Senior Year

The weirdest part about me being a senior is that I have felt no change and have felt a tremendous change at the same time. Being a freshman, you could spot out the older girls... the well-dressed ones who seemed to radiate coolness through their confident, more-mature mannerisms. I don't feel older, I don't feel a heightened sense of fashion, and aside from losing the doe-eyed look in the halls, not much has changed. I still identify myself as me from 8th grade me; I can remember memories from then up until now as though they were yesterday, and not only that but all my previous emotions are still so tangible to me.

At the same time, however, nothing is the same. My outlook on things are completely different, the way I act is completely different. I never EVER could have imagined myself at where I am right now. Two years ago, if you were to tell me I would smoke weed daily, get a tattoo, go on vacation with Lacey, or even become best friends with Katy Conti, I would have laughed in your face.

I can't explain how I got here. I know that I have felt anguish, and it was often blank, undifferentiated. Rarely would it carry a clearly written label that also contains its motivation, and any label it did have was mendacious. I've learned at this point that someone can believe or declare their self to be anguished for one reason and be so due to something different. You can think that you are suffering facing the future and instead be rapt with the passed. You can think that your suffering for others, out of pity or compassion, but deep down you know that it's for your own reasons- more or less profound, more or less avowed- and sometimes they are so deep that only specialists, analysts of the souls, can exhume them.

Regardless, I feel immense excitement gearing towards this year. Reasons include: taking Kirsten and Katy to school every morning, Katy being in my 5th period philosophy class and leaving everyday with her, my new-found friendship with Lacey, no longer being the ostracism and receiving general acceptance from my peers (this eliminates my fear of nutrition break), having two jobs, and having an easy schedule.

The Snowball Effect

Can someone please explain it to me? How is this possible: First I'm in a good mood, but my eyes get watery because Ali, the glamorous Bachelorette from season 6, clearlyyyyy made the wrong decision in the end. But as the tears start pooling together, it's like all my problems flash before me. The reality T.V. series gets me worked up over the heartbreak, then some stupid person said some stupid thing that got me upset over a similar heartbreak of my own, and then, before I know it, I'm a wreck. So first its Ali then its Nick then its loss then its Katy then its nostalgia then its Jordan then its back to loss then it's the cause of all the hurt I am, and soon enough the tear drops that were once plump and perfectly round are falling down the side of my face at such an uncontrollable rate that you can no longer see the perfect streaks left behind, but instead just a blotchy, red, wet complexion. It's like the filter of recall is itself altered, so that it blocks out anything but the darkest colors of the spectrum. Being unhappy precludes all else. The feeling is narcissistic, nothing that does not resonate with my unhappiness can interest me. That's when time becomes palpable and vicious. Every minute, every second, every nanosecond, gets wrapped around my spine so that my nerves tighten and ache. At that point I fade into abstraction. A self-generated narcosis creates a painful blank where my mind used to be. I feel the numbness come over me. It's so familiar, yet each time it feels worse than anything, I'm sure. Numbness is an understatement. It's more of a deep freeze, in which the ice threatens to crack at any minute, except underneath there won't be water, there won't be any fluid at all, just more and more layers of ice... ice cubes and icebergs and ice floes and ice statues, where a girl used to be.

What if...

What if I want to be large in a world that has me small, diminished. I don't want to diet, I don't want to say "no, thank you", and pretend somehow that what is there is enough when always, always I want more. That will always be my defining characteristic- I have appetites, and only if I'm truly shameless will I even begin to be sated because nothing is ever really enough. Not because I am greedy, or unsatisfiable, but because I just can't help it, I can't go along with the fiction that the world would have me believe and adhere to, that you ought to settle and be careful and accept the crumbs that are supposed to pass for a life, this minimized self you are supposed to put up with. Everything tells us to stop, to not have another piece of pizza, to not talk to the guy first, to not take an extra shot.

I'm 16, and in my opinion, I have the rest of my life to "stop"- to stand still. But I'm 16 and I intend on going, on living however I please, while I still can, while we still have zero responsibilities. Of course the sadness is still there inside me, like a stone, and it often leaves room for no other thoughts. I'm not trying to make an appeal to your sympathies, I'm just shifting this big weight inside of me from one place to the other. You know that things aren't going well for you when you can't even tell a person the simplest fact about your life, just because they'll presume you're asking them to feel sorry for you. I guess that's why I feel so far from everyone in the end; I can't think of any way to explain myself without sounding stupid or making them feel miserable.

Also, I'm tired of people trying to analyze my life when I myself have no clue as to what is going on, what it all means. I guess the reason for why I'm writing this blog is to use it as a staple, to remember how I felt two days prior to my birthday- lugubrious and irrevocably depressed. Who knows what was the cause, what came first, the sadness or the substance, but it doesn't really matter. Wow. I just had a really scary thought that made me pause my typing after I finished the last sentance. I can literally apply "it doesn't really matter" to every attribute of my life. Jesus, Kaelee, that's really really shitty. I mean how do you even solve that? Pick up a hobby? No. Get some friends? I have them. It's just like I don't feel like I know myself very well right now, so how could I ever be sure about anything? I'm always feeling awkward, like I'm walking on egg shells inside of myself. It's like I don't belong in my own skin and sometimes it makes me so frustrated at everything, I could scream or cry and there'd be no reason for it, aside from me just being so unhappy with myself.

It's okay though. My life is always this, at some point or another. I don't know if I'm getting better or getting used to it, but I know I'm so beyond need at this point. How amazing would it be if we could all decide not to be nice, never to be sorry? To have no regrets: what is before me belongs to me, my life is a result of the experiences I've been through. To say catch me if you can bitches I'm so free this is my life the rest of you can fuck off and die!

Someone asked me

to post a blog about my opinions on homosexuality. I grew up going to Sunday School, learning about how Jesus says to love God and love your neighbor as yourself and that the entity of the "Law" is summed up in that and yadda yadda yadda. That being said, I find it really hard to understand how homosexuality could be considered non-loving or harmful.

I used to be particularly narrow minded. I don't know, I guess as I got older or more mature that changed or something. Seeing flamboyantly gay people used to make me very uncomfortable and uneasy. But after experiencing love and life and the lack of control one can have over their emotions, I don't think it's wrong for a guy to love a guy or a girl to love a girl. It's love, it's all the same. Plus, I've recently made friends with a lot of gay people and they are probably some of the best people I've ever met. So I don't have anything against homosexuality.

If you, my anonymous formspring friend, are asking my opinion from a political standpoint, know that despite how liberal I may seem I do fall under the fiscally conservative republican category. I feel that allowing gay marriage would enable too many surreptitiously-straight people to get married in order to receive benefits. So I don't really know if that answers your question or what... but ya.

sorry if we ruin your lives

The bitch persona has moments of style and certain moments of substance, but quite often the attitude reveals itself to be about genuine anger, disturbance, or fear. It's the kind of female resentment and rage that produce girls like Sandy from Grease, for example. We all want to be Olivia Newton-John in the last scene, the girl swiveling her foot like a broken record to put out a cigarette with one of her red high heels (which are no longer "Fuck Me" pumps but rather "Fuck You" shoes), the girl with ratted hair, in slinky shiny black pegged pants. Yes, by the end of the movie Sandy has become your 1958 basic slut: the girl who, after suffering months of rejection for being a party pooper prude who didn't smoke or drink, has finally realized that you do have to "pet" to be popular, that you do have to put out to get the guy, that it isn't the blondes who have more fun- it's the sluts. Placing one's pretty power, one's pussy power, one's sexual energy out there for popular consumption no longer makes you a bimbo, it makes you smart.

We as girls already have ages of bad blood, beginning with Eve, ending our stay in Eden with her curiosity and lust for strange fruit, and to me it seems that even if we act like good people, the world is still quite likely to find us bad. So fuck dignity. It seems so much more exciting to be a Siren beckoning with her song or Calypso captivating on her island than to be Penelope, the archetype of female fidelity, weaving and unweaving, sending her suitors away while waiting for the errant Odysseus to return, waiting while he luxuriates in lotusland as he commits adultery with gorgeous, high-class women.

It seems to me, in the pageantry of public life, the one statement a girl can make to declare her strength, her surefootedness, her autonomy- her self as a self- is to somehow be bad, somehow do something that is sure to make her parents weep. We only seem interesting if something seems not quite right. Marilyn Monroe might have been miserable, but her death is immortal.

The Stupid Things You Do

Insight alone is not a transformative force. It doesn't work that way. Everyday you might come to a new conclusion about yourself and about the reasoning behind your behaivor, and you can tell yourself that this knowledge will make all the difference. But in all likelihood, you're going to keep on doing the same old things. You'll still be the same person. You'll still cling to your destructive, debilitating habits because your emotional tie to them is so strong- so much stronger than any cereal box insight you might come up with- that the stupid things you do are really the only things you've got that keep you centered and connected. They're the only things about you that make you you.


If only life were like the movies where characters muddle things through and do what's right in the end. In The Breakfast Club, a geek, a jock, a rich bitch, a girl in black, and a hoodlum become best friends and reconcile their differences in a few hours' worth of detention.... In real life, any momentary intimacy at Saturday school would result only in some forced, awkward exchanges on Monday morning, everyone returning to the same old cliques and clans, the same old lipstick shades and sunglasses.

"The Dead Girl", by Melanie Thernstrom

"It was like sawdust, the unhappiness: it infiltrated everything, everything was a problem, everything made her cry- school, homework, boyfriends, the future, the lack of future, the uncertainty of future, the fear of future, fear in general- but it was hard to say exactly what the problem was in the first place."

I'm starting to feel like I can't maintain my facade any longer, that I just might start to show through, and I wish I knew what was wrong. I have this palpable, absolute sense that I'm breaking down and there's really no good reason as to why, and- even worse- there's nothing I can do about it.

I'm certain that they'll never understand the philosophical underpinnings of the state I'm in. Sometimes I'm just fine, I can cope with the ebb and tide of life, I can handle the setbacks with aplomb, I can be a good sport. But when my head is clean and clear of this clutter of reason and rationality, what I'm mostly thinking is: why? Why take it like a man? Why be mature? Why accept adversity? Why surrender with grace the follies of youth? Why put up with the bullshit?

The thing is that the nature of life- even normal, sane, not depressed life- has worn me down and will continue to wear me down even more. It's just a fact that if I am to grow up, and get married, and eventually have kids, and do all the normal, happy things, along the way I will have so much trial and error to go through, so much living that I can only anticipate with dread.

There will be so many more Nicks, so many more heartbreaks, so many more cycles of elation at the first kiss, and devastation when it's over. I accept this pattern as a perfectly decent way for people to make their way through the "mating game", but I can't handle it. I am so wrecked already, so unstable, a piece of work who was never given the tools it takes to deal with what everyone else considers business as usual. I am not equipped with any emotional resilience, can't go with the flow, can't stand steady when the boat rocks and rolls. I have been robbed of that give, that elasticity that everyone else calls perspective.