I don't know if it is possible for me to convey to you just how bizarre last night was for me.
I guess I need to explain some background stuff before I go on...
My senior year of high school, my friend Christian introduced me to a friend of his named Sal. Sal and I hit it off pretty well and ended up dating for a little while. I was still kind of fucked up from one of many Aaron fiascos, and Sal and I ended up sleeping together way too fast and things sort of fell apart from there. He wasn't really my biggest problem, though, so I brushed it off and it wasn't a cause of much concern.
That is, until this past December; Christian called me and told me that Sal had gone off to Southern Miss and came out of the closet. Christian made a big deal about the fact that Sal had only slept with me to keep his friends in the dark about his sexuality, and to top things off, I was the only girl he ever slept with. So around Christian and a few of his friends, I became the butt of countless jokes about my ability to "turn" guys. Funny, right? Not so much. But again, I moved on. And okay, to be perfectly honest, it wasn't that much a surprise.
So Christian is in the Marines now, and he's stationed in North Carolina, but he's home in New Orleans for 6 days, and last night he gave me a call and told me to come join him and some friends for drinks. And it just figures that Sal was there.
So we made polite conversation, but he never made any mention of his dating life. We laughed about some of the things that went on back in high school, etc etc... not much worth mentioning.
So a few hours later, I announce that I'm leaving, and Christian asks me to drive him home. So I say okay and walk out to my car while Christian tells some more people goodbye, and Sal follows me out to my car. He tells me about some party that I should go to on Tuesday night, so I ask him if he still has my number and he says yes. I give him the routine "nice seeing you again" and kiss on the cheek, and I get in my car to wait for Christian.
Here's where the craziness begins... Sal hops into the passenger seat and kisses me. So needless to say, I'm confused, and I stare at him with a fairly odd look on my face. It probably would have been impolite of me to blurt out, "Aren't you gay now?" so when he asks what's wrong, I just shrug and let him kiss me again.
So Christian finally comes outside and walks to Sal's car to get his backpack out of it, and walks back to my car. The first words out of my mouth, of course, are "You told me he was gay!"
And Christian, nonchalant as ever, shrugs and tells me, "He was... but then he started dating some girl for a few months, and I guess he's doing the whole bisexual thing from now on."
This is how boring my life is when I don't have school and have the day off of work: I have been watching reruns of TV shows that I've seen a thousand times already and eating maraschino cherries out of the jar.
There are tons of college kids in New Orleans right now, and quite a few popular college bars in uptown and downtown New Orleans. But I somehow manage to run into Aaron every time I go out. What is that?
That aside, I had a really great time last night. After bar-hopping for a while, Bryan called me and told me that a few of our friends had gotten together to hang out and do some drinking at a downtown penthouse overlooking the Riverwalk. Waking up to that view this morning was incredible. One day, I will live somewhere like that.
I've been spending most of my time lately trying to pretend that my GPA isn't suffering terribly. More on that later, I guess.
My favorite episode of Seinfeld is on right now - The Limo, the one where Jerry and George take someone's limo from the airport and assume false identities for the whole night, then end up at a neo-Nazi convention. After we saw this episode for the first time, Elise and I called SeanO and SeanM Nazis for the longest time, and thought it was just the funniest thing. Yeah, we're big dorks.
So, you want to know what I did while I was in Grand Isle, Middle of Nowhere, Louisiana. I'll tell you - during the day, we watched a lot of basketball games and The Inferno reruns. We played beach volleyball on the not-so-beautiful beach. I got a tan. We slept in late. We had a bonfire one night. We played a few very absurd drinking games. We got way too drunk the last night. All in all, it was a nice way to recover from finals week.
It has occurred to me that I refer to two different Nicks on a regular basis but never distinguish between the two. Let's distinguish, shall we? Nick B lives with Jacob (the redhead) and Lyle. He came to Panama City with us on Spring Break, he has an adorable girlfriend named Leigh, and he has kicked my ass at poker. Nick H is the Nick I made references to last summer, for those of you who kept up with my life in the diary-x days. We sort of had a thing going on for a while, which I subsequently screwed up. He lived in my dorm, and he came with us to Grand Isle.
So now you know.
It is shaping up to be a very long, very boring summer. I cannot wait to move into my new apartment and get back to LSU life.
Well, that was an interesting little breakdown yesterday morning. I'm fine now, really. I'm off to take a biology final, and then I won't be back until Wednesday. Have a good weekend, everyone.
Senior year of high school, when Natalia and I were in the habit of going out together three and four times a week, people at school would call us Romy and Michelle. Once someone asked us which one of us was which, and we both shrugged, because we had never really thought about it. Then Natalia said, "Well, Nicole is smarter than me. She would be whichever one knew the chemical formula for glue."
A few minutes ago, I was sitting outside, staring at the cigarette in my hand and hating myself for smoking it, and thinking about those nicknames, and it occurred to me that back then, I was a really happy person. I went through some rough times during the junior year Sacred Heart fiasco, but after I had transferred and settled in I was really happy through the rest of high school and graduation and that summer and even a lot of fall semester.
These days I've been finding more and more that I've been resorting to self-destructive behavior to feel like that girl again. I drink way too much for my own good, just so that I can laugh and joke around and kiss too many people. I hop in bed with Aaron whenever the opportunity presents itself even though I know deep down that I'm just complicating things for myself. I take too much Adderall that I bought from some guy I met out on the patio while I was smoking. I buy a lot of clothes that I can't afford. I let Brad talk me into taking ecstasy with him a few times. I tell stories about all of these things and laugh about them and act like I'm really enjoying myself.
I've been thinking a lot lately about the fact that I am not at all the person that I thought I would ever be. My grades are suffering to the point that if I don't do something drastic I probably will not get into med school, and do I really want to go to med school, anyway? Of course I do, but if one shitty semester can turn me into this person that I am now, I don't want to know what that kind of stress will do to me.
Aaron went out drinking last night to celebrate being finished with finals, and when he got home he told me that he really wanted to sleep with me, but couldn't because his conscience was telling him not to use me anymore. I don't really know what I'm supposed to think of that. I hate that I'm still hung up on him and I hate that I get jealous when I see him talk to other girls at bars and I hate that I know him well enough to not be able to blame him for any of it, because he really isn't one of those asshole guys. So I have all of this misplaced anger that I'm directing at myself for being such a sappy bitch, because I always thought that I would turn out to be a more independent and confident girl. And I have been independent and confident with everyone except for him, and I don't understand that at all and I don't think that I ever will.
Everything has been messy lately. Couples that I know are fighting, Lyle and SeanM had a big issue about a girl they've both dated, SeanO left town for Air Force basic training, even Natalia is depressed about some guy. Brad and I aren't on speaking terms right now, but that is an entirely different story that I can't bring myself to discuss. A large majority of my friends are staying in Baton Rouge for the summer while I'm going home to New Orleans and I hate that we're going to drift in the next few months.
I don't want to get out of bed, and I don't want to go get my birth control shot today, and I don't want to take my biology final tomorrow.
After I've finished moving out of the dorm, I'm going to Grand Isle for four days with some of Nick's friends. Of course I'll be drinking a lot, which actually worries me more and more these days, but hopefully after that I'll feel back to normal again.
The finals countdown as of right now: 4 down, 2 to go, and only 10 milligrams of Adderall consumed in the process (so far). I have a lot of studying to do right now, so I'm just going to leave you with this picture and a little story to go along with it.
SeanM's birthday was about a week before Spring Break, and the boys had a party at LyleJacob&Nick's apartment to celebrate. That is Lyle in the picture, incidentally. This was a few days before my appointment to get blonde highlights put in my hair, so I wore my Redheads Have More Fun t-shirt for the last time. I drank quite a bit of Bacardi, made quite a few drunken phone calls, and wound up passing out rather early in the night. Anyway, the guys have a lot of parties at their place, so naturally, their furniture is kind of torn up as a result. Their couch got the worst of it - the entire back is completely gone now. So what would be the back of the couch is pushed up against the fireplace and the snake's tanks, and there's a crevice between what's left of the couch and the wall. I must have had more to drink than I thought I had, because I decided that that would be the perfect place to pass out. The next day, I woke up covered in the dust that had been collecting in there over the past few months.
Anyway, Amanda has a webshots album of pictures from various parties throughout the semester, and she added this picture with the following caption:
"Drunks! I swear... some people just drink too damn much...pshh! Redheads pass out first."
You know you've had a rough night when you wake up with a hangover and a guy in your bed and can't remember how he got there. And then you look at his face and realize that it is Aaron and think that maybe the night was even crazier than you thought.
I have told myself many, many times since spring break that I am not going to let anything more happen with Sean M. That night in Florida was very strange and very out of character for us, but I forgave myself for it because we'd each had about half a case of Bud Light that night and thats the sort of thing that's supposed to happen on spring break anyway and hey, at least I drew the line somewhere and didn't sleep with him. Blame it on the sand and the ocean and the alcohol and put it in the past, right?
But somehow I have let drunken makeout sessions and okay maybe sometimes more than makeout sessions become something of a habit for us, and it really should stop, because we are friends and he is sort of an acquaintance of Aaron's and the whole situation is just weird. He isn't really all that cute and he has that goofy curly hair and he's an inch shorter than me, which I hate more than you can possibly comprehend, and he is absolutely the least photogenic person ever, and he's Sean for godsake, the Sean that I met when I was twelve and he lived around the corner from Elise. This whole situation is just all kinds of bizarre.
The night after that night in Florida, though, we were laying on the beach and he put his hand on my back, and my skin started to heat up and my heart started to race a little bit, as if my body had learned to respond to his touch, and that should not have happened. And he wears this really incredible cologne, though, so everytime I get within a few feet of him, I am like on of those girls in the Axe commercials. And he is a really really good kisser, like one of the best out of the over 70 boys I have ever kissed, which I cannot believe I just admitted. And before I know what's going on, he has me pressed against the wall outside of SeanO's apartment and things start to take off from there.
And when we are sober, everything is one hundred percent normal - we've always had a pretty cool friendship, the kind where we sarcastically pick on each other and argue about anything and everything and have a great time doing it. He plays the guitar really well and loves to sing Beatles songs, and his recent obsession with Queen's music is a constant source of entertainment, and he calls me "Redness" even though I am mostly blonde again at this point. Nothing is awkward, but we don't touch each other either.
Yet another reason why I should probably cut back on the drinking but also probably won't.
nicole: 19-year-old LSU sophomore. biochemistry, pre-med. native new orleanian. starbucks barista. borderline alcoholic. addicted to facebook, red bull and vodka, and college football. a little neurotic, extremely indecisive, and often irresponsible.
The finals countdown as of right now: 4 down, 2 to go, and only 10 milligrams of Adderall consumed in the process (so far). I have a lot of studying to do right now, so I'm just going to leave you with this picture and a little story to go along with it.
