Chapter 300: Champion

Before anything else tonight, I just have to take a moment to acknowledge the fact that this is day 300 of the blog. Only 65 days left – just over two months. Insane. I am being completely honest when I say that I am surprised that I managed to make it this far. I mean, I began this project feeling confident that I would carry it all the way to end but, honestly, I have started a lot of different projects in my life that I have felt very confident about to begin with and eventually that confidence fizzled and gave way to a lack of interest or a lack of faith that I would actually complete it, thus cursing myself not to. In this case, on the other hand, that period never came. As a matter of fact, 300 days later, I am actually beginning to think about, and almost kind of dread, the day that this blog ends. Sure, there have been days when I haven’t entirely been in the mood and kind of punked out, (including the introduction of video blogs, which I have done 24 of now,) but at the end of the day it seems like a day isn’t complete without writing this blog. It’s definitely going to be a period of adjustment for the first few days or weeks after the blog ends. I actually sat down with a calendar and figured it all out – the final blog will be on November 5th. It’s just barely September but that still seems like such a short time. It is insane to think about how quickly this past year has gone by – it does not seem at all like it has been 300 days, a whole 10 months, since I started writing this blog. It has been 10 months since I started this story. The funny thing about that is the fact that I still don’t entirely know what the plot of this story has been. I mean, I discussed recently in one of my posts how this has been the story of a boy who lives inside his own head, trying to find a connection in the outside world. As weak as it may sound, even to me, I really hope that this story has a happy ending. I hope this boy manages to find his connection. Of course, he doesn’t have long to do it and he doesn’t really have any leads at this point… or does he?

There is another boy – a perfect boy. Our hero, the boy inside his own head, is trying to reach out to this perfect boy somehow. After all, this is the first boy that the boy has taken any interest in at all since his retreat into his own head. Unfortunately, the perfect boy is also perfectly complicated and impossible to read. Our hero has no idea what this other boy is thinking but he has this feeling – he just KNOWS – that this perfect boy is feeling SOMETHING. He gives off small hints and signals, like he’s got a perfectly beautiful mystery that he wants our hero to solve. Unfortunately, our hero has a tendency to be a little dim-witted, (that’s really an understatement,) and he can’t seem to figure it out. He will, though. I am sure of it. This story will have a happy ending. It’s just got to. I can’t figure out how exactly that will work out but I know that it will. As I have mentioned numerous times in the blog recently, “The Secret” teaches that it is not our place to ask the question of how things will happen. We just have to focus on what we want to happen. So, I will simply wish our hero the best and focus on him finding his happy ending. How that happy ending will come is not important, just that it does come. Of course, the other major factor in this story is the fact that a happy ending to this story doesn’t guarantee a happy ending in life. You see, the end of this story is actually the beginning of countless other stories for our hero – he doesn’t live happily ever after, per se. He goes on living and goes wherever life will take him. The only thing I can truly hope for him is that once he manages to make his connection that he won’t ever retreat into his own head again. There is an entire world out there that is his for the taking. My main hope is that he finds a way to really go out and get his fill of it.

Speaking of our hero trying to make an ascent out of his own head, as with any great climb, it has to be done in individual steps. I decided to take one of those small steps today. You see, I have discussed in the blog recently the fact that I am a lot more interesting and eccentric than I actually let the world see. Don’t get me wrong, what people see is pretty eccentric but I feel like there is a lot of me that I don’t really show off to the world. I used to show it off but at some point I took it all back in and stopped letting it show. The thing is, I am really proud of every part of myself and I feel like I need to let all of my eccentricities show. If I am going to live in the outside world and try to make a connection in the outside world, the first thing I need to do is show myself – all of myself – to the outside world. It’s not that I have ever been afraid of what people will think of me, (after all, my favorite quote is “What other people think about me is none of my business,” thanks to RuPaul.) Not showing every part of myself hasn’t been a matter of being concerned with other people – I have never given in to the limitations that others put on me. It was more a matter of me putting limitations on myself. So, this morning, I took a baby step – I walked out the door this morning with bright red lipstick on. I did a really cool but really over-the-top 1950s suburban housewife sort of look, inspired by Donna Reed, and I was really happy with it. It was pretty over-the-top, though. I had mentioned previously, I think in a video blog, I have always been a little afraid of red lips. The more I thought about it, though, you really only need one thing to pull off a really strong red lip: Confidence. That was the main thing that made me decide to try wearing a red lip out into the world today, and you know what? I think I rocked it! Okay, so I technically only rocked it for the first few hours of the day before it kind of wore off and I was left with just a red-colored stain on my lips… but whatever. I still rocked it. I felt fucking fierce today and I don’t care what anybody has to say about it. From this point forward I am, as Ana Matronic of Scissor Sisters once put it, “letting my freak flag fly.” Fuck the world, I’m doing me.

So, aside from all that, it was a very long day. I’m really tired. Work dragged on today. I didn’t really have to do much of anything today, except sit by and listen as my shadow for the week took calls. I figured it would make for a really laid back day. Unfortunately, I was wrong. We had a few call-ins, so there were only a few people taking calls and all the new people were the ones taking the calls, which takes a little longer than it does for us senior reps. So, we wound up with calls holding for a lot of the day. At least my shadow got some good practice. I also had plans to hang out with Rachel this evening but I decided to cancel them because by the time I got off work I was completely exhausted. I was having one of those evenings where I just felt like coming home, taking off my makeup, putting on my “sleep clothes,” and just lying around doing nothing. So, that is exactly what I did. I got “Gypsy” in the mail from Netflix but I didn’t wind up watching it because my Mom wanted to watch it with me. I just figured we could do it tomorrow night or something. Apparently, her boyfriend will be here tomorrow night and there’s some fucking football game on or something that he has to watch. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind my Mom’s boyfriend, (he’s much better than any of the hot messes she has dealt with in the past,) but the weekends when he comes to our house are always a little… much. I generally wind up spending the entire weekend in my bedroom parked in front of the computer watching Netflix movies, or leaving the house for most of the weekend. I am hoping to do the latter this weekend – I already told my sister that it is time for her to pay up on her promise of taking me to Michael’s to buy me art supplies for my birthday, and also to get my hair cut because she has been the biggest cheerleader for me cutting my hair and is the one who really implanted the idea in my head that I really need to have it done. So, hopefully she’ll follow through on that and I can be away for a good chunk of this weekend. We’ll see how it all plays out, though. I am just looking forward to the weekend. Work is irritating me and this weekend is a four-day one for me. I haven’t quite decided yet but I think I may wind up working on Tuesday that week to make up for the fact that I am not getting paid for Monday. I don’t know for sure yet, though, because being away from that place for four whole days sounds really great right about now. Plus, Tuesday will be the day that my Mom’s boyfriend leaves, so it will be the only day of the weekend that I get to myself. So, it may be a better idea to just stick with taking it off and not worry about the missing money. We’ll see. For now, though, I am off to bed. Goodnight.