I blogged, and it's depressing.

Several weeks have passed since my last blog.  Two of my friends and my Mom made sure to remind me of this, in their own unique ways.

   

True to our friendship, Courtney drew attention to my lack of blogging with a simple text message that got right to the point as almost all of our conversations do, void of flowery mush and gush small-talk.  It read: BLOG, NOW.

About a week later, as I’m scrolling through Facebook wasting time I didn’t have, I notice a little red notification box appear over the messages icon.  YAY! Someone wants to distract me in the most efficient and quickest form known to Facebook: an inbox message.  It came from Jeff and it read matter-of-factly: “So don’t you blog anymore?”

I’ve been friends with Courtney for about 26 years now.  After that many years of friendship, you can tell each other white lies without running the risk of offending the other.  Example: Telling each other that making wedding boards on Pinterest isn’t weird in an effort to convince each other we aren’t weird….even when we both know the whole thing is weird.  So, I chose to respond by promising her I’d blog by the end of the weekend, with absolutely no intention of doing so.

I’ve been friends with Jeff for about 26 years now.  After that many years of friendship, you can basically ignore one another if you deem fitting without running the risk of the other even noticing, especially in the case of Jeff.  We can go weeks without talking and not worry about one another; one of the many beauties of being friends with a dude.  So, I chose to not respond at all.  The conversation was essentially over before it began.

     

This past weekend I traveled to Illinois with my parents to celebrate the 2^nd birthday of my nephew, Nile aka “CrocoNile”.  As Nile slept through what could quite possibly have been his first diabetic coma from the cake we enjoyed the night before, my mom and I sat alone in the living room.  She asked me the usual questions to get caught up with the happenings in my life.  How’s school? How’s your health?  What did you think of last week’s episode of Teen Mom?  After we covered all the bases and the room fell silent again, she looked at me quizzically and states, “I noticed you haven’t blogged in a while.”  Like a two year old caught who has just been caught red-handed swiping frosting off a cake when it appeared no one was looking, I had been caught unexpectedly with no way out.  So, I did what any two year old who just got caught and tried, guilty as charged, in the blink of an eye with no time for defense.  I started crying.

Amid a waterfall of tear, short gasps for air, and the pointless, incredibly unattractive efforts to retract the snot that was on the verge of overflowing down my lips and onto my chin, I attempted to explain myself.  If I had an emotional-rant-translator present at the time, he or she probably would have looked at my mom and calmly translated the following information out of my tear fueled stutters: “Mom, I’ve been having a really hard time in Iowa City the past few weeks.  I’m upset at the thought of losing the Sebring and all the memories we have made.  I feel like I don’t have any friends here.  I miss people.  It’s fucking cold outside and impossible to function under incessant amounts of snowfall.  Going to school and having two jobs gets really overwhelming.”  That translator was absent as they always seem to be in moments like these, but I think my Mom still got the point.  I felt as if I had nothing good to write about.  Nothing silly, nothing entertaining, nothing of importance.  Or, as I later explained to Courtney in our straight-to-the-point conversation style: it’s all depressing shit.

    

Backtracking, I’d like to point out that never along this little blog experience have I actually thought that anyone was particularly intrigued by my blonde moments, my senior moments, my crazy thoughts, or the myriad of emotions I experience day-to-day.  Nor do I think anyone will be any more interested in me blogging about not blogging.  Having said that, I have found for reasons yet to be explained that telling others my stories of all the stupid things I do and crazy thoughts I have in bizarre, full-frontal, and often exhaustive detail is oddly therapeutic.

Fast-tracking, it’s now 2:07 a.m. and I have spent a significant amount of time I don’t really have writing this, but I feel better for doing it.  I’m still pretty stressed with school and upcoming midterms but I know it will be over soon, as will my arch nemesis that calls itself winter.  My beloved Sebring did in fact go into a brief coma, but is now recovering peacefully from engine replacement surgery in my parking lot.  I’ve come to the conclusion that as long as I have friends tucked in the mountains of Vail I’ll always miss not having them closer.  And as long as I have friends scattered along the stretch of land that runs alongside Lake Michigan from the skyscrapers of Chicago to Lambeau Field and friends getting weird in Des Moines and everywhere in-between, I’ll always miss them too because they aren’t in Iowa City.  But at least I have friends.  Friends who live in cool places and do cool things.  And friends like Courtney who encourage me to write about the “depressing shit” even when I don’t think it’s important, because as she reminded me, “we know how to make depressing shit interesting.”  Truer words have never been spoken, Courtney.  We make paying rent on time a game, car troubles are a way to make new friends, winter and loneliness are villains we fight together by planning fake vacations and telling stupid jokes about seasonal depression.  Depressing shit has never seemed more interesting.

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