June 1–30, 2004 — My buddy

This month I am decentralizing my ceaseless complaining and targeted self-pity. (The targeted type is different because it’s self-pity I hide except for when someone is around to watch. Often I’ll go an entire day feeling just fine about life, my friends, work and everything else, but I’ll get on the phone with a receptive audience and feel the need to sound tortured. I pretend I’m suffering through every day wondering if maybe I could have made a different decision one or three or seven years ago that would have made me happier today, that would have put me in a different city with different friends, in love with a girl who loves me back and sharing a basement apartment with her. When really I only think about that maybe once a month. I throw myself into self-pity to get others to feel sorry for me, so there’s no point in doing it when no one’s listening.)

Which is okay, I guess. I think a lot of people do it sometimes; it’s important to make life seem more difficult than it really is so as not to have people tell you that there are others much worse off than you. I’ve always hated hearing that. I want to be the person in my group of friends that no one wants to trade lives with. I think it’s important.

That said, I’ve made the mistake recently of concentrating it too much on one person. And so she just ends up thinking that I’m suicidal and horribly depressed all the time, when really it’s just that I don’t talk to anyone else, and if I don’t propagate an image of dissatisfaction through her, people might think I’m doing alright, and that’s the last thing I want.

Also, I think people are catching on. It’s not a mystique anymore — always leaving parties alone just after midnight, always seeming to have something eating away at me. She even told me that some people think I don’t have a mystique at all, that I just seem depressed. I really don’t know what to do. I still need to have my 30 minutes of self-pity every day, but too much is going through one person.

So I must decentralize. If I begin talking to people in different social circles, I can pick and choose between who I want to have feel sorry for me on a given day. Then I won’t really have to change anything in my daily schedule aside from rotating through different phone numbers to make sure that no one hears me complain too often: enough to think I’m suffering, not so much that it becomes routine. It’s like only wearing your favourite shirt once a month and making sure that you don’t wear it to a party or show more than once every three months. (I think that’s important, too.)

I already have two or three people lined up to listen to me complain, and I think this will be better. I’ll hear a different person telling me that this too will pass, that it will all be better soon. And maybe they’ll have female friends that they will try to set me up with out of pity.

I really think it could happen.

Actually, I think I just need a pity rebound relationship. That’s all. I’ll be fine after that. Maybe I’ve lost my mystique. Maybe no one has any respect for me. Maybe people are catching on. But pity: It will still be there because even people who try to get attention by pretending to be worse off than they actually are deserve pity.

Now to find a cute girl to pity me. But not too cute, and not good to me, because then my constant griping would be that much less plausible. If I seemed happy, I really don’t know how I would get girls.

I forget where I was going with this. Maybe nowhere.

But there has to be someone I can call.