tv--Yaz--which wouldn't be awful because what girl wouldn't love "shorter, lighter periods"?  But I digress.

Ahhhh. Life feels like it sucks, even though my brain knows that it is actually very very good.

Only remedy I know is to cry myself to sleep, and wait for it to go away...

(I felt too melodramatic leaving it there, so... bah.  Reindeer.)

Michelle

Ughhh. Whenever I get really upset, I can feel it in my stomach.  Nausea, unsettled rough energy, raw anger, all boiling.
shaking
tears rolling
angry
can't hold it
in
anywhere

and it finally passes.

A good riding lesson is amazingly cleansing.  Not physically, of course (you end up dirty and sweaty as hell) -- but mentally, there is nothing better in the ENTIRE world.

It annoys me that people only see lust in teenagers, like we're just balls of raging hormones (not saying that that's not happening, but it's not all that's happening) and we're not capable of feeling real emotions.  In the public eye, love and lust are all subjective.  When newlyweds, or even older married couples, can't keep from being close to each other, it's sweet that they're "so in love."  Like being married makes it love.  Honestly, one half of marriages end in divorce; I think we need to dispense of that stereotype.

Likewise, if teenagers touch each other, it's all lust.  Just because you're seventeen, it means that you cannot want to be close to someone because of how much you care about that other person (we'll say 'him' because I'm a girl, but it applies either way).  You cannot find comfort and security in his hand on yours or his arm around you, and you cannot want to look at him because his smile makes you happy.  No, it can't be--remember those hormones we talked about? The only reason you are touching him is because that skin-on-skin contact feels so good, and the only reason you are looking at him is because he turns you on.

Puh-LEASE.

Nobody denies that certain things are physically pleasing!  But that is unavoidable (and really, be honest, not a person in the world would want to avoid it), and what's more, there are deeper meanings to being close to someone.  Sometimes you can know someone so well, and have them know you so well, that it's hard when you're together to stand apart.  This unity is so strong, it's magnetic.  And all you want to do is just be together, and revel in the oneness.

There's so much more to a lasting relationship than lust, at WHATEVER age.  It's ridiculous to stereotype these things based on the age of those involved.  So don't judge, the next time you see teenage relationships, and don't assume that those twenty-five-year-old newlyweds are going to make it.  Maybe the teenagers will break up tomorrow, and the newlyweds will be married their entire lives, but you can't assume that.  Take people for what they are, not for what you expect them to be.  Each person is an individual.  Stop assuming you know everything, and let people be who they are.

You might actually give those around you a chance to surprise you.

<3 Michelle