Who the hell are all these people?

Other than the celebrities, they're generally my friends and acquaintances. Pretty much everyone gets some kind of alias -- of their choosing, actually, if they're aware that I write this thing -- because if I'm going to use a pen name, it would just be really silly not to let everyone else in my life do the same.

You may notice I don't talk about my family too much. This is because I don't talk to my family too much. I've never had much contact with my father's side of things and my mother's side is uniformly crazeballs, so I avoid them as much as possible. Last year I picked up and moved 2500 miles east without bothering to tell them, which I think gets the point across. They no longer have a mailing address or phone number for me, and since one of them sent me a lengthy nastygram a few months ago, I haven't checked the email address they have either. Suffice it to say that anyone who has ever tried to tell me that "blood is thicker than water" and that I should try to maintain a relationship strictly on the basis that they're family has stopped telling me that the moment they met the family in question.

I may occasionally get into Tales of My Mother, but I have to be in a certain mood to bother. I try not to think about it much these days.

The rest of the people in my life are much more interesting, and generally less aggravating. I don't think I know anyone normal anymore. I also suffer from some bizarre form of Small World Syndrome, where for years everyone I met turned out to have already known other people that I'd met, unbeknownst to me. I managed to meet two people from Las Vegas one semester (at a college which was not in, nor really all that near, Las Vegas), completely independently and in two completely separate contexts, and then found out that their families used to throw drunken Christmas bashes together. Or the time one of my classmates in an anthropology course turned out to coach high school speech and debate with the brother-in-law of a girl with whom I wound up sharing digs not too much later. Oh, and the best man at the wedding of roommate's-sister and roommate's-brother-in-law was a friend of mine from high school -- whose wedding I attended, years ago -- who didn't know the debator at all and had only met the roommate briefly through the bride.

I also solemnly swear that I am not inventing the people I tell stories about, and that the stories are not embellished. Cleaned up a bit, perhaps, and usually with some extraneous detail stripped out for the sake of brevity and flow, but all of these people actually exist -- although some of them I have regrettably lost contact with -- and all of this shit happened. My life is far from sane.

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