rock over London. rock on, Chicago.

I just talked to mom and Mar.
Mar is going to Budapest next semester. that’s what you get if you study. you go to Budapest. Mar rules.
whenever mom calls out here, and that’s a lot, I tend to unleash some torrent of complaints about my current standing. kind of like I do here, only with more whining (which is impressive). she tells me if I really want to get out of here, I need to plan; hence the last post. so far, I’ve been dragging ass. all I’ve got as of yesterday is maybe another song or two to add to the list, and that’s not much progress at all.
mom is telling me I should go out and visit Mar in Budapest at the end of her term in the summer. line up another job and quit this one around then, go fuck about in Hungary for a week or two with my sister as my tourguide, and then come back.
I felt a little bit of elation, a little bit of giddiness. how rad would that be? not only would I get a concrete date in my mind as to when I’m going to leave here (school was easier; you graduate at such-and-such time, so you knew what to look forward to) but I’d also get to see some of Europe.
so mom put Mar back on, and I told her what mom had just suggested to me, and she said something to the effect of “well, she’s worried about you.”
that’s the long and short of it. she didn’t say that exactly, and I can’t remember what exactly she said, but that’s the gist.
and I felt just a twang of guilt, and I told her to tell mom I’m fine. I complain a lot, but it’s not that bad. I’m not going to jump off a bridge or anything.
and Mar said, “well, I can tell her that, dude, but you know how she is. and the way you talk out there…” etc.

and that’s when the guilt bus hit me.
I spend an awful lot of time feeling sorry for myself. wishing someone would make it all better, would write this book for me. I wish this, I wish that, I bitch about being out here, I complain about how I don’t like my job, I miss people, I miss my friends, I miss Josh’s horrible songwriting skills, I miss my brother and sister, I miss Alisha, I miss changes in the god damned seasons, and I want someone to map it all out for me so that it’ll be like it once was. truth is, though, it’s never going back to that. Bloomington and the unique assortment of people it brought around me are gone. I’ll never get that same combination again. and even when I had it, I bitched about it most of the time. but… if it’s those things I want, those people I want to be near, then I need to make that change myself. until then, I’m in southeastern fucking California (as a local once put it, “the armpit of the state”). no one keeps me here but me.

I know this, right now. in a week, I’ll be back to posturing, waxing poetic, making vague allusions to better times and framing imaginative ways of saying that I still think about a girl who never really felt the same way that I feel about her.
but for this one moment – 6:39 pm, pacific time, Saturday the 18th – I knew that no one keeps me here but me. and I’m still here. so I’m obviously staying for something.