@inareiko replied ; he truly does look miserable...can i have ten of him please? 🙏

February 25, 2017.  2:48 AM

I should have started writing this journal earlier.  Maybe on my birthday, which was only two days ago.  Wouldn’t it be perfect if I had started chronicling my life and thoughts on the day I turned 18 and became an adult?  But, not everything works out perfectly, so here I am.  Better late than never I suppose.  

Woke up this morning to be greeted by a snap from an old friend, let’s call him Gamer.  I’m choosing that name because we used to play video games together back during freshman and sophomore year.  It’s actually how we came to meet each other, since he lives in Minnesota and I live in Indiana.  We hadn’t talked in a while, but recently he started snapchatting me out of the blue.  I’m not sure why, I think he just may want to start a streak with someone, but it’s nice to be able to speak with someone again like that after a long while.  It’s not like we have any deep conversations, and we’re not as close as we used to be, but just having a tiny conversation with him each day is nice.  It’s a simple and easy way for us to keep in touch while keeping things casual.  The snap he sent was a “Good Morning” snap, just like the ones he’s sent me for the past couple of days.  It’s a black screen with a timestamp printed on it, captioned with “good morning” and adorned with a couple cute stickers of cats waking up.  It’s nothing special or unique, and I’m pretty sure he probably just sends it to everyone on his friends list, or at least a dozen more people than just me, but it still feels comforting.  It’s something to look forward to, a nice message that you know is gonna be there every time you wake up.

Speaking of messaging, a girl from the school play has been messaging me on instagram a lot lately.  Her name should be Hashtag, since everything she posts is riddled with them.  Like, 30 or so to a single post, all of them being random buzzwords that never end up relating to the picture.  We don’t talk much in real life, but we have a running joke where we call each other freshmen when we pass each other by.  The kind of joke that you have with acquaintances so that it gives you SOMETHING to bring up and break the ice when you see them.  However, she’s been sending me random memes recently, and a lot of them.  I’m not a big fan of “meme convos”, where you just keep sending pictures to one another, so I’d wait a while and then respond with the first picture I could find.  Eventually though, we’ve managed to transition to actual conversation.  What I’ve learned is that she’s got a lot of self-doubt, this is her first year here in Indiana after moving from Ohio, she has trouble making friends, and she craves attention.  She told me first three things, but the last one I kind of found out myself.  Even when you ignore the fact that she tags all of her pictures with whatever’s trending at the moment to try and get more followers, it’s very clear.  She talks trash about herself in the way that either fishes for compliments or tries to garner pity.  She’s shy in real life (hence why she can’t make friends easily), and she clearly doesn’t like sitting there feeling forgotten.  She’s also very dramatic about everything, like she wants to depict her life as this dreadful tragedy.  I’m very doubtful that things are ever as bad as she tells me, but I’ll bait the bait and respond with whatever words of encouragement I have lying around.  Stuff like “be more confident”, “People will like you, you just have to approach them”.  It always frustrates me a but to see someone like this, cause that’s exactly how I was as an underclassmen, and I feel like I missed my chance at a lot of friendships and experiences because of it.  Plus, once you find a way to instill confidence in yourself, you really start to wonder why you didn’t do it sooner.  The doors of your world just really start to open.  Anyways, I’m also fairly sure this girl has a thing for me, because if I go a while without responding, she’ll just…keep messaging me.  I get notifications about her sending me pictures or texts all the time.  And that might be a problem.  She’s nice and all, but she’s a freshman.  And even though she calls me freshman for our gag, it doesn’t change the fact that I really am a senior and that it’d just be something I wouldn’t be comfortable with.  We’ll see how things turn out on that front.

A couple of friends and I (Let’s call them Viper and Cross, for reasons I can’t really justify for privacy’s sake) want to try our hands at Private Investigating. It’s definitely an odd hobby to pick up, but it’s the perfect kind of eccentric activity a couple of bored small-town teens could find themselves occupied with.  Our first case involves a girl who’s yard was vandalized with police tape over winter break, and the prime suspect is her sister’s ex, who she tried to get a restraining order against.  I went on the internet and found that the name that Evil Ex goes by is his middle name, and after doing some researching, discovered that he was arrested two years ago for resisting police, and that he’s either a firefighter or training to become one, which explains why he could get police tape.  We went over the info at lunch together, and honestly, I got a bit of a rush from it.  To be able to piece a puzzle together is an amazing feeling, even when the case is cut-and-dry like this one.  We plan on interviewing the girl who gave us the mystery about him and maybe talking to her sister too.

Today, I asked my ex, (let’s call her Clam, because she never opens up to anybody, which is why we broke up) if I could get back the corsage ring I gave her.  You see, Viper and I are going on a pretend date in a couple of weeks.  He has a girlfriend, neither of us are gay, and we’ll basically just be hanging out, but we decided to stage it as a date for fun.  So then I thought if I gave Viper an old corsage ring covered in dead flowers.  I felt a little sleazy about asking at first, because it was a gift and asking for anything back like that is just a shitty thing to do.  But honestly, I thought about it and it was fine.  She didn’t really care about me during our relationship and I don’t think we were ever serious, so it’s not like that ring would carry any emotional baggage with it.  Plus, she forgot to even wear the damn thing to homecoming, so clearly she never gave any mind to it in the first place.  Sure enough, she was fine with it.  She never ended up finding it, but I told her to tell me if she did.

Met with my out-of-town grandparents to grab lunch before the opening night of the school play.  We stopped at this organic burger place in town and I had one with onion rings, bleu cheese, and garlic aieola (I have no idea what that is).  Look, I'm under the impression that chemicals make food taste better. I can't act like I'm "better than junk food", because I'm not. When I see "Organic" slapped on a label, I assume whatever's in there tastes worse than it's factory-concocted counterparts. That being said, however, organic meat tastes sooo much better. The burgers were thick and juicy, the kind you actually need two hands to hold and the kind that can actually entirely fill my gaping fat mouth in one bite. Way better than the thin soggy McDonald's burgers. Also, talking to grandparents is pretty hard, especially when you don't have much in common. I mean, you could talk about college plans with them. Or stab yourself in the eye with a dull pencil. 

 Our school play is not very good. I'm not gonna list the myriad of problems we had leading up to opening night, but I will say that despite all of that we did our best with the material given. Since winter play is the family play, it means there's gonna be a lot of shitty comedy. My character was basically completely comic relief and based around a running gag, which is that he is a boring and lazy janitor that everyone loves unconditionally despite his complete lack of charisma or personality. I'm proud to say that I did my best with the dialogue and directions I had and I got the second biggest amount of laughs, plus my good friend (let's call him Clifford) showed up as a surprise so hey, all's well that ends well. 

 Clam and I have a mutual friend who works up in tech booth for the play (her official nickname is Aqua) so afterwards I went to go talk with her. Apparently Clam is very uncomfortable around me, and neither of us know why, because Clam doesn't like to talk about her feelings, as mentioned before. I was curious as to why that was, because I was comfortable around her, and I was the one that actually cared about our relationship while it was happening. I don't really plan on staying friends with her though, so it doesn't matter. I just like having deep bonds with my friends, and she's emotionally shallow. Nothing personal, just not the type I wanna have as a friend. I just needed a failed relationship to see that. 

 After the show, Viper, Clifford, and I went to the Dunkin Donuts nearby to see if the garbage bag full of donuts was in the dumpster. It wasn't, somebody had already taken it.

 After that, Clifford came over to my house and we watched It's Always Sunny, I tried to introduce Mr. Show to him, but I guess it wasn't his speed, and then we played WWE2k17 until I drove him home at around 1 in the morning. I played this music, drove home alone in the dark, and just thought about everything going on lately. Then I came home, sat down, and just typed this all out. It's now almost 5 in the morning, and I really need to get some sleep. So until next time... 

 Ride's over.