I'm home now. I haven't been in this room since January 6. It's no Panama City, but I should be looking at a pretty decent week. My magazines have been nicely stockpiled on my floor, and there's tons of beef jerky and hummus sequestered in my part of the fridge.
But this is all pretty boring.
Classes are all right. I'm getting pretty good at Spanish. I'm keeping up. Nothing else to say about them really, except that they're boring, for the most part, and tedious. They're not killing me anymore, though, which is good.
My life has taken some pretty interesting and unexpected turns this year. I feel bad about not writing in here more often. So, now I have to give a giant plot dump.
It's probably easier to do this by categories. Maybe I'll talk about people, one-by-one first? I even ripped some pictures off facebook.
Joe: My 22-year-old roommate. Eats whole pizzas by himself while playing old PS2 games. Breathes heavy, farts when girls are in the room. Also, happiest person on planet. Laughs at UPN sitcoms and apoplectic Japanese cartoon characters. Asked me, "Hey, do you want to live with me next year?" like the second week of school. Not wanting to sound like a dick, I said, "yes." He has made me sign up for a room very far from my classes but very close to his. Says "it kind of sucks for me." Want to hit him a bit right now. Still, very nice person.
Franz- My buddy. Comes over quite a bit. He's a man of very particular tastes, a collage of different brands and people- AW, Blues music, Mitt Romney, Schwepps ginger ale, Arizona Tea, barbecue sauce, Batman, Drudge Report, Detroit Tigers. Self-described "50-year-old" man. Reads the Wall Street Journal while we play Rock Band. Very fun, though. We piss our pants while swapping youtube clips. Does a decent Sandler, good Clint Eastwood, and phenomenal Joe (from Family Guy). Works his ass off. Gives private tours of his chic business school. Only person I know who writes more memos than essays. Helping to get my life together. Taught me about commodities, securities, futures contracts, and the Federal Reserve. Massages girls a LOT (more on that later). Darkest eyes you've ever seen, vampire-like, almost. Thinks cake is a main course, and eats pizza out of sheer boredom. Skinny as a fucking rail.
Zack- New friend. Lives down the hall. Has seen EVERY movie from Birth of a Nation to the fucking Watchmen, which comes out next month. Very funny. Full of movie quotes. Worked at Paramount over the summer. Has a film Credit on Friday the 13th, I think. Big guy. Gained a lot of weight after football, not uncommon. Can still run faster and longer than me, I think, based on what I saw when we worked out. Sprinted to his class in the Diag in two minutes because he woke up a half hour late. It takes me about twelve minutes to get there. Doesn't do homework, ever. Sits in my room all day and watches me do it, instead, or plays Rock Band 2, working both the guitar and the vocals at the same time. Brought me Challah bread for my birthday. Really nice, very friendly. Joined a fraternity. Stumbled into my room after they abducted and inebriated him for his initiation. Sang like a fucking beast when we played Rock Band. It brought a tear to my eye. Wanted to get an apartment together, spend a weekend at his house in Bloomfield Hills, and join him in California for Spring Break. Very friendly. Perhaps a little too much so?
That rounds out the guys I see on a daily basis.
Now for a story.
Romance has been a pretty bleak prospect for me these last two years. As I've complained about before, I just could not find a girl I liked. There were more pretty girls at State than grains of sand in the Sahara, but I wasn't attracted to any of them at all. Everything was a "hi, bye" type of relationship. I had absolutely no drive to pursue them or date them.
I moved into East Quandrangle on January 7th and was immediately impressed. My room was an island in a sea of cute girls. I was truly excited. But, in typical Alex fashion, I lost interest in all of them within a few days. I don't even know what part of my brain or heart caused this. They didn't do anything wrong. It could have been the school work. I was angry at the way classes ripped my life away, and I was even angrier at the possibility of someone ripping any more of it away. So, I guarded myself. I was cavalier. I "played it cool." This is about the time when I pledged to my guy friends that I would never stand between them and a girl that they liked. You know, the old "Bros before hoes" credo. Sure enough, within a couple of weeks, Joe developed a crush on a girl named Susan, who hung out with us a lot. "I won't fight you, man. Go for it," I said. And "go for it" he did, but he failed miserably. She came and watched him play video games. He invited her to watch movies with us. By the looks of it, she seemed to have an interest in him. However, when I asked her if she did, she denied any and all feelings. And yet, she still kept coming to the room. Flash forward to about two weeks later. There are a lot of people in my room, maybe seven? We hang out late. Susan looks really sleepy and curls up on my bed. We all sort of stare in wonder, thinking about whether she meant to stay there or not. My mind was doing somersaults. Do I take the floor? A chair? The hallway? Do I wake her ass up and boot her? She looked too peaceful for that. So, I voice my dilemma to the gentlemen, and we decide to wake her up together. Susan begrudgingly leaves. About a week later, the exact same thing happens, and this time, Susan looks dead asleep. None of us could summon the cruelty to jerk her out of it and send her packing, so we let her stay. After everyone leaves, I go brush my teeth, hoping maybe that she left with everyone else. I open a door to find the lights off and a girl asleep in my bed. By this time, I was tired as hell, and far from surrendering my comfy foam-layered mattress for some shitty steel-frame desk chair. So, I took a deep breath and crawled in next to her. What followed was a sleepless night, punctuated by an eight-hour, raging erection. These sleepovers soon became weekly because Susan liked sleeping in our room more (she said it was warmer than her room), and we quickly gained a reputation for having the weirdest relationship ever. Now, you may think I'd have gotten a clue by now, but I hadn't. Truth is, I really didn't know what to make of Susan. Sure, she would sleep with me, but she'd also give my friends sensuous back rubs. Here's where my friend Franz entered the mix. Though I can't remember if he ever explicitly stated it, I'm sure he had some feelings for Susan. He would tease her until her face was red from laughing, which I had remembered as a signature part of Franz's courtship method- small, gentle put-downs really do drive a woman's passions wild. Like a mosquito, he'd be on her the second she'd walk into our room, sucking the stress out of her with his fingers and then getting her to do the same. I watched all of these in utter confusion. Just what kind of game was this girl playing? God, I hate flirts, I thought. No, this girl isn't for me. Friends started pestering me about Susan after I told them I'd been "sleeping with her" (Don't worry, I explained the joke. I'm not a pig :D), and I told them she just wasn't my type. Besides, there was the credo. So, yet again, I told Franz to "go for it." And, for awhile, it looked like he was killing it. She would hang out with him, one-on-one, in his single until the wee hours. They had their own little private jokes and nicknames. One night, when, to escape the fracas that is my room, I was reading at a table in the hallway, the two walked by me, obviously on their way to Franz's room. "I'm stealing her from you!" Franz said with a smirk, and Susan smiled. I was getting pretty excited for Franz. So, I decided to feel her out, see if I could russle up some encouragement for my friend. I started teasing her about Franz, poking at the long, sexual massages they administered to each other behind closed doors her little nicknames for him- "Franzy-wanzy" being the most nauseating. I mean "yeesh"! And, to my surprise, this made her upset. Soon after, the massages stopped. Hmmmmmmm, curious, I thought. Next up was Zach. He seemed to have a little thing for Susan. So, for the third and final time, I told one of my friends to "go for it." So, he did. However, returning from her room one night, he came to me with a kind of resigned look on his face. "Congratulations," he said, "she likes you." I don't know what it is about revelations of this sort, but they seem to place you on a play clock. Action was needed, whether it be rejection or something else. I was shocked, but not really. I was embarrassed, but not so much. I was worried, but also suddenly confident. First things first, I had to sit down and see if I had any feelings for this girl, now that my friends were no longer in the picture (I don't know who taught me that there is virtue in forbearance, anyway. Maybe it's a Puritan thing). So I thought it over for the rest of the day. I thought about her. Then I thought about what an "us" would be like. Then, I knew. She came over that night, and I revealed my feelings for her. She then revealed hers. I interrogated her a bit, asked her about her little dallies with my friends. She explained that she was, in fact, trying to make me jealous. We shared some more stuff, and then she left. The next four or five days were a bit awkward. We spent a little time trying to describe it. We toyed around with "it's complicated" and "it's a thing". Finally, on my birthday, we agreed to date (this totally made my 20th birthday, by the way, a day I'd been dreading for months.).
So, without further ado, here's Susan.
Susan- Susan is my girlfriend. Beautiful, about 5'2, stunning, wavy, dark hair. Gorgeous, brown eyes. She's one of the sweetest people I've ever met. When I was sick, she made me green tea. When my clothes weren't fitting in my drawers, she folded them with me. When I'm about to grind my teeth into powder in frustration with my Spanish homework, she'll come work on it with me. She's fun. We're learning Merengue dancing and Salsa dancing via youtube. She can play most of the songs on Rockband on medium, and she can sing the shit out of Alanis Morissete's song, which might be the only one I can't make heads or tails of. She eats like a hyena, and I love it. Most important, she has a heart of gold. While she'll indulge in a cruel joke with me and Franz every now and then, Susan is just a really good girl. She practically raised her sister. Susan and her talk all the time, usually with her sister sobbing in the background because she misses Susan so much. She's a genius, and she's diligent. She's semi-fluent ("proficient" she says) in Spanish, which is also the world's sexiest language to be conversational in, I must say. In addition to Spanish, she's studying biochemistry and math. Also, she works two jobs: A research position and a hospital job. She wants to be a surgeon. She's what I've wasted two years looking for: A girl I truly admire.
I'm almost uncomfortable speaking like this/feeling like this. This girl has turned my world upside down. Once, we were talking, about this blog, I think. I told her I had a little depression gnawing at me, and she asked me why. I started to answer her question, but I lost myself in her eyes, and after awhile, it seemed like I was addressing myself, not her. I sort of split in half. It was the strangest thing. I was looking inward with full force. It was like seeing myself in the proverbial mirror for the first time. I was facing the beast, and it felt like finishing a blog post, only ten times sharper. It was almost too much, and I started to tear up, both out of gratitude for the honesty I found and out of sheer joy at having found someone I was truly comfortable around. I know she reads this now, and I don't want her to get freaked out by all this, so I'll just say that I'm very glad I met her and she's done more for me already than she knows.
I was trying to think up choruses for a song yesterday. I'm pretty sure I'll never write one since I don't have any musical ability. But I hear Zach is working on one, so I'm thinking about loaning him this. All I know is he's writing it for some girl.
I'm taking a leap.
Throw me out the window
for a trampoline
or the cold concrete
because you've won me,
you own me,
and when I close my eyes,
I see yours.
I thought I'd end with some more pictures.
These are from the day that Joe, Zack, Zack's cousin, Franz, and I went to the shooting range.
Here's some of me and Joe on a cold day.
And here's some of me with my brother and sister.
Here's a picture my friend Theresa drew of me! It has to be one of the coolest things anyone has ever done for me, and it made me smile more than once during my first trying weeks at my new school. It hangs proudly on my desk.
Here's an old one I found of me and my friend Shane, who I've mentioned in here before. I miss him a lot. I like our matching sweaters.
