Yes, it's been awhile. I got bored with writing this thing, but now I'm back (maybe)...
Sorry about that. Now for some content!
I made a playlist of all my favourite songs
from when I was 18 and did the South Bank walk for probably the hundredth time
with all of the tourists, but instead of fulfilling my purported goal of really
appreciating the fact that I live in London, I got caught up in remembering a
largely uneventful weekend in October of 2008. It was fall break, and my
roommate had gone to visit her boyfriend and at that point I didn’t have any
other friends in Ann Arbor. There was literally no one to talk to, and
according to my calculations, I went 72 hours without any human contact.
That Friday I had downloaded Bon Iver’s
“For Emma, Forever Ago,” which, although I hadn’t know it at the time, had been
recorded in an isolated cabin in the woods of Wisconsin. In other words, it was
the perfect soundtrack to loneliness, and I spent what I would later come to
view as the loneliest weekend of my life listening to it on repeat, pacing
around my dorm room, falling in love with some guy I had met at a party. I
never saw him again.
And now, for the first time in four years, I’ve again started listening to “For Emma, Forever Ago."
It makes sense, in a way: I’m about a month
and a half into living in a new place – the point at which I feel like I really
should have established more in the way of connections with other people than I
actually have. My undergraduate experience taught me to be very good at having
long conversations about nothing and to be able to pull out a reference to
zombies or something at any given time. It seems, however, that those skills
aren’t transferrable to the real world. In reality you have to be prepared for your social engagements to involve more than watching random youtube videos (not that I haven't had fun doing that). It isn't enough to be vaguely sarcastic and to express enthusiasm for random, strange things. You have to consistently prove that you're intelligent and funny and interesting and generally worth spending time with. I spend a lot of time worrying that I'm failing.
I suppose I had to come all the way to
London to realise that my love of sarcasm and disinclination to admit that
anything really matters to me were really nothing more than devices to avoid
getting hurt. See, I like the things I like, and I know why I like them, but a
critical word from someone, anyone else, and I’m questioning basically
everything about myself. I wish I were exaggerating, but I’m really not. There
are so many things I could talk about, so many things I want to say, so many conversations I've imagined having, but then when the moment to say these things actually comes, I can't do it. I pretend to be too tired to really discuss anything. I pretend to be concerned with something else. I pretend I don't care.
I wish I could be braver.
And Kim? Tag! You’re it! (I haven’t
forgotten your promise.)
