School starting

School is going to start. I decided to come to it with a healthy satisfaction with my own summer and a healthy refusal to be jealous of anybody else's. I decided to say, no matter whether they were in Paris or Africa, they must have been lonely or had lousy times occasionally as well. Because I remember the times I would finally go abroad on a trip and be completely dissatisfied. My trip to Paris when I was 14, I was depressed for the first two days and didn't really like the city, but liked Provence a whole lot better. I claim that I just didn't know to appreciate it back then to vindicate my Paris obsession. (For my birthday in senior year of high school, a friend got me a sign for my door that said I'm in Paris, come back later). Almost all the time, I would be upset about one thing or another when abroad, though. Lonely and embarrassed or uncomfortable because I've only ever traveled with my parents, unhappy in the knowledge that I should and ought to be happy but am not.. I imagined a map of the world with me as a before and after dot to compare how far away I was from the US when I travelled to Ukraine and to dramatize that I had never been there, but like I settle into losing things I really care about, I got blase about being in a place I never visited before. I got used to Thailand, Italy, Germany this way and then when I come back, I dream about going to Europe for months. My mom says this is because I'm never satisfied about where I am in the present moment and never will be (this is her cop out when I complained to her about Sarah Lawrence as if I'm trying to place responsibility on her), while I try to remind her that I have been happy before. When I told her that everybody complains about Sarah Lawrence, she says that it's our "artistic temperament" that makes us dissatisfied with everything. When I wanted to transfer, I would watch how people would say that they were much happier in other colleges. As far as whining about wanting to go abroad alone, my mom's first reaction is to cut responsibility from it with "We're not stopping you." Yeah, but fuck all are you helping.

But then I went on the facebook. The place I learn what normal people do or would like others to believe they do. And of course I'm jealous of the people that went to Africa and Buenos Aires and want to pretend that their parents funded it all or to ignore the friends that come back all transformed from abroad. I won't even bother asking them how it was. The American tradition is to either say 'fine' or to give a partial answer that I can't bother waiting to puzzle out in their later passing remarks and stories. I get overwhelmed enough when I think someone sincerely wants to know how I passed the time and am meanwhile trying to remember all the details myself. It's weird, the in between path is bad, the full revelation is exhausting even though I have to chronicle a trip I took for myself in full, and the 'fine' is a big fuck you. If they say fine, I am not going to juggle around for the appropriate questions to get them to spill it. Saying instead of how was your summer, 'What did you do this summer,' (every week of all three months, I mean), 'What things in consecutive order did you do every day of this summer,' I have no time to figure out how to rephrase these questions while they get annoyed. I'll probably just write them off for a while. I don't know how to seek an empathetic middle ground where I don't try to see their humanity by saying that they must have had tough times too or enviously make them out to be something more than human, a smiling, travelling, simple person, the kind that according to my mom don't go to my school. Plus ignoring them with an "I bet the change that took place in you your junior year abroad is so overwhelming that I don't even want to hear all or half of it, or to talk to your modest ass until you get in the depressed Sarah Lawrence rut and forget you were ever enviable" is pretty stupid anyway.

I'm reading The Bell Jar right now because I never have and I think I'm starting to sound like Sylvia Plath's main character. I thought it was supposed to be dark and kind of forbidden like Go Ask Alice. What strikes me is all the antiquated expressions (gosh!, I can't think of any, but so weird to think that Sylvia Plath thought or talked like this, you'd think her cosmopolitan and Bloomsbury) and ideas, the lack of options girls of the time had. The amount of miscommunications in the book could make it a tragic situation comedy. The things that the girl leaves off saying and explaining, shite psychiatrists that give her shock treatments for no apparent reason, a mother and other people that have no idea of what's going on in her head. Tragic dramatic irony. And the dumbass things that supposedly intelligent people or the misguided adults in the book say. I could never picture rich, college educated girls in wild New York waiting to be scooped up by a career man or someone who hates the idea of marriage to have a broodful of kids and a husband as a back up plan in the whole book, typists, shorthand...