the first and last daylog This is my life. I wake up early to spend the day at a cheesy Flinstones themed theme park where we ride rides that were a lot more fun when I was six and small enough to be excited about getting to go on the big rollercoaster. This makes me sound cynical, so I should mention that I had fun nonetheless. Spending the day with a friend I've known for nearly twelve years and a sister I've known my whole life is pretty much bound to be enjoyable. We get home to clean the house for my sister's best friend's eighteenth birthday party and I can smell drama in the air already, can feel it in the marrow of my bones, but I won't say anything, what is there to say at this point? So we clean, and decorate, go off in search of liquor and return. [In my head I hold dual images - the image of this room as it was last night before the party when I sat in this same position, and the image of this room now after it has been decimated by drunk teenagers.] I've got plans for later but my friends party later than her friends so I stick around and party with them for a bit. There's that sticky tension in the air that you only find at teenage parties with uneven male to female ratios - in this case, a mass of cooler-filled girls versus two boys shooting Appleton rum and Jagerbombs, one single and one not. The single one has his eye on my sister who is also single, but in her typical fashion she isn't noticing. I find out later that this single boy is the boy my sister's best friend has a crush on, and I feel the sparks of disaster charging up this hideous triangle. I leave one party in the hands of chaos and go off to join the other. I'm more than a little drunk at this point and am not surprised when I fall off the sidewalk on my way, skinning both my knees and taking a chunk of skin out of my left hand. The only thing I'm thinking is, "Thank goodness I'm drunk enough for that to not hurt" and it didn't, I feel fine, I keep walking. Some friends pick me up on the way and then almost kill us all by trying idiot driving maneuvers in front of the house where we plan to party. But I'm drunk, so I laugh. Someone gets the idea to play drinking games and let's be honest, it's all downhill from there. At some point I pass out on the couch, so full of beer that I can't even think about moving, I keep thinking in turn "I am so wasted" and "I'm going to chuck" and well let's be honest, I'm less than impressed with myself but so it goes. So I pass out, someone throws a blanket over me at some point and there are vague attempts to wake me, but I am like an immovable stone. Two in the morning and I jolt awake with this odd sensation that I need to be outside RIGHT NOW, so I listen to my instincts and as I'm walking out the front door my phone rings. If I'd waited two minutes longer I would have missed that phone call. It is my sister and she is crying, no surprise, I saw this coming. She made out with the boy who likes her but that her best friend likes and in her drunken state is feeling the guilt in a hard place. The reception on my phone is awful so I'm only getting every other word and it's enough to tell me I need to go home. So I start walking and am again picked up by friends from the party who drunkenly profess their love for me [well one of them anyway] but they mean love in the sense of respect and admiration and the feeling is mutual so I leave the car smiling. So I'm home and still drunk and suddenly I feel as though I'm in the process of diffusing a sticky bomb of teenage FEELINGS; either way it is going to explode on someone or someone is going to blow up at me for mediating, but so it goes, I try anyway. They are inebriated and confused, miserable and indecisive. My sister wants the boy but does not want to hurt her best friend, the best friend wants to see my sister happy but does not want to see them together because it hurts her. The situation is completely high school, I don't know what to tell them. It's a good thing they graduated a few days ago. They all fall asleep with the situation unresolved, planning to deal with it in the morning when they are not drunk. Now they talk in the kitchen peaceably, discussing mutual hangovers, and I'm watching bad infomercials on television. So it goes. |