Chapters
“Friends”
Before you, the reader, continue any further, I want to make one thing clear: this chapter isn’t me complaining about my friends or trying to instigate anything. The things I’m about to talk about genuinely don’t bother me that much. I’m writing about them because I’ve noticed a pattern with my friendships recently, and I’ve realized many things about myself while thinking about it.
Earlier this week, I saw a group of friends I’ve hung out with before posting stories about a pre-college hangout. It’s pretty obvious who I’m talking about here but I won’t mention any names for everyone’s sake.
When I saw the stories, I wasn’t really sad. It definitely did sting a little bit. And when I say that, I mean like, “Hm, that’s interesting.” The part that stung was that it was a pre-college sendoff hangout and I wasn’t invited. I personally would consider myself relatively close to these friends.
The general pattern I’ve noticed revolves around initiating. After thinking for a bit, I realized that I’ve always been initiating a lot of the hangouts and time spent with my friends. But why?
There are so many different explanations and so many different questions I could ask about this. Is it because of my friends and who they are as individuals? Is it because of some sort of bystander effect? Is it because of me? Is it because I don’t present myself as someone who would be down to hangout? Am I too awkward and weird? These are questions that are so hard to answer because of one simple fact: it’s impossible to know exactly what someone is thinking.
Maybe someday, I’ll find the people who will reciprocate my initiation. I’ve only ever found about five people who have initiated things with me. But for now, I find a lot of peace being “alone”. After all, I have a lot of things I need to do including this silly blog. I probably would’ve said “no” to the group hangout because there were too many people anyways.
It would’ve been nice if someone had thought of me, though.
Day 0: Packing Anxiety / The Cologne Thief
Packing is insanely anxiety-inducing for me. I started packing on Thursday night because I had to pack all my stuff both for college and my trip. I won’t have time to visit my home once I get back from Disney, so I have to pack everything ahead of time.
When it comes to packing, I try to mentally sort out everything I need rather than write down a list of everything that I need. In my mind, I tell myself that since I don’t have many things, I wouldn’t need to create a checklist. However, the moment I start packing things and organizing them into boxes, I start forgetting the small things that I use. These things could be like my hair-dryer, nail clippers, or my La Roche-Posay cleanser.
Then, a sort-of chain-reaction effect happens where I get mad at myself for letting such an obvious item to pack slip out of my mind. After that, I start worrying about what else I might’ve forgotten to pack and it makes me sort of anxious. The anxiety gets so bad that I spend about 10 minutes walking around the entire house before I remember something else that I forgot to pack. The cycle goes on and continues from there on and gets worse.
Thursday night, I was able to pack my entire computer setup and fit almost everything into a singular box for college. I was planning to wash all my clothes across Thursday and Friday so I could have a lot of extra room to work with in terms of time. Recently, I’ve been really stressed about whether or not I have “a lot” of time left to do things. To be clearer, I’ve constantly been stressed about procrastinating, which doesn’t even make sense in the first place. In this case of packing for college and my trip, I was constantly stressed because I only had “two days” to pack everything I had. The simple idea of only having two days, despite those days being plenty enough time to do what I had to do, stressed me out so much. I’ve been seeing myself wanting a lot of time to mentally reset myself to prepare for things and two days is not enough for moments like these. I felt pretty accomplished after packing my entire desk setup, so I decided to sleep early. That way, I could wake up early and then also sleep a lot earlier to wake up with many hours of sleep for my trip.
I woke up on Friday at 8 AM and everything was going according to plan. I had plans to do a final hangout before college in the afternoon and that went well too. During that hangout, I had to buy some travel sized bottles from Target because I only found out the night before that the TSA only allows fluid bottles that are 3.4 fluid ounces or smaller.
I got home around 7 PM and then quickly did one last laundry load before getting ready to pack for my trip. What I severely underestimated, however, was how much space I was given to work with. I only had my backpack and an extremely small carry-on bag to stuff 7 days worth of clothes. Well, more like 9 days of clothes because I always want to be extra extra safe when it comes to trips. I hate when everything is extremely messy and not very organized. Since I didn’t have much space to work with, I had to improvise by stuffing everything between my backpack and the bag, which caused me a lot of unnecessary stress. In fact, it bothered me so much that I couldn’t sleep at all because of how stressed I was. I could barely fit any clothes along with my Dyson Airwrap and everything was so messy. So at the time of writing this, I’m on about 3 hours of sleep and I guess you could say I’m feeling extremely moody and feel the urge to be a little brat. It’s funny because the 9 days worth of clothes was probably the reason I couldn’t stuff all of it into my bags.
That should be the end of this chapter, but there was something that really bothered me while I was packing within those two days. For the past month, someone in my family has been spraying MY cologne everyday before they head to work. Every time I wanted to use it when I went out, I always saw a big chunk of it gone since the last time I used it. They did tell me that if I ran out, they would buy a new bottle for me for free.
Regardless of this fact, I still didn’t like the fact that they were constantly spraying MY cologne. Whenever I looked at how much of the liquid was left, it always made me sad because subconsciously, it made me think how wasteful I was being with my cologne. That part bothered me a lot, so earlier this week, I decided to try to hide my colognes away. When they came into the room and tried to “rob” my cologne, they got angry because the bottles weren’t where they were supposed to be. I’m usually still mid-asleep when my cologne stash gets raided, but I always wake up during the robbery and am usually annoyed. This time, I fell back asleep happy, thinking that my cologne was safe.
Later, I found out that they found my hiding spot and I was sad. Granted, my hiding spot was terrible, but I didn’t think that they would actually be determined to find where it was.
Fast forward to Thursday, the person asks me if I’m going to be bringing my cologne to the trip and I’m INSTANTLY annoyed because I already know their intentions. I ignored the question because I knew what was happening and on Friday, they asked me again and I told them, “No, because you’re the only one who uses it.” They got pissed at me and called me a little cheapskate or something like that and that made my entire mood worse, on top of the packing anxiety that I had from having to pack so many things.
Day 1: To Hell
I woke up with only 1-2 hours of sleep today. I was and still am extremely moody. I was complaining the whole morning and was acting like a complete asshole while everyone in my family just woke up to finish their last-minute packing. Something about seeing my entire family pack last minute gave me so much anxiety and stress, that I kept ranting and complaining about the trip. I was being an extreme nuisance and I couldn’t really stop myself. My whole family was yelling at each other in the morning which pissed me off even more. Oh yeah. On top of all that, one of my favorite pairs of cargos that I recently bought had its top button fall off, which meant that I couldn’t wear it out or bring it on the trip.
Everything until going through TSA was pretty smooth sailing except for a little attitude from me on the car ride. On the airplane blueprint I saw that I was getting the window seat so I was pretty relieved that I wasn’t getting the middle seat.
Yeah, so apparently when your seat is in the last row and in the back of the airplane, there are no windows.
I ended up in the middle seat. It wasn’t that bad but when both people beside me were using the armrest, I had nowhere to hold my head up while trying to sleep. While on the airplane, it felt like time slowed down significantly. Even doomscrolling wasn’t working to pass the time. I had a really moody argument with my mom on the plane to pass the time. It was something about me being extremely moody and ungrateful for the trip. Then, I teared up a little bit because I was acting as such an ungrateful brat and was wishing I could be a little bit more grateful. It was a pretty good emotional reset for me because I was much more locked in after that whole conundrum.
The airport we landed at was so big but empty at the same time. It felt really peaceful being there and wished I could’ve stayed there longer. We went straight to get our rental car and then after that, we went to a local Costco to munch at their delectable food court. We got a new electric toothbrush because my old one broke somehow; two cases of water; a case of protein shakes because the protein shake never stops; and some fruits and snacks to eat during the trip.
After that, we went to pick up my older brother from the airport because he had a later flight than us since it was a last-minute decision for him to join us.
Then, we checked into the place we were staying at. The rooms looked like something that you would see in one of those 1-star motel videos with weird stains all over the place. They call the place a “resort,” but it genuinely looks like suspicious activity goes on here. There are also “inspirational” messages all over the parking lot on signs with heart signs plastered everywhere. And when I say “everywhere,” I mean EVERYWHERE.
The best part when staying at a hotel or whatever is always the free amenities. Unfortunately, all the free amenities were hot ass. They somehow managed to make everything seem as good as possible on their website and deliver the worst possible amenities for their respective advertising. For example, I thought the gym was going to be a fully decked-out area, but it turns out it was just a small, nasty room the size of a dorm room with only five treadmills in it.
We unpacked in our respective rooms and then I started working on the chapters for the blog because I didn’t write anything yet. Everyone else went to take huge naps while I worked on my blog. When everyone woke up, we decided to eat Chick-Fil-A for dinner. I decided to big-back for the first time in maybe a month and ordered a huge chicken sandwich meal with a shake. That meal was soooooo good. Walmart was our last visit before ending the day so we could get a few more snacks and some essentials like sunscreen. I was able to get myself a premium travel hand sanitizer, which I wanted since apparently the hand sanitizer I’ve been using for the past year has been expired for the past 3 years.
Remember not being able to fit my hair dryer into my bags? Well I wish I could’ve pulled some sort of magic trick to bring it with me because I severely overestimated how terrible the average hair dryer in motel rooms is.
I’m pretty sure that’s all for this day, though I find it really common for me to remember something I wanted to mention in my entries after I already posted my journal entry for the week.
Photo(s) Of The Week
Performative Frank 
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