yeah so i WAS really tired....but i guess i just had to get past that threshold. now of course i'm wide awake so i've started drinking and eating vinegar chips....taste real good with a beer : )

either way, i finally registered for one of those online poker casinos, and i'm actually winning. funny how that happens. they boast of an entirely random shuffler, so perhaps my bad luck doesn't come through. eric played it and apparently his GOOD luck doesn't show through either : ) heh heh. but yeah, every once in a while you get these guys who know they're not playing with real money so they jsut fuck up the game. luckily there's usually like, twenty tables going at once, so you just gotta stand up and go find a real game. there's almost always people who are honest somewhere.

since i'm still awake and have half a beer left, i guess i'll start my discussion about ghosts that i alluded to. i suppose brevity would be a good thing, but i've never been good at that. i'll try my best nonetheless ; )

hmm...i guess i'll start from the beginning. when i was in kindergarten, there was this girl, the first girl i actually kissed on the lips actually (pimp, oh yeah..). it was really nothing, just a cutesy, kindergarten kiss. it was affectionate though, we were really good friends and always 'flirting', not that we knew what that was back then. we'd tease and tickle and whatnot, blah blah. she was also the smartest girl in the class (i was always a geek, so that was hot) and even at that age, and even though all the other girls had cooties....i really liked this girl....very weird. even weirder: the NEXT YEAR (we ddin't really hang out outside of school, so summertime we didn't see eachother), apparently we'd grown up a lot over the summer and despite going to school with the girl for six more years, i barely talked to her. i feel like in those short three months, we both realized what a weird situation we'd gotten ourselves into. i remember so little of it besides the feeling....but i remember that quite well unfortunately. the very thought or sight of her made me so uncomfortable, so soon after the year before, when COOTIES probably should've kept us throwing mud balls at eachother....i never understood it...
i saw her YEARS later (our mothers are friends) at a craft fair (me and my mom were selling our pottery) and didn't know what to say...i could tell, and so could she, that we both remembered. she will forever be a ghost. even if i ever caught up with her again, that child inside me would probably recede into my little cave of emotional avoidance...

k, this would take a while if i went through EVERY ghost, so i'll save you the novel. basically, what i realize about myself is that time apart from people i once called friends at some point usually has very adverse effects. for one thing, i change a lot. i used to think of myself as a rather static person, but not so much anymore. granted i have many fundamental philosophies that will always be with me, but the variables are the ones i tend to test and shift and calibrate often...it's weird. for example, the obvious example, when i was in elementary school, i was an absolute geek. i never went out 'till like sixth grade when i finally found friends near me. before that i always had one or two good friends, and that was it. i wasn't that geeky kid with glasses that everyone picked on though....somehow i got a lotta respect from my peers (still don't understand that either). i just had to let them in....

high school was a new start, and i made a conscious decision to change and be more sociable. i was amazed what a simple "hi, i'm jess" could accomplish on the first day of school....i'm still friends with many of those people. but still, high school produced so many more ghosts for me. towards the end, when i was finally getting more comfortable 'letting them in" i befriended SO many people (and so many cute girls)...more than a handful of which told me flat out that they'd wished they'd hung out with me earlier in life....oh the missed opportunities.....and the inflated list of ghosts that i'd JUST started to become friends with...and i left for nyc.

so i came to nyc with a heightened confidence and a little more motivation to explore the world outside my little bubble. i'm still pretty conservative, as most things go, but at the same time, my bubble got a LOT bigger. i actually kind of overshot it and kind of created some sort of weird facade that really isn't me. it's comfortable, on one side, because the facade is of a very verbose, fun lovin', laid back guy who likes to drink and party a lot....
on the other side, i keep remembering when i was that 'smart kid' in high school that was on top of his classes and adored by the women (of course i only heard this second hand, far FAR too late for me to capitalize....). i was so money and i didn't even know it. i was just too stubborn to let anyone in. so i went overboard and now i'm some party fiend. which is fun, mind you, but i don't make the sort of few, extremely close friends anymore. for that i have to find a girlfriend....and that's just no good : ) don't get me wrong, i love all of you. it's just...different for me to spread that love to so many people, and accept what love i get in return. i somehow feel that because of it i've become a very shallow person....

and i also think about how many more ghosts (returning to my point) i'll capture in my own prison. i've already created a handful...there's some i think of more than once EVERYDAY, without fail, and i never see them. and every ghost that pops its head into my consciousness brings with it a stab to the heart....

i don't want anymore ghosts

i want friends.