The fine line between silly geniuses and clinical insanity

[Jenn coughs]
Jenn: You know how when people sneeze you say "bless you" and when people burp you say "excuse you"?
Me: Yeah...
Jenn: Why doesn't anyone say anything when you cough? I want to know.
[later]
Jenn: Now I'll have to say something whenever I cough, because I made such a big deal of it...
Me: What, did you just cough or something?
Jenn: Yeah. It made me think of it.

[during the quiet car ride]
Jenn: What are you thinkin' about?
Me: I don't know. You've been asking me that all day. Why is that?
Jenn: You always talk.
Me: I was thinking about A Flock of Seagulls. You know, how they all had funny hair. That guy had all his combed over his head and it came to a point in the front? That's what I was thinking about.
Jenn: Sometimes I wonder about us.

zwei.eins

It's a delusion, I am sure: "things used to be better," despite or perhaps because we didn't know it at the time. At our age the good old days could be only a year ago. So much changes between summers, but summers always seem to change everything. "It will be so different..." we always say, anticipating the next school year. And it always is. Better? Worse? Who knows.

Here's one kind of change: When I was a freshman here I marveled at the number of friends I considered myself to have; not all that many, perhaps, but more than I'd ever had at one time before. (I even managed to keep the friends I cared about from high school.) And now the number of people I care about seems so much smaller...due, I think, to physical and emotional distace between me and some of them.

In the emotional cases (except one rather notable one) and even in most that had accompanying phsyical distance, it's been the subtle, gradual knd of distance you don't notice as you're creating it and then one day you think of someone and realize how long it's been since you even thought of them, and then you remember that a year or two or three ago they were as important to you as food and sleep. You wonder what happened...in a detached sort of way, because you really don't miss them anymore. This may surprise or sadden you, but probably not all that much because of the distance that's there. You may think or say "Whatever happened to... I should really get in touch with her again. I never see him anymore." Maybe you actually do something with those good intentions; maybe you don't.

But people get married, people study abroad, people go to colleges far away...or maybe the people you're used to seeing across the hall or sharing a room with just are no longer that close, and that's all it takes.

It happens, everybody knows it. We shake our heads and move on, saying that's life. It'd be immature and pitiful to try to deny that. won't deny it but I am disturbed by it. Sure, people change, but today the changes all sound bad. I've lost some of the people I was close to, it seems, or at least lost that closeness...but it doesn't seem to have been replaced with anything. I don't seem to care about as much, as many things or people or something, as I used to. I don't like that.