Sunday, November 11, 2012

City trips, weird nostalgia, and Joe Biden

I may not have been entirely fair in my most recent blogpost. I could be reading into things too much and I certainly did not mean what I wrote to apply to all of my friends here. I have a few good ones that I think I will be keeping. But that's how I felt when I wrote it and I am not a fan of invalidating emotions, even my own in hindsight, and so that post will remain as a primary source for when people want to write my biographies.

I'm feeling moderately better than I did on Friday, anyway. On Saturday I took a trip to New York City to see Kara and Alex. It was definitely what I needed.

I overslept and was worried when I found the bus station in my town to be half in ruins. But none of that mattered as my bus was ten minutes late anyway. After a few blocks of vague panicking and city-wandering, this rural suburban girl managed to find her way to the NYPL to meet two of her closest friends. We spent the day looking through a food exhibit in the library, finding our way to the Harry Potter Exhibition that just so happened to be in the city the same day as we were (really, we had no idea it was there until we saw signs for it), eating at Chipotle for my first time, and then planted Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans throughout Bryant Park. Really. We threw them on statues and hid them in kiosks and left them in the hands of mannequins and buried them in potted plants.

It was so good to be amongst internet friends again. (Though at this point Kara is barely a URL friend anymore.) It was so great to giggle our way through the sorting ceremony at the Exhibition and to squeal over pictures of Gilderoy Lockhart and make jokes about how Harry Potter wears Nikes and how short Daniel Radcliffe is. We gossiped about people in the fandom we know and told stories about our school lives and what we did there.

So I was rather miserable as I walked back to my dorm room from the station last night with obnoxious blue eyeshadow (random stop at Sephora, knowing full well we couldn't afford anything) on my eyes and a burrito sitting mildly awkwardly in my stomach. It sucks to live so far away from the people I love and it's great to see them at long last but then it sucks again to leave them.

I suppose you could say I've been rather miserable as a whole lately, though. For some reason I've been reading through Hayley G. Hoover's blogposts from 2009 and it's making me weirdly nostalgic for my own spring and summer of senior year. Reading through my BEDA posts from this year you could argue that I was rather unhappy for that time in my life but that's not true. I think I genuinely had a pretty good senior year. Definitely my best in school so far. It's also occurred to me that in nine days I will be 19, and thus entering my last year as a teenager. Maybe it's because of the nostalgia or this realization that my time for being an angsty, whiny teenager is limited or lingering insecurity about the people I go to school with or because I miss my friends, but I was feeling rather low.

I thought about last spring when I was feeling rather good about myself and realized that I did a lot of walking then. Whether to school or back or to the grocery store or the creek or the dollar store or the Chinese take-out place during free (and not so free...) periods, I probably walked more than I did at any other time in my life. So, it being a deliciously warm November day, I decided to walk to Rite-Aid.

I really only meant to pick up some red nail polish and remover but of course that didn't happen. I have this huge love/hate relationship with stores where you can get a bunch of different things like convenience stores and Wal-Marts and, my love, Wegmans. On the one hand, it's fun and exciting and you never know what you'll find. Where I'm from, that's where you go with your friends on a Saturday night. But I also always get more than I intend to. Today was no exception. In addition to the polish and remover, I also purchased a birthday card. For Joe Biden.

No, I'm not kidding. I bought our Vice-President a birthday card. We share a birthday, he's my political soulmate, and I have a Leslie Knope sized crush on him. How do you find a card that says "I admire you for all you do in your service to the country but I'm also strangely attracted to you"? There was no "For the Vice President" section and I nearly got him one that said "Today, you're the queen" but resisted and got him a very respectable and heartfelt one. Though I nearly asked strangers their advice but just wasn't up to that sort of conversation.

I also bought a bag of mini-Hershey bars. I'm less proud about this as I've already eaten five of them. I grabbed them on a whim and as soon as I bought them realized I didn't want them. Well, that was true for about an hour. I definitely want them now....

So that's the life of an anxiety ridden almost-not-a-teenager with depressive tendencies and friends who live too far away.

I'll bet you're really excited for those biographies now, aren't you?

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