Please leave now if you feel well-adjusted.

[Insert emotional quote about the meaning of life and your purpose in this world here]

Are you there, God? It’s me, Anxiety.

I honestly have no idea how to blog, but it seems like less of a waste of paper than writing my letters has been, and less like a mental patient than the journals I attempted to keep. Also, I can’t afford to keep buying those, because college has ruined my financial situation more than my bad spending habits ever will. So please be gentle, this is my first time.

Let’s start with what I find upsetting today. By that I mean we’ll do specifics, because I tend to find everything mildly upsetting and I don’t have the energy to work through that shit right now. The first stop for today’s struggle bus is, drum roll please, a girl. (Small insert here: I’m a chick that digs chicks more frequently than I dig guys; if you happen to be homophobic please feel free to hop in a nice, soothing bath with bubbles and a plugged in toaster. I’d apologize for being rude but I’m fresh out of fucks for today.) So, I’ve got a thing for this American girl, Mia, who works a lot but happens to play games a lot more. To be fair, I don’t think she’s playing games intentionally, I think that’s more a casualty of being American. (Second side comment: I attended high school in the Netherlands while living in Germany, and currently attend college in America, so the majority of my learned social skills NO LONGER FUCKING APPLY. SURPRISE.) I’d like to take a moment to address that, because someone fucking needs to. Apparently in this country, it’s socially acceptable to, when not interested in a particular human, cut off any and all interaction with no explanations or closure for the aforementioned human, with no regard to the psychological issues that will run rampant as a result. It appears as though this country lacks basic communication skills and basic human decency, which, let me tell you, seriously sucks for anyone living here that wasn’t raised here, because none of us have any idea what the fuck is going on 99% of the time. Weirdly, ‘ghosting’ is perfectly fine, and oftentimes expected, here, whereas literally anywhere else, that makes you a dick.

Now, how does this relate to Mia? I’m fairly certain you can guess where this is going. I was ghosted (kind of). We went on one date, which went fucking great (and no that wasn’t sarcastic, it was actually lit), and she agreed to go on a second one when I asked her, but about a week after the ask for the second, radio silence.

To preface this whole deal, she’s been through some shit recently and is still dealing with the fallout from it all, which, trust me, I get. I left Germany for a reason, but we’re not gonna talk about that right now, because that’s its own set of emotional trauma. Now, said fallout is still making her life complicated, and I’ve become collateral damage, and therefore was almost ghosted but not quite. Either way, NOT OKAY. Who the fuck does this? Why? How hard is it to USE YOUR WORDS? I can answer that: not very. And yet, we have a whole society of individuals who are incapable of doing just that, and it’s one of the worst things I’ve experienced to date. To make things twice as bad, my American friends kept telling me to ‘do what I would normally do’, not accounting for the fact that I’ve literally never been in this situation before, so I have no pre-existing knowledge of what to do in this situation, and therefore I’m fucking lost. What are the rules????? Spoiler alert: there aren’t any. Anyone can do anything (or anyone) and consequences other than chlamydia appear to exist.

In America, even the people not playing games are playing fucking games. Welcome to my world as a casualty or this shiznit. She’s said that everything in her life is complicated, and if I’m gonna be brutally honest, which I am because that’s what this is for, I’d say she’s creating her own goddamn problems. I say this because when I came to America, I said to myself, “I’m going to be simple, straightforward, and not get into messy shit. I’m going to be drama-free,” and that’s exactly what I fucking did. I’ve been here for almost two years, had sex with multiple people, been on dates and had one-night stands, and I don’t have any of the problems I’m seeing in other people’s lives. It can be done. It’s not even that fucking hard. And yet, Americans act like you’ve asked them to do the impossible.

“Living life without bullshit????? Whattttttttttt? Bitch where????”

FIX YOUR SHIT. GET OVER YOURSELVES. IT’S TIME. EVERYONE ELSE HAS FIGURED IT OUT, AND YOU ARE THE ONLY ONES STILL ON THE SOCIAL SHORT BUS. FUCK.

Let’s see what else is bothering me today. Oh yeah, Dr. Carson. Carson is the band director here at Coe College, and let me tell you, he’s an experience. I’m a percussionist (one of 11 chilling in the back at rehearsals) and we are the concert band’s dancing monkeys. We’ve created drinking games centered around this man and the dumb shit he does and says. The games are half the reason I even attend rehearsal, and the other half is that I’m already intoxicated by the time rehearsal rolls around. Rehearsal runs at 4 PM on Mondays. That’s the level I’m currently functioning at.

Steele