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Aug. 18th, 2016 11:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
My seventeenth birthday happened to fall on move-in day for the dorms in my final year of high school. I was pretty bummed to spend a birthday moving boxes, and my friend Lee decided to surprise me by showing up to school with a cake. It was something of a conciliatory gesture--the preceding summer had begun with Lee and I making out during a sleepover followed by three months of traveling (literally, I went to France and California, Lee was in Tennessee and Alabama) in different directions. I'd spent my summer full of anticipation, building up a heady infatuation with someone I thought of as a best friend, imagining a senior year of hand-holding and smooches and John Hughes style movie montage coolness. Lee had spent the summer getting a boyfriend. So... you know, cake.
Unfortunately, I never got any of the consolation cake because Lee left it unattended for a moment in the cafeteria and it was mistakenly devoured by a PTA group who happened to be meeting that day. Why they thought a cake reading "Happy Birthday Liz" was for a PTA group...
We spent senior year drifting apart and together, a rising and falling tide pulled mostly by my keenly hurt feelings, the kind you can only have when you are seventeen and a girl leaves you for a boy. My sense of betrayal was perhaps a bit overblown, especially since in the down time between bouts of anguished sadness at my eternal loneliness I actually spent quite a bit of that year smooching other ladies, dating other ladies, and even falling in love with other ladies.
Lee was good at coming up with grand gestures but execution always seemed to falter. At senior prom, Lee tried to convince the DJ to play Le Tigre's Deceptacon so we could have one last dance together. It didn't happen, but I was touched that she tried. Another of her gestures was the creation of a livejournal account, and she urged me to get one too. And that, my friends, is the origin of me journaling on the internet: I did it for a girl. All my early LJ entries are written directly to her, painfully frank as I tried to emote vastly enough that I might impress her with the heavy weight of my emotional commitment (I think these entries probably had the opposite effect).
Anyway, much as I like to think I've come a long way since those days, it is also true that I made this journal for the express and sole purpose of keeping up with Zee and it's entirely likely I will feel like every post is written just for her for a pretty long while. Everything is cyclical I guess.
Unfortunately, I never got any of the consolation cake because Lee left it unattended for a moment in the cafeteria and it was mistakenly devoured by a PTA group who happened to be meeting that day. Why they thought a cake reading "Happy Birthday Liz" was for a PTA group...
We spent senior year drifting apart and together, a rising and falling tide pulled mostly by my keenly hurt feelings, the kind you can only have when you are seventeen and a girl leaves you for a boy. My sense of betrayal was perhaps a bit overblown, especially since in the down time between bouts of anguished sadness at my eternal loneliness I actually spent quite a bit of that year smooching other ladies, dating other ladies, and even falling in love with other ladies.
Lee was good at coming up with grand gestures but execution always seemed to falter. At senior prom, Lee tried to convince the DJ to play Le Tigre's Deceptacon so we could have one last dance together. It didn't happen, but I was touched that she tried. Another of her gestures was the creation of a livejournal account, and she urged me to get one too. And that, my friends, is the origin of me journaling on the internet: I did it for a girl. All my early LJ entries are written directly to her, painfully frank as I tried to emote vastly enough that I might impress her with the heavy weight of my emotional commitment (I think these entries probably had the opposite effect).
Anyway, much as I like to think I've come a long way since those days, it is also true that I made this journal for the express and sole purpose of keeping up with Zee and it's entirely likely I will feel like every post is written just for her for a pretty long while. Everything is cyclical I guess.
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Date: 2016-08-18 04:24 pm (UTC)I love that Le Tigre song. No lie, one of my favorite moments from your wedding was when that Le Tigre song played and everyone seemed to know it and want to sing and dance along. I guess I don't often find myself in crowds where Le Tigre is a real crowd-pleaser and a sing-a-long jam? It was great, and you're great.