I am good at a lot of things: wearing sailor suits, making vegetarian meat facsimiles, naming theoretical pets, remembering in which Doctor Who episode various British character actors have appeared, (I hope) writing and putting on shows, for example. But I’m not particularly good at blogging. Most of it is because I’m lazy, and have other things to write and read and do that seem more important and interesting than updating my website. Some of it is that I don’t have a focus, like Christian does when he writes about books he’s read, or any number of people on the internet that like to share information about their personal lives. But, since I read in phases (right now, it’s The Border Trilogy, snippets from my beloved Please Kill Me, and a stack of others I’m itching to get into), and am relatively boring, I don’t always know what to do with this space, or for whom I’m even writing.
The other reason is that, once, I got into an internet fight. When I was a freshman in college, I had a LiveJournal. I don’t have an excuse for that. I spent a lot of time complaining about school, talking about whatever album I was obsessed with that week, and ostensibly keeping in touch with the four or five people from high school who also tracked their adolescent miseries for everyone to see. It was dumb, but so was I.
As the year was drawing to a close, a few Juniors in the program I attended in college wanted to put on a series of one-act plays. At the same time, a classmate of mine, who was a little older that I was, wanted to do something similar with a few things of his own. In an attempt to either appease everyone or make everyone miserable, the director of the program had them share a bill. I was in two of the plays, one in the first half, written and directed by my classmate, and one in the second act, written and directed by my boyfriend at the time.
There was tension. It was a three-against-one situation. The freshman had not been properly introduced. Everyone felt entitled. Bad blood.
At the time, I felt a certain amount of loyalty to my then-boyfriend and his friends, and I didn’t know my classmate that well. We were in a big, frustrating class, full of people on different levels of reading comprehension, cinema knowledge, writing capabilities, and interests who had never really been put together in any workable way. We were also screenwriters at an art school, so everyone had a giant chip embedded deeply about their shoulders. We weren’t really allowed to write yet, and it was making those of us actually interested in doing so anxious and frustrated and combative.
After a particularly irritating play practice, I wrote a little screed on the internet about how I regretted agreeing to do the play with my classmate, and how much I thought he sucked. I believe the phrase “untalented hack” was used. He found it, and responded. I think the phrase “petulant brat” was involved. We became bitter enemies. After the plays ended, we didn’t speak to each other if we could help it. The problem was that we had a lot in common. We were in the same major. We took the same Liberal Arts Classes, and liked the same books, and made the same arguments. We had the same friends.
I can’t quite put my finger on what the impetus was, or when exactly it happened, but sometime in the transition between our junior and senior years, we became friendly, and then drinking buddies (when I was old enough), and then friends. We both came up in Philadelphia in an environment that was more conducive to argument and animosity than it was to collaboration and companionship, but, somehow, we managed to sidestep it eventually.
And now, seven years later, I can’t think of anyone I’d rather kill four mysterious, gin-soaked hours at Uncle’s with than my dear friend, Alejandro Morales.
Alex, and many talented others will be performing in this month’s Second Stories Puts on a Comedy Show on Tuesday.
Tags: Alejandro Morales