10.24.02
Mayme said something today that made me very nervous.
Apparently, my web address (a la this one) was given out today at lunch. This concerns me, not because I’m trying to censor the readership of this site, but because I’ve said some things I regret.
About a year ago, I got a very nice email from one of my classmates/casual friends (i.e. we don’t hang out, but she’s cool and I wish I knew her better) questioning something I’d written in one of my journals. It had to do with me grouping several of my female classmates into a group of ‘airheaded blondes’ or something of that nature. I’ve spent the last half-hour skimming my entries from the period I think it was from, and I can’t for the life of me find the reference. As far as I can remember, it was a one-or-two line social commentary. I might have used the word ‘shallow.’ Like I said, I forget. And I’d forgotten about it until today, when Mayme (whose name I keep typing as ‘maybe’) told me they were tossing my site’s address around.
Oh, shit.
Whatever I said, I couldn’t’ve said any less than a year ago. Maybe more. I’m honestly too damn lazy – and have too damn much to do – to go hunting for a short reference. But if someone else finds it, then I might have to do some apologizing, and I don’t want to do that.
The email my sort-of-acquaintance wrote was, as I said, very polite, simply asking if I grouped her in with the whatever-term-I-used girls in my grade. I said that no, I didn’t, and that, in fact, I’ve since revised my opinion of many (if not all) of my classmates. Brunch helped to do that, as well as hanging out with different people this year, and generally being a more open person. I’ve gotten to know lots of my classmates better in the last year or so, and I can honestly say that there’s not really many (if any) of them who I wouldn’t mind taking a [short] road trip with. (My patience is finite…)
Last night, during the play, I hung out in the Drama room with Mayme and Lalee and Joanna and Molly…three people that I don’t hang out with. The only reason we were all in that room was because there were too many people in the hall. But we had a fun time just shooting the breeze. A few years ago, this would have been impossible; if you weren’t friends with someone, you didn’t talk to them. I’m so glad that we’ve grown past that. It took me a bit longer to go past it than it should have, actually. I mean, I had this ‘they’re-all-out-to-get-me’ mentality for a while, and I’m pretty sure that that was what I was thinking about when I wrote whatever inflammatory paragraph it was that got me in trouble last year.
So anyway, Senior year, people open up, and everyone likes everyone else, and it’s just a happy place. So whatever I said, I take it back. Are you all happy now?
So why don’t I go back and change it? Uhh…well, that would kind of defeat the purpose of a journal, if I could change what I wrote after the fact? I know I’m not the only one who writes the occasional negative thoughts. I just happen to be one of the few people that I know of who’s dumb enough to post those things to an open forum. I know that people read this. I depend on that, in some cases. But what I don’t want is people getting angry at me for something I said here and then not saying anything to me about it. And no matter how offensive it might have been, I’m not going to go back and change anything. I write entries, proofread them, upload them, and that’s it. Unless I catch a huge, ugly, glaring typo, I won’t change a letter. And even then, I usually leave it alone. Maybe that’s a bad way to deal with people who don’t want to read about themselves and know that it’s not going away…but hey, if you really don’t want your name on this site, let me know and I’ll take it down, easy as that.
And to everyone who I may have offended, I hope you get what I’m saying.
And it’s entirely possible that I’m totally overreacting with this whole thing. But hey, you really can’t be too careful, and I don’t feel like having any kind of confrontation.
God I’m paranoid.
I’m drinking one of those Snapple drinks…y’know, the ones in the curvaceous glass bottle…and it’s Diet Air flavored. Diet Air. I know that it’s a diet version of the Air flavor, but ye gods, when I saw that in fridge I almost passed out. At any rate, it’s gross, and I’m gonna head out to Starbucks before the play starts anyway.
Oh, the play. Heh.
We’re opening tonight instead of last night because we had Sniper Days on Monday and Tuesday. That sniper-guy who spent the last three weeks tear-assing up and down the Maryland-Virginia coast, shooting people? Yeah, he was about ten minutes from my house on Monday. That was a little…odd. Like, talk about a sense of dislocation. I have gotten gas at the station where the sniper made a phone call. And it’s not that it’s scary, so much, as it is odd…I mean, if he’s killing people at random, there’s really nothing I could’ve done. First off, the areas I haunt – school and Peak, of late – aren’t anywhere near an easy escape route, so I figured I’d be fairly safe there. But as far as getting gas goes, hey, if you’re gonna get it, you’re gonna get it, and you are just as likely to get it as the guy at the next pump. It didn’t give me a feeling of mortality so much as it made me grin to see people getting all alarmist. Maybe that makes me a believer in fate…or maybe it was just the fact that I was grounded, and as such, couldn’t go out anyway. Why I’m grounded is still something of a mystery.
Anyway, they’ve caught the guy, they think, which is pretty nice. If nothing else, it’ll mean that they won’t yell at me for not cutting through the Middle School tomorrow, because the Middle School smells like ass. And that’s not all of the odd precautions they’ve been taking. I honestly, though, don’t think that they would have done anything. If the sniper came near Collegiate (which is unlikely for reasons I’ll get to in a minute,) he would have gotten someone no matter how many people there were around him or how many adults were surrounding him. He’d’ve gotten one of the adults or something. Every student that got picked up today had to be escorted down to the pickup lot by an adult, and only AFTER the head of school called the front desk to say it was ok. It made the normal traffic even worse, and if you know anything about Collegiate traffic, that’s saying something. Anyway, my point was that a sniper, should he be camped out on North Mooreland road, seems to me to be more likely to fire at a single kid bookin’ it down to mom’s Suburban than he is to fire into a crowd of students. But let’s back up for a minute and look at the fact that that requires assuming that a sniper would camp out on a 25mph flat road, full of cops, and miles from the nearest freeway. Hell, I can’t get out of there when I’m not being chased and/or running ‘cuz I just killed someone. Elissa and I decided that because it’s totally random, the school can’t really do anything, so they – like every other school in the area – are just putting up the efforts they are, to give the impression that they can, in fact, control it. Humans hate not having control, which is why our friendly neighborhood sniper enjoyed this little game of us. We had no control.
So we made jokes. Coming out of play practice last night was hilarious, though, because everyone was jumping around yelling ‘bob and weave!’ and the cop-on-duty was looking at us like we were nuts. Eh, such are theatrefolk.
Speaking of the play, we were supposed to open last night, but didn’t, because of the sniper days. We missed our last two rehearsals, and had our first real run-through last night. We’re opening in about three hours, and I’m honestly not sure if we’ll pull it off. Ah well, a full update will be coming this weekend
I guess the reason I sat down to write this was because I was sketched out about the prospect of one inflammatory comment being passed around the class without me being able to speak for myself. So I wrote this, hoping that when and if the lynch mob shows up, they’ll read this, eventually, and see my apology for whatever it is that I might have said.
Right.
I’ve got forty-five minutes to do tons
of work, get coffee, and get to play practice.
Come see it!