It’s ironic that the month I lose all my real life college friends, and then some, I get an invite to Friendster:
“It’s hotter than yam…. cooler than icb. Check it out. How are you? What’s
up? Do you still hang out at the cafe on cole? I was thinking of dropping by
there do some writing.” That’s what a friend wrote on my invite.
March of 2003 began a pattern of losing friends in a negative way that didn’t really stop until 2008.
Writing now, I see that I didn’t support all that killing. I was alienated and alone. I didn’t have anybody to really hang out with during the day.
I was frustrated. I would go to all these cafes and talk to all these people and never really made a connection. I had been back for a year, and didn’t even have a girlfriend. I felt worthless, but seeing things philosophically made me feel invaluable. I felt a toxic combination of self-aggrandizement and self-loathing. If only someone understood me.
All my college friends that I held dear no longer talked to me. They gave me a chance to recant, but I didn’t. Why? Because if I did, it wouldn’t change the alienation that I felt. It wouldn’t change the fact that maybe they weren’t real friends.
In this depressed sort of mood, I took a job that I no longer felt beneath me, working at a copy center making copies of documents and CDs. Let’s face it. I needed the money. I had squandered the year pretending to be a writer and really had nothing to show for it except a few poems and one review of the Yoko Ono exhibit in print.
Looking back, I sort of regret all the idealism. It was misplaced. If instead of pursuing philosophy and poetry, I pursued building the website of my dreams, I would’ve been rich now. But I am pretty sure I would have inherited a different set of problems….
The new, menial job was the kind of place where you got hazed. I got spit in my coffee. They loved playing practical jokes on me. You’d never know that I worked with some of the best coders in the world when I lived in Italy.