#1

A Reality: I hate my friends.
     I know, if I still call them my friends, it can't be that bad and I'm just being melodramatic. But it's still sort of true. I went to a very small high school (my graduating class was about 50) and so I always knew basically my entire class. That's not to say I was friends with them, but I still knew them. Of course, the smaller class size meant fewer opportunities to meet many new people my age. My personality is such that I can't stand being around the same person all day every day without wanting to kill them. In high school I had several ways of dealing with this: 1) I would kinda rotate through my group of friends, changing who I spent most of my time with. 2) I would get super pissed off at someone and stop talking to them. They usually didn't know why I was suddenly their greatest enemy and I didn't ever have a reason. I just got sick of them. I tended to do this a lot more when I was younger and tended to keep most of my friends when I got older. But this still illustrates my weird lack of regret when I lose a friend. Unfortunately, that has come back to haunt me in college.
    I started off my freshman year determined to meet a lot of people right away and get a bunch of new friends. I figured that all the other freshmen were in the same boat as me and so it would be best to start early. And that's just what I did. I met a girl who lived down the hall from me (it was a coed floor) and we hit it off. We had several classes together and met a bunch more kids. The kids from my classes were like me: studious, not into partying, slightly awkward. It would seem to be a good match. We weren't. One of them I ended up doing the stop talking/hate thing before the end of the semester. That made it awkward to hang out with several of the other people that were friends with her, and the other kids no longer had classes with me after the next semester, so we've lost touch for the most part.
    The girl from my floor, who I'll call Vee, is absolutely nothing like me. She is loud, outgoing, very open about everything, very experienced in many worldly areas. We have very different senses of humor (we usually fail to even crack a smile at links we send each other) and almost no music we both like. There is essentially nothing keeping us friends, except one thing: we are both filled with hate. She and I tend to hate the same people in our classes and most of our conversations over dinner are about them or other people we know and how much they piss us off. We talk a little about other parts of our lives, but she mostly goes to her girl friends to talk about that stuff. We bond over hatred. I think its pretty predictable that that might not be the most sturdy foundation for a friendship. Invariably, one or the both of us will get pissed at the other for some little thing (or just because we're sick of spending so much time together, she's like me with that) and we spend the next couple weeks avoiding each other and acting like we're not mad at each other. In the end, we get enough space and then start spending a lot of time together again. But that's not a good thing. It's so easy to hang out with Vee, but whenever I spend long periods away from her, like Christmas or summer, I realize that just being around her makes me a more negative person. It's like I specifically look for reasons to hate people just so we can bond over it and reinforce that hatred. There's people that I would probably only consider a minor annoyance in other circumstances that I can bitch about for hours with Vee. If I even try to say "Oh, so-and-so's not that bad," she gets super pissed at me for not agreeing with her. Over breaks, I always come back determined to start hanging out with other people, but it never happens. As soon as I see Vee, we fall right back into our usual conversations.
     So why do I spend so much time with Vee? I honestly can't answer that. I can't stand her, but I also couldn't stand to be without her, partially just because there aren't other people to replace her. And that is why I say fuck reality: I hate that I hate my friends. If I could change that I would. I'm not sure if the solution lies in changing my outlook on people, or if I do just need to stop hanging out with Vee. There was another friend I was going to talk about, but I'll save him for another post since this one is long enough already I think. I also realize that this post makes my sound like a very unpleasant person. Hopefully that isn't true. I like to think that I'm not, but then, it's not really your opinion that matters. If people don't think you're fun to be around, you're not a pleasant person. Oh, well. I think for now I'm just using this blog to put my thoughts down. I'll try not to care if I'm coming off as a shallow jerk. Maybe later posts will be better. That's all for now.