Pilots watching stars..

Ugh.

Truly, ugh.

I've got so much in my head right now, but... at the same time, not so much.

Frustrated by the guy last night. I hate how easily influenced I am by people. I mean, this was an inexperienced, ignorant, insecure jock who spent, basically, the entire night attacking me and I am letting it get to me.

I totally am.

How frustrating is that?

I hate when I can't look at something and go, "Well, we're different people and his views are his views and my views are my views..." and leave it at that.

I hate how I was so excited to sit down with someone else who wanted to write and just... write. And, instead, the evening turned into me sitting there under an onslaught of aggressive and, more often than not, insulting questions.

There was no openness in this man.

Not a drop.

Talking about BDSM clubs and how if he went in there and someone even looked at him, he'd just beat the shit out of them.

And I'm sitting there, looking at him, going, "Really? Are you that insecure in your sexuality?"

Because wanting to potentially beat someone up for looking at you is a pretty significant sign of issue there. A confident, secure man would just roll with it.

It was such a disappointment.

And his writing idea? His book idea? Uh... a group of people in their mid-20s looking for identity and career paths in a world that is so unlike their parents' very linear experiences. Hello indie flick. Hello so over in a decade when trends shift yet again.

So I go from excited and happy that I'll be sitting at a Denny's writing all night to being made fun of, being attacked, being told how unhealthy and wrong my life has been and how it continues to be, the whole while him making a disclaimer that he's "really concerned about people" so this is why he "feels the need to tell people when they're being unhealthy".

Talking. To. A. Wall.

Emails me that he hopes some of what he said "rubs off on me".

That he hopes, as I said, that I wasn't disappointed in that he wasn't one of those guys I could just hook up with.

A. No.
B. His personality, his outlook, his inexperience, was very much not outweighed by his looks. I don't reward bad behavior. If he had a great body and we had good chemistry, sure, I'd one-night him. But he didn't. He had a post-jock body. You know the one I mean. When a guy is all buff and active in high school and then moves to a desk job or goes into college and eating fast food all the time so the structure is still there and you can look at their face and see where they used to be hot before their chin started rounding up and their skin started sagging under the unexpected weight, and this layer of fat starts spreading over the muscles on their chest and stomach, and you can still feel that muscle as it leaves over the years, but they never get it back and their body feels so betrayed.
C. No.

It was just a nasty experience and I'm still feeling that grime you accumulate when you encounter something that doesn't quite vibe right and if that ever happens again, rude or not, I'm going to excuse myself and leave. I had the biggest instinct, after talking to him for just a few minutes, that I should go to the restroom, call a friend, and tell them to call me in fifteen minutes.

I've never done that before.

I usually just tough it out.

But I really wanted to write.

So I tried. And everytime I started going he would start in on me again with the insults and the advice and the therapy and the total lack of understanding that when things like my life happen, you don't fit in anymore, if you ever fit in at the first place and there are other ways of being.

There is more than one version of happiness, more than one version of being healthy, more than one idea of what love is, what success is.

He couldn't get that. It sailed over his head.

And me being me, I was polite. I was polite and answered his questions and teased him without going too far (in my opinion anyway) like a good spokeswoman of the sexually-free females.

God, he made me feel dirty, though. Pawing through my notebook, making exclamations, asking questions, telling me what I did wrong, where I should meet men, how I will know if I meet a good man (apparently, all Jewish men are good men, or so he informed me) and how to keep a good man. Oh, and, of course, the definition of a "good" man.

Being incredibly sarcastic and insulting the entire time.

I shouldn't have stood for it. I should've just walked out, fuck politeness, I shouldn't have to deal with this crap.

But I want to learn. I want to learn about as many views and ideas as I can in this world and he was one that I only encounter online because our social species avoid each other in life. It was a learning opportunity, and he made his kind, the standard white American jock male, even more detestable to me. To be avoided as much as I can, unless I happen to have a ball-gag in my glove compartment, which I never do but might actually start because some of them are hot. Roofies, chloroform+cloth, condoms, and a ball-gag. The V-Starter Kit.

Oh, that would be priceless.

Hehhe, I'm cheering myself up.

It bothers me, a bit, that I wasn't able to walk out.

That the combination of wanting to learn, wanting to be polite, wanting to represent my "type" well, to be a good spokesperson... I should know better than this. I should stop allowing the occasional person to make me uncomfortable just for the sake of politeness. I mean, they're not being polite, so why must I always be polite and respectful?

I need to be more assertive in these situations.

I should have just looked at him after his first few declarations and said, "Sorry that you drove out here for nothing, but I don't think this is helping my writing and I need to leave now."

Buuuut, I didn't.

I sat and took it.

I always forget how difficult people are. I surround myself with like minds, or at least open-minded individuals because that's what I appreciate, because that's what I consider healthy. To be able to accept others, no matter what your differences.

Trying to toss myself in with a regular joe, even for just a couple of hours... no, that was just not the best idea. Yes, I can fake it. But I wasn't looking to fake being normal while writing. What good would that be?

And I know that in a week or two, I'll have forgotten all about it, that in a few days, the lingering effects of his internal discontent pushed to external issue will have gotten out of my system, especially once I start catching up with my friends during the week. The Bassist and I are going out on Friday night, I'm seeing C on Thursday (and probably my concert buddy), hanging out with my TV-marathoning friend tomorrow, school Tuesday and Wednesday (and I already made friends with an interesting tattooed male who is the drummer of a decently popular metal band). Also should have the funeral on Friday, so I'll be seeing family as well.

I wish people weren't so judgemental. I wish people could look at each other and say, "It's not for me, but I respect that you enjoy it," instead of the constant fighting and judgement and declarations of wrongness and psychological issue and accusations of bad parenting, of being molested as a child, being beaten as a child, being picked on as a child. It's a constant search for something to blame, something that makes what the other person likes or does invalidated, to show that what one has chosen for oneself is somehow better than what other people choose for themselves.

I wonder if it just comes down to security in a lot of cases. That people aren't secure in the choices they made, or they aren't secure with who they've become, so they have to look at the people around them that make different choices and tell them how incredibly wrong they are for not towing the line like a good citizen.

But, then, in the case of religion, which is always so outwardly offensive (not offensive like "oh, you offend me" but more of the "on the attack" offensive), people seem to be very secure in their views, in their gods, in their morals, and yet they still run around like angry idiots proclaiming to those who do not share their beliefs that something is wrong with them, that the Devil is in them, that their judgement is clouded, that they're going to Hell.

People so delight in telling others that. It's crazy.

If I was at all religious, I certainly wouldn't wish to be the one to inform a friend, or even a stranger, that they were doomed to eternal pain and suffering. I mean, what a mood kill.

Sometimes I think I should read more.

No matter where I go, there's people. There's always these people with their external proclaimations and their trudging ways. You talk to them and, yes, some of them are nice, but it mostly just pushes me more and more outside of everything because it's so rare for me to actually strike up a conversation with a stranger (which I do fairly often) and actually meet someone I can connect with at all.

I spent this weekend in Orange County. I was surrounded by tan Christians in white and khaki, women my age and younger, married and pushing around strollers, living in the same cookie-cutter homes, drinking their Starbucks, slowly putting on weight or wrinkles, their husbands in boardshorts and flipflops, carrying their kid on one arm while their wife orders their insane drink with more adjectives than should exist when talking about coffee. Bleach blondes, tiny shorts, boys on skateboards with their clothing plastered in brand names, like they're part of one of the skater teams. I might start slapping "Clorox" and "Miller" stickers on them and make them race around the fountains and palm trees.

So many small children, so many young women already popping out a brood. I run into people from high school occasionally, and I look at them in bewilderment and amusement. What it must be like to have that one path, to graduate high school, go straight into college, marry while still in college, pop out a baby as soon as you're done with college and, with your parents' help, buy a nice home in suburbia and work at the same job for the rest of your life, while your children wash, rinse, and repeat the life you just led.

I wonder what that would be like.

I wonder what it must be like for these girls that are the definition of "Orange County" with so many options of boys that are the definition of "Orange County". To know that, because of the shared and average experience, that you could pick among any man you see at Starbucks and have a decent match. That being average, that falling not only on the mean, but the median and mode as well, how nice it must be.

I mean, really. All an "OC Girl" has to do to find a mate is to pop into Yard House or TAPS or any number of the bars in Fullerton or The Block and pick the guy that appeals. No conversation necessary.

Yes, I know, I'm being annoyingly generalizing and bitter about this. I shouldn't be. I picked my path and, for the most part, I enjoy it. It's just hard, spending so much time here, in this area that I could never blend into. There is not a single city in this entire county where I could go and look normal, be normal. I'm pale, dark, and curvy. I don't have the jewelry section of Forever 21 dumped across my body. I'm not wearing mini-dresses and outrageously high heels that ruin my back and make me walk like an unsteady T-Rex.

Being here all weekend, even though most of yesterday was reading Heart of Darkness and most of today was reading Much Ado About Nothing and hanging with the family, I still have this awareness of separation. That if I would want to go and blend in somewhere, I'd have to drive about 40 miles.

Which isn't too bad, all thing considered.

I could be living in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Or Santa Fe Springs, NM.

I'm just whining and bitching to myself because that guy last night grew on me like mold and made me question my own sanity because I allow myself to be open to views in the way that I do, so I can understand, and then I fit them on myself and forget who I am because I'm trying so hard to look at the world through someone else's eyes.

I'm glad that I do that, but I hate how it makes me feel afterwards. Shaking it off... makes me feel like I'm almost vomiting inside, trying to get them out of me, stomach upset and off-center. I wish I was strong enough to look and not let them get in my head. I feel as though if I had any self-definition, if I knew who I was, it wouldn't have such an impact on me.

Maybe. Maybe not.

It's all made me feel very lonely.

I know. Me, lonely? It happens from time to time. I'm usually more of an "alone" girl than a "lonely" girl. But I do occasionally hit that point where I wish I had a man in my life, a man who I understood, who understood me. Someone I could talk with and it wouldn't be a debate, but a sharing of ideas, an acceptance, and a knowledge of a shared truth.

How nice would that be?

So I sit here, in my bedroom, laptop on a desk inherited from a friend, mail next to me, reclining in my oversized office chair, wishing I could just give up the ghost of hope. Wishing that I could be satisified just by myself, wishing that I didn't feel so alien in such a huge city, wishing that I didn't so badly want understanding, that I could just be who I am and that that would be enough.

But it's not. Not right now.

That's the way it goes, though. As years go by and more and more experiences and ideas pile up, as more things happen, it becomes harder and harder to relate to people, and you're left wondering that, at the end of the day, if you should even bother trying to connect.