20

I am.

This birthday makes me want to wear high heels. It makes me want to buy a suitcase that doesn't have hello kitty on it and put on mascara. Watching Mad Men, in combination with this birthday, makes me want to smoke a cigarette at a party and seduce Don from across the room as thick smoke is released from my perfectly pouted red lips.

But, when I fall asleep and dream a strange late-night-snack-induced dream about pizza, eighteen-wheelers and baby seals, my mind will be wiped clean. I will wake up having forgotten that I am a year older. I will go on wearing ballet flats and no make-up and bumbling around proudly sporting cartoon themed luggage.

Dear Margo,

Boys are turned off by girls who cannot control their eyelids.

Dear Ben,

I just want you to be depressed again. Your success and happiness are bringing me down.

Bdelygmia

bdelygmia, n.

1. A litany of abuse-- a series of critical epithets, descriptions, or attributes

"From the very beginning— from the first moment, I may almost say— of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork of disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry."

-Jane Austen, Pride & Prejudice

Your pearly white smile broadens and I am reminded of an equine muzzle. I want to stick a carrot in your mouth so that it might match your hair. Those eyes are like vacuums into which souls and intelligence are sucked, never to escape again. But none of this really matters because I don’t know you at all. He, on the other hand, I do know. Or at least I used to. He is blind to your mulish qualities, but rather finds you appealing like a phlegmatic mail-order doll—after all, you share the same purpose. His booming voice dulls the senses of those within earshot; fortunately you were dulled long before his pedestrian existence intertwined with yours. It must be nice for you to have a reason to straighten your hair in the morning and he a reason to pop his teeth back in.

Navy Blue Converse

Her eyes scanned your body as you walked toward her. Those heavily-mascara’ed brown eyes bulged and froze on navy blue converse clad feet.

“What, are you like, Goth now?”

Your early morning smile faded. You felt small and lonely and… Goth? Wait, you thought, what the fuck does she mean? Then you corrected yourself. What the heck does she mean? You are trying not to curse as much. You have had the mouth of a sailor since elementary school, and one time, this same girl and her suburban cronies denied you the opportunity to play dodge ball because, as they said, you had a potty mouth. At the time, you thought, fuck them. Now you are desperate for them to like you. This whole converse thing really throws a kink in your plans.

You want to run back to the front of the school and see if your mom is still in the car-rider line. Maybe she will take you home so you can change shoes, or even better—let you skip school and go eat Mexican food. You quickly realize this is an absurd fantasy. Not too absurd, though, because on a pretty regular basis you do skip school and your mom does take you out for Mexican food. It is suh-weet. The strange part is you don’t really want to run away. You want to tell this little middle-school biotch that she can shove it up her ass. Converse aren’t Goth. You aren’t Goth.

“No, I’m not. And converse aren’t Goth. Goth kids wear combat boots and dog collars and read anime,” you say.

“Oh, okay. I mean, they are just kind of different,” she says.

“Right,” you say.

From that moment on you realize that being a converse-wearing Goth kid would be so much better than being friends with these ass-holes. You stop wanting to be invited to their farms (the term “farm” is applied loosely, it simply refers to a home built outside of a residential neighborhood, though still located thirty-feet from a residential neighborhood and 1 mile from a large suburban sprawl). You stop laughing at their jokes. You stop passing them notes in Algebra. You start thinking about what you like. You start listening to good music, as provided by The O.C. Mix 1 Soundtrack. You start wearing converse.