November 18th, 2001.Sunday
Friday was the first night since I started work a month ago that I came straight home from work and stayed. I was so tired I didn't want to go anywhere or do anything. Around nine or ten I finally mustered the strength to go down to Matt's with Jed, and from there we went over to Great Lakes.There was a not entirely unattractive girl sitting two stools over from me at the bar. I said one or two words to them about a song they were talking about, debating whether it was a nationally known song or something from around their hometown. I didn't' know the song. They seemed nice enough and sort of friendly. Then later I came across the song the were talking about, so I said something to the less attractive girl while the other was in the bathroom. And then, nothing. No look, no nod, no nothing. Absolutely no acknowledgment whatsoever that I had spoken to her. I thought she didn't hear me, but I wasn't sure. What I was sure about was that I stood there feeling utterly humiliated. Really, I wanted to fall into a hole. Instead, I just stood there like a nincompoop and continued trying to have a conversation with Matt and Jed, wondering what the hell just happened. Obviously, she didn't hear me. Surely, no person could be so callous as to not even acknowledge another person speaking to them, no matter how disinterested she was. Regardless, I became all tense and uncomfortable and wondered why oh why do these things happen to me and why am I utterly incapable of striking up a conversation without either looking, sounding, and/or just feeling like a complete social weirdo?
Anyway, on Saturday the denizens of the apartment spent most of the day cleaning in preparation for a little party in the evening. At 9:30, the apartment was as close to spotless as it could possibly be, drinks and food were out, and everything was ready. So around 9:40, I was like "Oh yeah, did someone forget to make friends?" The party was ready, but there were no guests. And for a while we were all very, very worried that no one was going to show up. And Dylan was like "Anybody want to go to Great Lakes?" Jed was saying how he would prefer that no one show up rather than 6 or 7 people. Around 10 there was a knock on the door. The fact that it was a knock on the front door and not someone ringing the buzzer at the building's door made me very nervous. I was sure it was the upstairs neighbors, whom we had invited to the party. They'd had a rather large party in their aparment last week, and I was using that party as the standard in my mind of whether or not I would be satisfied with ours. So when the door knocked, signifying that the people at the door were obviously already in the building, we were sort of freaked out that we would be terribly humiliated about inviting these people to a party and have them show up and it was just the four of us sitting around. Anyway, it ended up being Josh's friends. And while it was sort of awkward for a while, pretty soon a steady influx of people started showing up. All the normal cast and crew. All in all I had a pretty good time. A lot of people I didn't know. And some spilling of drinks in my room and on my bed and floor. And a ton of empty and full bottles in the kitchen this morning. But well worth the effort and the cleanup. I always like having parties round here. It makes me appreciate the apartment more. Also, people sometimes bring cookies.
I slept rather well. I woke up feeling statisfied and content, even though I woke up repeatedly between 7 and 11 am. But for some reason this morning I felt ok. As the day wore on, I started to get a bad feeling about conversations I'd had yesterday. I was mostly trying to put together a coherent timeline of things that had happened, to try to figure out whether the conversations had ended on good notes, or if they'd ended fairly soon after I'd said something idiotic. I'm afraid I said quite a few idiotic things. Just stupid conversational landmines that I could have avoided and now feel uneasy about. This seems to be happening with more frequency lately. I'm beginning to think whiskey and bourbon make me stupid. Vodka and rum make me funny. I think. Anyway, I'm getting increasingly paranoid as I get more and more insecure about my social skills. Did I say social skills? I meant to say...um, nothing actually. you could just drop that "about my social skills" bit. So why did I bother writing all this instead of just going back and deleting it? I don't know. I'll chalk it up to stream of consciousness, mixed with an inability to edit oneself.
After eating some lunch and cleaning up in the afternoon I went into Manhattan and met Jen K in Soho. I really enjoy hanging out with her. I'm not entirely sure why. Matt heard me on the phone with her and mentioned something about us having a good dynamic. Which i would say we do. She's just an easy person to be around, who can talk intelligently but still stupidly, in a fun way. She thinks it's terribly amusing when we talk about I'll say something whimsical and/or nostaligic and she'll say things like "Do you have your mail delivered to the past?" Meaning of course that I am living there. What a riot, I'll tell you. Anyway, we met under the guise of Christmas shopping, but we just wanted to buy a bunch of stuff for ourselves. She needed a hat. I needed a lot of work. But mostly we just took a leisurely stroll through Soho, occasionally walking into stores. I tried on a lot of jeans, and most of them made my ass look really, really weird. I think it had something to do with the pocket placement. It was too low. Anyway, after that we sat in Wendy's on Broadyway and ate chicken nuggets as she went through her palm pilot looking for people to set me up with. I told her it was about freakin time, that I'd been wondering why in the world I was maintaining all these friendships with girls if they're not going to yield some attractive friends. I told her that I'd just about given up on her, and that I was resigned to the fact that she didn't have any really attractive friends. But now she swears otherwise, that she has this cache of friends that she's either been reluctant to introduce me to or she just plum never thought of it. Still I'm not getting my hopes up. Although I will say Jen K. is pretty reliable when it comes to judging other people, in both looks and personality. The nuggets, for their part, weren't as good as I'd hoped they'd be, but the honey mustard sauce made up for it.
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