I turned thirty and I had friends from school over, plus my brother, and we sat around my dining room table. I like having people over for dinner, and in my new place I always knew I wanted a table big enough to fit at least six. And then I moved here and had no friends. I looked at my new table and thought, why did I get rid of my old table? It comfortably fit one and generously fit three, and in this new city I would have had to work to find the three. But then I panicked too soon, as I always do, and then when it came down to it, it wasn’t that hard at all to find six people. When we sat down for dinner, I thought - my table’s full. My table’s finally full.
Grad school is more like I thought grad school would be like. It’s definitely more like I thought grad school would be like than how I actually through grad school was like when I first started. This week is reading week, and I've been meeting various friends on campus every day (downtown today because campus is closed) to do homework together. We had an event for the school and then a dozen of us went out afterwards. There is that easy kinsmanship that I imagined. There’s a lot of homework, too, but I can write papers pretty quickly.
One of my classmates, Marcy, had her sister and her friend come to visit over the weekend, and they wanted to go out dancing. I don’t like going out dancing, even though at moments I like going out and at moments I like dancing. Marcy’s sister is sweet and married and used to be very good at flirting with strangers at bars, and now likes to set up other people with strangers at bars.
I think there’s this stupid perception of women being competitive with each other that I have never experienced in real life. In real life, a friend’s sister, who theoretically must only like me vicariously, decided that I didn’t have enough confidence, and felt compelled to tell me every time a guy looked at me, and what about him, what about him, what about him he’s been looking at you all night.
I have had kind of a lot of nights like that. I wonder, how insecure do I seem? It’s accurate, I guess. I hate myself and then I don’t hate myself and then I do again. I’m good at making friends, I know that. Marcy said the theme of the night was slutty, so I wore a short but loose dress, red with black polkadots, and one of those harness bras. Every time I see one of those, I feel compelled to buy them, even though I don’t actually love the way the style looks on me. It was easy to make friends with Marcy’s sister and her other friend; we were showing each other our bras within the hour.
It’s funny what a difference familiarity makes, how uncomfortable I am around strangers. I liked dancing with Marcy and her sister and her friend and her friend’s cousin, but I didn’t like it when her sister brought over a guy for me to dance with. There’s something about people in clubs. They must be real people. All people are real people. But when I’m in a club, everyone who is unfamiliar to me seems otherly. It’s not just that I don’t know them: they are Other. I don’t want to get to know them. I don’t want to dance with anyone I didn’t come with.
A girl came up and told me I was beautiful, and I thought, that was nice, and then I thought, I wonder if she felt sorry for me. I think that’s probably why Marcy’s sister thought I needed a confidence boost, even though I didn’t tell her, or any of them, what I thought. I’m probably a little drunk now, even though I do feel like the jagerbombs sobered me up. At the end of the night, we got drinks with tangerine vodka and redbull and they tasted just like Flintstone vitamins. I think I hate myself the normal amount, but I know it’s easy for me to make friends. I’m doing well in school, but that could end at any moment. I guess sometimes strangers like the way I look, but I never notice them noticing me, and I don’t like it when other people point it out.
