the bathroom is down the hall, a long daunting hall full of offices that are full of books and intelligent men and women who all cast their eyes on my as i shuffle down the hall because i need to pee so badly that my jeans are getting tightter by the minute.
sometimes everthing seems as daunting as this simple task, because at the back of your mind and on the tip of your mothers tongue, you know that it is as simple as not thinking about it and raising your butt cheeks from the seat and making your way down that long dark hallway. However, oftentimes among ourselves, we single ourselves out because we think too much. you know you are the person I speak about when you are. when you spent your 16th year trying to think of intelligent witty conversations to perform with boys who werent listening to the sounds your throat was making, or the way your tongue was forming, but rather your throat and tongue circling their penis. i certainly never knew a different kind no matter what they insisted. However long i spent imagining and lusting after their conversations i never felt ill prepared, embarassed or frightened around these boys. rather i made jokes and found it all easy after which i think i convinced my precocious young self that boys were just girl with larger pants and i stopped thinking about speaking with boys.
instead i focused on lying to my parents to get to those boys, i would think about wonderious excused and stories to get out the house mainly i focused on avoiding the word party around my father. my mother too because the two of them were a gang, a real team that snitched on each other like a gang member would. so i spoke of "get togethers" with pop when really we were rolling joints and drinking rum straight out of the bottle and sleeping on someones floor, anyones floor because nothing was worse than going back to your house late. I would more likely be allowed to sleep elsewhere than actually come back late, which never made sense to me. I suppose i shouldnt inform my parents today, perhaps it is the secret of teenagers everywhere that their parents dont actually think about what they are doing. some friends had "cool" parents who would drive us in their min-vans and let us drunkenly sleep at their house, serving us breakfast the next morning to cool the stale smell of hard liquor and pot that was reeking from our dirty mouths.
I comfort myself with the notion that my parents never really asked. they would ask where i was going and i would answer "so and so's house" consistently failing to explain that between my house and so and so's we were hitting up 3 parties, stealing booze and killing peoples joints of pot we certainly did not pay for. this should not give anyone the impression that i was popular during high school; i had a great group of friends indeed, who spent most of our time making fun of everyone that was not us, including the "popular" kids while we smiled at the lonely kids. never too wide however, because we didnt want anyone to get too attached.
this period passed as well and suddenly i wasn't thinking about mundane activities but telling anyone that would listen for long enough that i was going to university. university for PHILOSOPHY. that was a sore subject indeed because as soon as i actually started attending the school i spent more time trying to find friends who werent in university and had jobs lax enough to call in sick and have friday afternoon beers with. my parents stopped worrying about me coming in late because by 8 pm i was already past my drunken prime and feeling the effects of a hangover. that year i thought about making the most of the little of the very tiny paycheck i got ( most of it went towards my tuition, especially after i threatened to drop out and after which is was threatened and sentenced to pay my own tuition anyhow). that money was spent wisely on quarts of green apply vodka which eased my throat and my dance moves at local bars we snuck into, the art school dances or really anything that was going on which comprised of a drummer, guitarist and hopefully a synth player. I met my first real boyfriend that year, before that it was just slutting it up with boys who would bore me within a week.