25 percent fun!

Nothing is as remarkably boring as being sad. People aren't interested sadness. I should take that back: people are interested in sadness if it is new and fresh. They are interested in sadness if they are uncharacteristically bored, or if they think they can easily cure the sadness. Personally, I treat sadness the way my mother does: as something that the sad person is trapped inside of, like a fairly basic wire cage with the lock on the outside. I always assume I can find the magical secret key that will free my friends from their sadness, and then they will feel better and I will be rendered an instant hero. I am always much too talkative on the phone with my sad friends, suggesting antidotes for their problems at a chattery-fast pace (You should go out on weeknights! You should start a blog! You should listen to Swedish pop music! You should read graphic novels beneath sycamore trees!).

Of course, no one is going to solve it for you. My mother, in her infinite kindness, put up with me last week while I brattily rejected every one of her misery-elixirs for my particular ailment (You should buy a new pair of shoes! You should find an entirely new set of friends! You should balance your checkbook! You should drop out of Teach for America and move to Walla Walla and try to relive your college life for as long as possible!). I'm deeply grateful to her, because she is probably the only one who is not bored with me being sad. After my embarrassingly egomaniacal summer of crying every night and nervous breakdowns, I've officially run out of emotional IOUs and shoulders to cry on.

No one really wants to read a blog where some 20something waxes poetic about how much life sucks. There's nothing profound in that; we all know it. I need to pull myself out of it. Again.

I've done a lot of things that have been FREAKISHLY fun (Read: Grant Park on election night). Then I offbalanced all of those things by crawling under my covers, panic attacking (a new verb?), and eating exclusively foods of the 90 percent carbohydrate set. I've left woe-is-me voice mails ("Mary? ... It's... Sophie. I'm just... things are so.... hard right now. I'm just... I think I should go to the hospital... I'm so miserable... I don't know what to do... I am going to lie on a bed of nails... I am going to drown kittens to distract myself from my current... unbelievable... melancholy... Anyway (snifffff) you don't... need to call back..."). And then I indefinitely logged myself out of GChat (I didn't just Invisible myself, I actually LOGGED MYSELF OUT), deleted my Facebook account (briefly), and effectively hid from the world.

The world did not particularly miss me. The world did not call, nor did it write e-mails, frantically wondering where or how I was. The world continued on its axis, perhaps glad that I was out of order for the time being, because it had other things to worry about -- like, um, THE FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT (+342894723894723984723 points for the country!!)?!

So that's the long-winded excuse for my Internet absence. I could explain away the sadness, but you've heard it all before (shootings, terrible reading, gang fights, bad names, threats, friendship trouble, etc.). I just have to start working my way up again...

1. I went on a critical mass last night (5 points!). I'm not very good at riding a bicycle. I know that seems like one of those things that you can either do or not do (such as rolling your tongue or snapping), but when you ride in a critical mass you realize there are varying levels of goodness when it comes to riding a bicycle. For example, I cannot a) Ride with no handlebars, b) Pass items from my bike to another bike and back again, c) Fix iPod speakers in my bike basket while also riding, d) Be drunk while also riding (I don't know if this is true because I didn't try, but I wasn't about to because THAT SEEMED DANGEROUS), e) Not make a face that implied that I was focusing a lot on the actual activity of bike riding. Everyone else in the critical mass COULD do those things. But it was still cool. People honked at us because the didn't like the critical mass. People also cheered because they were drunk and they thought it was cool to see a lot of bikes.
2. Karaline took me on a picnic yesterday (3 points!). We went to City Park where all the trees have Spanish moss and Whitman-y artists' creations hanging from the branches like in a fantasy novel, and there is literally every rare shore bird in North America just chillin' in the various bodies of water. She made something really luxurious involving pasta and basil and we drank hard cider and iced tea. Then we saw this tiny train going along these tiny train tracks in the park and we thought, "We are going to find where that tiny train sets out!" And so we followed the tracks and realized that CITY PARK HAS A MAGICAL WONDERLAND INSIDE OF IT (Read: amusement park). We snuck in the back without paying admission and took the train ride. Why is it that if you are riding on a tiny train it is acceptable to wave at everyone you pass and expect them to wave back at you, but it is totally not acceptable to do that in everyday life?
3. We got $120 Thai food and ate for three hours (1 point!). I made earrings out of 10-cent mini motorcycles (another point!).
4. Grant Park is the ultimate bragging right (10 points!). It was everything you might have imagined it was when you watched television, but then multiply that by about thirty-thousand. I can't really describe it without a string of cliches. But I was with Kim and Alex and let me just say that I have never been so happy in my entire life.
   
5. Alex and I went for brunch in Hyde Park and we ran into Spike Lee going into a barber shop (2 points!). I can't not mention that because the stars are still kind of in my eyes.
6. For Leah's birthday we went to a freelance pedicurist, which sounded really sketchy to me but turned out to be AWESOME (3 points!). How is every single apartment in New Orleans cooler than the last apartment I thought was the coolest apartment? At this rate, the next apartment I see is going to have actual clouds hanging from the ceilings and celebrities mixing in the parlor room. We drank hot apple cider and discussed the weary ways of the world, along with the merits of Democracy Now and cheap flip-flops. My toenails are exceptionally clean and also orange. We had dinner at Nighthawks again which is absolutely my favorite restaurant here. We ate at the bar and they gave Leah a free Bloody Mary with sprigs of asparagus in it and onions and olives. Some old man came in with his impossibly young puppy and let it run around on the bar top. That puppy smelled really good.

So things are good. Fine, really. I really miss having a family. Define that however you want. My parents arguing over Halloween costumes, my sister walking with me for miles in Birkenstocks, Alex doing work in my room when I come home from running errands, Ari and '80s movies on Friday nights, dancing for an hour straight at Kim's house after consuming an entire pizza, Jessica and Ben lying on an oversized couch at one in the morning watching "I Love The Nineties." Feeling deeply safe and not alone. I miss that. A lot.