Is It Up to Me?

I've lived in Baltimore for three years now, but I just got my first (professional, Julia notwithstanding) Baltimore haircut this week. It wasn't so much a statement of finality as a simple result of my anticipation that the weather around here will be getting very hot very soon. (And I was right, see; I'm always right.) I was going to do my research, find out who gives good haircuts around here--but then I stopped myself, decided it was against my principles to spend any effort on the issue, walked into Tenpachi and said, "just, um, make it shorter." And so it was. As far as I can tell, it looks alright, if boyish, but then again I'm boyish (at least to people who don't know me very well); besides, it'll look like the same old when it grows back out, anyway.

Finished with exams this week; got my grades back. They are:

Biological Physics 2: A
Advanced Biophysics Seminar: A+
Advanced Poetry: A
ProbStats: A

average 4.0

And there you have it: the first straight-A, four-point-oh average semester of my entire life. My overall GPA just went up by 0.13. It's not like I worship GPA scores, but I do feel somewhat accomplished, especially since I've been feeling more paranoid about studying this semester than during past semesters.

Met up with Valerie one last time on Wednesday afternoon. Sat outside Carma's with Sno-Joes for hours. Talked about how she injured her ankle while bouldering. At some point a really tall dude and a really short girl walked by, and Valerie said hi to the guy. His name was Chris, but I didn't really pay attention, since I didn't know the guy. But after he'd passed she said, "what a jerk," and I realized there was some history going on. So Valerie ended up talking to me about how this guy Chris had given her all these overt signals while they were hanging out, but then decided to not talk to her, and why was he with that short blonde girl when Valerie was a "good catch," (her words) and I had to talk through all this while thinking the irony was so goddamn thick I could roll it up into a ball and chuck it across the table. I think that I'd have the decency to not talk to someone about relationship problems just a few weeks after having to pre-empt them.

"You're a good listener," she said after I admitted that most people tend to tell me about their problems. So fucking what, I wondered. Later I helped her move boxes out of her dorm room. Sometimes I wonder why I bother.

After considering the cases of my uncle, my father, my brother, and myself, I've come to notice a pattern: my family makes loners. Since I got kicked out of Trafalgar, every group effort I've started since freshman year has officially failed. With all my talk about ineffable forces driving people's lives, I can't help but think that there may be some kind of force compelling me to be alone, making doing the same things by my self so much easier than doing them with others that I have no choice but to do things by myself.

I wonder what I am to the people around me, anyway. Being a good listener just means I feel the pain of everyone, and then I feel nothing. When all my friends are finally happy and don't need me anymore, what will become of me? Will I just disintegrate and fade away, having served my purpose? This year I had to talk Anne out of hating herself and her life once every week, and she didn't really bother to bring me barhopping for her birthday (though it's doubtful I could've gone, being 2 months away from my own 21st birthday), so where will I be when people don't need that from me anymore?

Probably just deluding myself anyway. Probably people would get along fine without the things I do. Probably I just balk at the proposition, since those things are the only connections I have with some people I know, and I'm scared of being disconnected completely.

I need to start drawing lines, establishing terms. I should stop being so damn kind. Can I stop? Should I stop? Maybe it's not just a vacation from this city that I need, but from the very people I surround myself with, the people who never seem to make time for me, but whom I can't seem to make myself stop caring about.

"So...what about you?" Valerie asked me near the end of our conversation that day. I didn't know what to say to her. How was I supposed to sanely communicate that the problem I had wasn't so much with any one person, not her, not anybody, snubbing me, but with a state of loneliness that's as perpetual and natural as thirst or hunger, except when I'm thirsty I can drink a glass of water, and when I'm hungry I can make myself a sandwich, but solitude is pretty much a chronic condition without a reliable, permanent cure? And were I to say that, how was I ever supposed to communicate that it was something personal, visceral, and relevant, and I wasn't just speaking on an abstract, philosophical, and disinterested plane, like I do too much of the time, even in this here very goddamn blog?