why
january 25, 1998, 01:37


The ultimate goal in any college student's life is to do something. It seems to me that the point of having friends, the point of having a core group of people around you, is so that you have people to turn to on a saturday night and say "Let's do something," at which point you all spend the next hour and a half deciding exactly what it is that you're going to do.

But really, I don't always want to go out and do things. Parties rarely excite me any more. What the hell? Any more? They've never excited me. I've been to maybe one or two parties where I actually left and could honestly tell myself that I had fun. Most of the time it's me sitting there thinking about how much more fun this would probably be if i was drunk out of my head, but since the prospect of being completely wasted doesn't really bring a thrill to my existence, I just sit there passively and watch everyone else get trashed while I think about ways of getting out of there without causing a big fuss.

So what is it that I really want? I don't know. I haven't really done a lot of "hanging out" in my time. I mean, there just wasn't time in high school. There was school, and there was the theatre, and other than that, there was nothing. Not until my senior year, when i realized that I had missed out on one of the more exciting aspects of being a high school student did I start to spend time with friends just sitting around in someoneone's basement talking shit until all hours of the morning.

And I guess that's the real problem now. There's nobody around to just talk to. It seems strange, but when people are together, they're silent, or they're talking about what it is that they want to do. They don't just talk about... stuff. There doesn't seem a real need, and, among cs majors, there doesn't seem to be that ability. All that ever happens is a conversation about coding, or perhaps about not having a girlfriend. Anything else quickly degrades into talk of doing "something."

Of course that "something" always turns into getting a movie, getting some food, or venturing over to a party that's the result of some other people trying to figure out what to do and realizing that a party is at least "something."

Not that I've had any real winning moments of conversation recently either, but really, I haven't had the opportunity. The people that I'm around, and the general situations that I am in don't lend themselves very well to just talking.

Heh. Even this. This is my substitute for talking.

I just found something to do.

*sigh*

jcn@brown.edu


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