Confession: I wrote this blog fifteen minutes before beauty sleep. I am so exhausted I can only write in run-on sentences that resemble William Faulkner!
Life is not frosty as Robert/Henry my hookup musician or my ex-best-friend-in-high-school Cory would say. Or maybe it's my conception of life at this very moment that changes mostly because I am not in a state of complete euphoria or enlightenment either when I have finished a novel or when I have shaken the hand of a complete stranger but she is cute and has finished crooning a duet with me. Life is not really like Billy Reid southern culture although I did feel Billy Reid homely atmosphere when I visited Shawn's crib for the second time. His neighborhood dramatically transforms from a part industrial gnarl to a diverse mecca known as Little India that manages to fit itself into the branches of Northern Boulevard which continues to haunt me even in my sleep. The name itself signifies more than just memories of Shawn and Tanya, but I'm afraid it is Tanya that is not completely purged from my system. How can women do this to me? Take me for a ride and take advantage of me after realizing how much of a softie I am. Tanya did exactly just that. She used her Las Vegas attitude to ingratiate herself with me and used her award-winning/egalitarian smiles to vex me to share in half of my busking money. But the sheer fact that I agreed to split the busking money with her when we had dinner it showed how much of an unspoken influence she had on me. I had such a magnetic pull towards her that I had completely forgotten how much I gave into her, needless to say that I felt such golden passion when I sung with her. But this halo effect quickly swept over when I realized that she took it upon herself to take bills out of my busking box which alarmed me to no end. Inside I was thrashing and protesting the fact that someone put their hands inside my busking box of cash and this hand was not my own. When it comes to the cash I make I do not share it, and I don't know what came over me when I told her I would share half my busking money with her a week before she came and saw me for the last time. If Northern Boulevard should represent the hub of my close friends then it should only link Shawn and Linda, not any one else.
I am sentimental to the point that I allowed Tiff to spend months with squirrel. We would trade this furry hand puppet every few months. Though we didn't keep track of it mostly because Tiff was busy, I still feel that I allowed this to happen initially because I was incredibly sentimental. I had thought that by allowing her to live with squirrel or put him on her bed, somehow it would be closer to her and we would both be caring for squirrel the way we would care for a child or a pet. This longing for a common core of concern became placed on/into squirrel, a hand puppet Tiff and I found at Barnes and Nobles Union Square the second day we hung out. It took us no more than ten minutes in the Regents section to find squirrel. Out of all the puppets Tiff fell in love with squirrel because it was cute and she loves squirrels. Our most earliest memory of a squirrel sighting was in City Hall Park where we sat during our first hangout. It was there that Tiff tried to feed the squirrel. It got pretty close to her and then a pigeon entered the scene. I still have video of this event on my cellphone. It is safe to say that when Tiff told me she was leaving to Boston to study I felt sad. I would not be able to see Tiff anymore and I would not be able to explore the city and be part of haphazard discoveries which we used to have every time we hung out, from the Shake Shack diarrhea experience I had which led us to sit at the steps of FIT near my house, to the DSW experience where Tiff sent her mom pictures of her shoes to see if she approves. It has led us to watching the film Being Flynn and it has led us to shopping at Macys for her father's day gift. Sometimes I wonder if Tiff knows that I have this sentimental attitude around her and that I express my desire for her through the taking care of squirrel and through the passive acceptance of her taunting jokes about me being a dork and a weird kid.
I like to say that I have guy friends, but lately that has been difficult to attest to. I drifted away from making friends with guys ever since I entered the yellow hallways of Hunter College where the student body comprised 70% females and a high population of Asian chicks. Though the Asian chicks at Baruch are "classier" because they are suited up for interviews at accounting firms, etc., Hunter has the more stylish chicks who come dressed in whatever they choose to flaunt. I lead myself to believe that Baruch girls are classier but they are more shallowminded because they think they are all that with calculators stuck up their ass. Maybe this kind of thinking leads me away from them and it only assuages my inability to get with them. I remember six years ago, this Dewey senior named Vincent told me that Dewey chicks are shallow. I suppose wherever he went, the chicks were shallow too, so I readily assume that Baruch girls are shallow. Then again maybe Vincent was shallow himself so all he attracted were the shallow girls, OR he could have felt that the girls were too shallow because no one found him attractive so his defense mechanism activated was that all the girls were too shallow for him anyway so he doesn't need to bother looking around in Baruch so he deems all the females shallow as an easier way of turning them all down.
I haven't seen Jessica in over two weeks now ever since we had ice cream at Sky Ice in Park Slope. I think I have made Jessica my foodie buddy. She doesn't replace the Jessica I once knew, but she does remind me of her in some ways. Jessica is almost four years younger than me and it not only shocks me to revisit what she told me: her mother tells her she looks incredibly young but she has the tongue and wisdom of a forty year old. Jessica and I get each other because we can hold up intellectual conversations and ponder about mature stuff even though sometimes what I say can surpass her experiential skills and experience level that is usually associated with the actual age a person is and not what their conception of the world is. I want to be able to spend time with Jessica and either duet with her or just contemplate the world.
Hien is a thousand miles away from me somewhere either on Capitol Hill or in Virginia where she is originally from. After the explosion over the phone and the dam break the morning after I realized that Hien has shown me almost all sides of her self and it hasn't been more than half a year that we have known each other. In fact we have only spent eight days together and touring NYC by foot. I feel like we have known each other for a much longer time as friends. To a certain extent Hien stretches the burden of trust to me mostly because she knows I can keep a secret. I can keep secrets because I still have a lot left to know about her and because I don't know the corners of her life I can bear to keep the secret. The secret loses its volatility because I am still a stranger to her on some levels while I'm a friend to her, speaking-wise and reference-wise. I don't want to be the harbinger of slightly uncomfortable news but all is well with our friendship except for the balance of information: I wish that Hien could ask me more questions and find out about me. I find that she tends to talk a lot more about herself because she feels that through talking about her events and life situations she can indirectly find out about me because I respond in certain reflexive ways to address my own life. This is similar to Elisabeth, my two-semester-old philosophy classmate who lost communication with me almost three months ago.
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