You know, if I had been able to stand outside myself last night and observe my behavior, I might have been concerned.

PEOPLE! I am 27 years old, I am mildly successful, I am certainly smart and pretty self-aware, my Irish ancestors have paved the way to ensure that I can hold my liquor, and last night I sat at home by myself and drank to the point of puking. Discreetly. I mean, I just moved, and I don’t want my stranger-roommates to think they’ve gone and Craigslisted themselves an alky.

This morning I arose with an unlit cigarette in my front pocket, several bruises on my legs, and the crushed remnants of a ceramic tikki glass (upon which I apparently fell) strewn across the floor, and I ran out the door just in time to catch my bus to school. After class, my friend Deanna asked me what the hell I had been doing last night. I told her about strapping a bottle of Bushmills to my face like an infant to the teat ... or wait, I guess to keep that analogy parallel I’d have to say “like the teat to an infant,” which is actually way funnier and I’m still laughing about it, but anyway ... Deanna replied, “I knew you had put yourself on a bender! I could smell it.”

Awesome. Stumbling into therapy school smelling like a brothel.

You know, being steeped in psychobabble these days, my impulse is to analyze the reasons behind my actions. And the reasons behind my resistance to analyze the reasons behind my actions. And the reasons I’m denying that I’m resisting the need to analyze anything at all.

Motherfucker.

Oh, whatever. Sometimes those nights just happen. Sometimes I get in a lonely, fist-shakey mood that I treat with inappropriate amounts of alcohol and mopey long-distance phone conversations, just because I can. (Sorry, Dean.)

Switch gears! Story time. I think.

I met Julie the summer after I turned 21, when we were both working at a summer theatre in Vermont, the setting for many of my favorite stories and lots of boring-to-you post-adolescent self-discovery. It was during a strange period of my life when I had made the decision to become invisible, and then spent every subsequent moment berating myself for feeling worthless.

At the time I thought I’d I suffered a minor stroke of the social variety. I felt as though I only existed through others’ reactions when they bounced off of me, and was terribly lonely unless I was alone. Julie was the exact opposite of me. We were working among a number of loud and eccentric attention-grabbers, and she was the most successful of the bunch at warranting attention.

For every topic that came up in conversation, Julie had a personal story according to which she had been on the brink of stardom several times in her life only to have been thwarted by jealousy, misunderstanding, or freak medical conditions. She wore funky miniskirts despite being not-skinny, and had a head of hair that had been through wars and ceasefires of all lengths and colors. She was born with a brain that was missing its left frontal lobe. She had suffered a mysterious long-term illness that had damaged her hearing and given her permanent vertigo; but the dizzy spells didn’t impair her ability to tap dance. She had so many shoes she could have built a castle out of them. She swore like a sailor, and had read every book known to man, save for the ones I had to lend her. She always had a band of admirers of every gender, and once said to me, “Kelly, people don’t find me attractive because I’m good-looking. They like me because of the weird things I do to myself.” That might have been true, to an extent, but Julie was objectively very pretty.

Julie was always singing, talking, flailing, smoking, or some combination of the four. She treated a cigarette like a floating appendage, as if it was an extension of herself, or a prop meant to distract people from the fact that the smoke pouring out of her mouth was coming from a fire in her gut. She would exhale smoke in great, honkin’ mouthfuls, in the middle of her sentences, biting off clouds of it between words or letting it leak through her smile. Always kinetic, she was never at rest.

For some reason, Julie took an interest in me. She once said to me, when we were in a group and I was looking particularly awkward, “I’d love to see you in your own element, Kell.” In gatherings when I found it easier to shrink into the background, Julie would be the only one to hear and laugh at my sotto voce one-liners and non-sequiturs. At the time I registered her laughter with an Eeyore-esque “Thanks for noticin’ me” recalcitrance, but in retrospect I appreciate it as being very kind.

I was cast in the kids’ show presented every weekend on Br0mley Mountain, and because of Julie’s position as Company Manager, she was often required to give me rides from our chipmunk-infested theatre-lackey commune to the mountain clubhouse where we performed the show. We became friends during those car rides, and came to look forward to our conversations to and from the mountain, when we spoke frankly about drama within the theatre company and discovered that we had a lot in common. I cracked her up, and she told me stories. We gossiped and shared. That was our deal.

It occurred to me that she might not always have been telling the truth or that she wasn’t very well-balanced, because she seeped the electric hysteria of a person who was stuffed into a body not able to move or respond as quickly as she wished it to, an energy I’ve learned from experience should be read as a flashing yellow light in getting to know a person. But, we were cool, me and Julie. We both proceeded with caution, and eventually got to a point in our friendship where we could talk for hours without stopping; this was miraculous for me during a time when I felt like I must have flushed my personality during a bulimic purge.

During one trip to Br0mley Mountain, while I was puzzling over my almost belligerent reluctance to come out of my shell, Julie said to me, “Kelly, I used to worry about that stuff all the time. But one morning I woke up and realized that I didn’t give a fuck what anyone thought anymore. Everything was way more fun after I stopped giving a fuck.”

I recently discovered that, while I still try to keep a certain amount of integrity intact and take responsibility for the way I treat myself and others, I have stopped giving a fuck what people think. And yeah, everything is way funner.

Someday, maybe I’ll be one of those “together” women who does not drink herself into a stumbling stupor whenever she gets the blues. I’ll wake up with the first alarm, and my morning routine will involve more than rolling out of bed and donning the first unsmelly outfit I find on my floor. I’ll do something like exercise and shower every morning, and I’ll be able to predict what my hair will look from one day to another. Maybe I’ll even wear underwear consistently and my socks will match.

Not today. Nope! I still have some Bushmills left at home to tackle. And like I said, it’s funner this way.

(I'm kidding about tackling the Bushmills.)

~ Last Five Entries ~

My Sister's Wedding - 06.27.06

Meltdown? Who knows? - 05.09.06

You probably won't be surprised to learn there are flies circling me. - 04.23.06

Oh, I'm just kidding. - 04.17.06

Snake Sake - 04.15.06

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BUY JEN'S BOOK! BUY IT! DO IT!

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BUY DEAN'S BOOK, TOO! YOU KNOW YOU WANNA! SERIOUSLY.

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