Sunday, November 21, 2010

The non-alcoholic hangover

I guess one way to describe feeling depressed is like a hangover. Maybe I should stick with the positives.

Since I was a teenager, I've kept a cultural connection and friendship with these Latin American girls. I developed feelings for one of them, and now I am just close friends with her. I keep close friendships with all of them, a relationship enabled by the joys of facebook, MSN and Skype. I guess you could say (here I sound like a loser) that I invested a lot of myself online, in friendships like these. I should probably focus more on my 'IRL' avatar.

Anyway, yesterday, I went out with two of these girls. They are not the ones I know really well, but they are good friends with them. We met up in Camden, then I wanted to find a restaurant of their country that was supposed to be nearby, it didn't exist. We ventured on to the British Museum (my favourite place) where I made a joke that Aphrodite looked like my ex. Then I made a friend that one guy (who is a boyfriend of one of the latina girls [not in the party]) looked like a certain greek statue, muscular and naked. I can be charming, nice and sweet sometimes. They are nice girls, and it's so nice to just meet up with old friends, since they are new to the country, and the city it was an opportunity to show off my knowledge, and get lost in the city in a way that was non-embarrassing.

I was thinking to myself: if this were any other situation, namely, a date; this would have been a perfect oppurtunity to show myself as a nice guy. Needless to say, I'm not interested in that sort of thing with those girls. In as most sincere a manner as I can say: they are good friends. Maybe I'll use that routine with a future date: walk through whitehall in the evening with no one around, see the gorgeous thames and make jokes and small talk.

Heading home, there was a group of teenagers and two adults who I presume to be parental supervisors. One boy was really rude, he was commenting on the appearance of the other passengers on the tube, and he tried to get some response to me since I was reading, and I replied in a deadpan/friendly way and he saw it wasn't possible to rattle me. I think I was probably a little bit like him when I was younger. I wanted the attention and made a spectacle of myself. I'm really glad that isn't me anymore (well, most of the time). I had half the urge to give him a punch or citizen arrest him. The boy was really rude to some of the female passengers in a totally unacceptable way, and he talked about raping his (presumably step-)sister in a really loud way as she sat next to him. I suppose it was in a way that exposed some kind of 'ironic distance' in the same way that punks and the retro-punk movements exhibited a view of abhorrence not their own.

The thing about ironic distance is that it tries to be clever and cynical. Why not try to be clever and develop rituals and idioms of proper significance, what ever happened to originality? what about the perfection of the stylistic norms and an advancement of the modernist notion of progress and perfection: what ever happened to human advancement? Perhaps that's my dilemma. I'm a modernist in a post-postmodern world. Cynicism is tired, and nothing is left.

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