Happy FEST day, kids!

I am coming to you LIVE from the DePaul student center! I am a crew member and I am currently on duty right now. It is currently 7:46PM, and Brian, my boss, just let us know over the radio that if we pegged 7:42 for the first arrest of the night, we are the winner. He also just announced he’ll be staying by the east entrance, so I should have a good amount of time to type this out on the computer that’s labelled, “SC [Student Center] Use ONLY. No Web Browsing or Homework!” Oh well, what Joe doesn’t know won’t hurt him. I’m going to be done with school on the 9th, anyway. I don’t care if he fires me at this point. I’m out of here.

Okay, so, back to the story from last night. So like I had said, Buck* had just become a part of the CCM community in the second half of spring quarter freshman year, so she was relatively new. I think it was Sophomore year that she began to hang out late at night with a group of people from in there, like Ben and Andrew and Piere* (Ere/Air* for short) and some others, I’m not 100% sure who at this point in time. If I could change another thing, I wouldn’t change that she had spent time with them, but that I would have joined them. I think she might have invited me once, but I never went with them, probably because they mostly just went to Devil Dawgs which I couldn’t go to considering I was newly vegan. I think she did want me there, because at that point, as I said, she and I were each other’s best friend. I feel, though, that not being included in this part of her life made it simpler for her to divorce herself from me completely later on. Sophomore year was still pretty good otherwise, though.

One night, the Devil Dawgs gang was hanging out extra late, so Buck* asked everyone in the group if someone could put her up for the night. They all ignored her as though they hadn’t seen her message. How kind. I had to work that night, but I told her if she could wait until I got off then I could put her up at my place. I sent a group message to my roommates and two of them said they’d be fine with it. The third (the second random roommate, if you remember the story from before) never responded. Well, Buck* needed a place to stay, so I figured it would be best to just ask for forgiveness later if it upset her. So once I got off at 1AM Buck* and I walked to McCabe and I signed her in and we went upstairs and I put her up on the couch before going to my own bed. Before I fell asleep, the third roommate comes barreling in, her two friends in tow. All of them obnoxiously drunk. They were very loud and I had to move Buck* to my room due to their unannounced visit. I had to have her sleep on top of the covers of my other roommate’s bed. What got me is that she hadn’t even tried to let us know that they were all coming even though we had put that in our roommate rules. So essentially my having roommates made it much more difficult to host people because I couldn’t trust that everyone would stick to the rules we all agreed on. However, remember how I told you yesterday that Drisella* had her own room in Clifton-Fullerton again?

Well. Buck* actually ended up getting a job as a regular crew member, so she needed a place to stay. Since I had introduced her to Drisella*, they made plans that Buck* could stay with Drisella* on the regular, because Drisella* had no roommates to worry about notifying. By nature of this regular time spent together, the pair of them became very close to each other, and I realized only too late that they had become closer to each other than to me, though I suppose this may be partially my fault because Winter quarter that year was by far my worst academically because of a mix of orgo (word of advice: unless you are 110% sure and dead-set on becoming a medical doctor or a chemist, do NOT take organic chemistry! This is coming from someone who thought gen chem was easy- orgo exists to kill your spirit.) and my entry into the world of netflix, which I binged to my heart’s content. I spent most of my time in my dorm room watching The Secret Life of the American Teenager and Once Upon a Time, the latter of which became and continues to be my new obsession.

It was also around this time that we really met Hele*. I distinctly remember we had met her before, but I don’t truly remember her before the day I think Justice* brought her to the epiphany party. Justice* walked ahead with Drisella* and Buck*, and I followed with Hele*. I remember this moment distinctly. I said, “So how have you been?” and she looked me right in the face and sheepishly said, “Do you even remember my name?” and I was very taken aback by this. I think it is something of an unspoken rule that you do not ask this to people who sort of know you, especially if they’re being friendly, because we’ve all been there where you forget someone’s name, and we all do the same thing: we wait until someone else says their name, and then we make a point to remember after that so we don’t have another near miss, and if we’re the one whose name was forgotten we politely ignore it until they learn your name. In my case, I even let a girl who lived down the street from me call me Erica for years, though this was in part because I thought it was funny (sorry Jenna, haha). But no. It’s not even like Hele* had some very traditional foreign name to be proud of- she has the name of an old white lady, Helen*. She called me out anyway. I was embarrassed. I thought it was Melissa or something, but it turned out I had it mixed up with some other average looking white girl. Nonetheless, she spoke with me at the party as well as Buck* and Drisella*. She began to hang around CCM a lot more despite the fact she’s very much against Catholicism, which I would come to learn the following year. We all got to know her just a little bit better during that time, and she even came on Women’s Retreat, which was now a camping retreat like the men’s.

However, the closer she became to Buck* and Drisella*, the more she came to annoy them. See, Helen* was the type who liked to kiss and tell, and she wanted to have relationships with other girls who relished in gossip, too. Buck*, Drisella*, and I aren’t really like that, at least not on the same level she wanted to be on, because it was a bit more of a wannabe thing for her, though she seemed to have a “fake it ’til you make it” mindset. At that time, Buck*, Drisella*, and I weren’t really into that. I, for one, am demi-asexual, and I subscribe to a certain Catholic way of being which dictates that love should be grown organically from a friendship, not forced out of infatuation, so any relationship I may come to have will be slow to come and will be a slow-burn because I will really need any man (or woman or person of other gender outside of or in between that binary- I do currently identify as heteromantic but I have never explored this so who knows? Just God) who wants to be romantically involved with me to know my entire heart, and know all of me and know that all of me is what he wants, so that if we do get married I will feel safe allowing him to become one flesh with me and that he would also want to truly be one flesh with me, as God intended for us when he created humankind as we are. Buck* is a bit less intense about it than me, as she is still kinda boy-crazy and does kind of care more about boys who she is infatuated with (any boy who isn’t physically unattractive and is nice to her) than the friends who have been there for her by her side the entire time they’ve known her (I’m a little salty), but she still is pretty Catholic and believes in doing things the Catholic way, which is waiting until marriage to have sex. Drisella*… I think she has a very contorted understanding of relationships should work. I understand that she herself has a mental disability, but her understanding is odd at best and concerningly contorted at worst. She definitely sees potential SOs as objects, and I think even the boyfriend she has now she doesn’t completely see as a person; he’s very quiet. I can’t imagine dating someone who I would not feel comfortable disclosing my sexuality to, yet here she is, having a sexual relationship with a boy who she doesn’t trust enough to disclose her non-heterosexuality to (I’m not going to disclose her sexual identity and forcibly out her, but it stands to be said that she has one which she is afraid to come out about TO HER PARTNER). How romantic. I do not think that a relationship in which you are not fully trusting of the other person should exist. That is just a disaster waiting to happen. But she still does seem to believe in committed relationships. That much cannot be said for Helen*.

Helen* seems to want her life to be like an American high school drama series. Like a soap opera. She wanted to sleep around and kiss and tell and fight and cry and be über passionate (dramatic, in a theater sense) about all of it. As many of us know, that is the sensationalized view of life portrayed by the media, and she was eating it up wherever she could find crumbs of it. So when she caught wind that Drisella* was kindling what might potentially be a romance with another friend of ours, Helen* lunged at this information and practically begged Drisella* to give her all of the juicy details of it, from what Drisella* has told me. This, however, caused some panic for Drisella*, who was not completely sure how she felt yet. She didn’t want it to be a huge deal like Helen* was making it out to be (though I’ve since come to suspect it is also partially because he didn’t fit her image of her knight in shining armor), so she decided against dating him at all. In addition to this, apparently Helen* would constantly ask Buck* where she was hanging out, which Buck* hated. I can understand both sides on this one. On one hand, yeah, I can understand that it would be uncomfortable to have someone wanting to know where you are all of the time. On the other hand, I’ve been there, and Buck* herself has put me into a position of feeling a need to know where she and all of my other friends are because I am being left out. I understand fighting to not be left behind and forgotten, or even worse, being left behind intentionally. I get it. Buck* doesn’t seem to, and neither does Drisella, so near the end of the year I innocuously asked Buck* where she was over facebook messenger and was met with mean backlash by Drisella*, who was manning Buck’s* phone because she was the passenger in the car. She told me that I was bothering them and that Buck* was angry with me for asking. This upset me greatly and I cried, because ouch, all I did was ask where she was and suddenly I am a terrible burden who deserves Drisella’s verbal abuse?

I didn’t. And I don’t. And I feel very stupid for not being able to stop her from putting me in a position of being abused by someone again. As much as she thinks she does, she has no right.

It is the end of the night now. I might work on this a bit tomorrow while I’m working at 826. Come visit, if you’re so inclined. All proceeds go back into the non-profit tutoring program to keep it free, so you’ll be doing a good deed by buying the taco-printed socks you’ve always wanted, you saucy millennial. Until then, keep it real kids. You don’t have to sugarcoat the truth, but it doesn’t have to be cold and hard, either. Be kind. Use “I” statements. Love one another.

A demain,

Cara