I Like Not Having To Sleep Off A Hangover.

Sometimes I’ll be talking as if vomiting, spewing and gesticulating with few pauses and poor enunciation. The way I do anything – move, write, smack – mimics the way I talk, which is absolutely furious. More often that not I end up with my palms turned skyward, or pressed to my knees, panting like some kind of animal. The unfortunate recipient (usually my father, because neither my brother nor my mother can listen to me talk for more than twenty seconds without going EMMA! GOD! THIS IS BORING! and walking away) looks at me with a slight frown, as if admiring a caged chimpanzee. His face is very OKAY, UM, WHAT WAS THE POINT OF THAT MONOLOGUE? but my father is too politically correct to usually say that. He just nods like he’s understood everything and offers to go make us a cup of tea or some couscous.

I don’t talk to my school friends about what really interests me. They don’t give a rat’s ass care about the stream-of-consciousness technique James Joyce used to articulate Molly Bloom’s thoughts in the last chapter of Ulysses, and they are not afraid to tell me so. Nature versus nurture, eugenics, Modernist literature: these topics are shot down with a heavy hand and a voice like an open guitar chord. I didn’t dress up as a slutty nurse this Halloween. I didn’t feel a need to go out and party and drink booze and sleep on the street. I like my bed, okay? Feeding on supermarket alcohol and dancing on folding tables and puking in my neighbor’s hydrangeas does not make me happy. I do not do things that do not make me happy.

The point: I don’t usually talk about what I would like to talk about, so I write about it. And even if I write like I talk, without proper punctuation and with an excessive amount of paltry adjectives, it feels nice to say something to any kind of human receiver, even if they maybe think I’m a little bizarre. That is okay. It is kind of teenage verbal diarrhea, what I am doing here, but I’d like to think that there is a someone and that someone’s screen somewhere and for once that someone would very much like to listen to what I have to say.