[315] This House Is Not A Home

I’m bad in that I expect things. I expect myself to hold certain standards and ideas about myself. While seemingly all of my friends struggle with things like crippling depression or personal insecurities, I’m poised with my finger over the button that initiates the perfect time to helicopter dick in the middle of the mall, and laugh maniacally about it. My potential for seemingly endless or reckless joy knows no bounds. I genuinely don’t feel like the common hang-ups of life really apply to me. I attempt to think around them and live in a world that allows me to expect things. Yet, I find I’m ever humbled by my naïve expectations.

It’s one of those things that speak to why I call myself a loner. No amount of friends really means they grasp or even want to pretend to grasp how or why I think something. Even if they agree, it’s hardly ever “Nick P., that makes a lot of sense, I’m going to try to start doing that right now too.” This doesn’t mean that every habit or potentially good idea I have can be adopted over night, but there is a certain kind of person and a certain kind of mindset that behaves like mine. Ask Byron about it.

What I suppose bugs me the most is my inability to quell the anger. It’s not even that I don’t expect the things that come. But even seeing things coming for years will get to me. The failing expectation in that moment is that “things could be making more sense.” In actuality, the moment is playing out in a way I would consider nonconstructive, caddy, or pathetic. It gets even better when people like to play the vague fool. Well I didn’t know, well I thought you thought, didn’t so and so tell you, it’s not about this it’s about that, why can’t you understand where I’m coming from…

I think it speaks to what makes life feel like perpetual punishment. Like you always get to be self-conscious or on edge about something because even when you try to be well or plan right, it’s always with the bombs going off around you. The only thing that calls for a cease fire is firmly planting yourself in an environment that’s theoretically above all the explosions. I like to think of that environment as my friends, but to carry the analogy further, I feel offered up as a meat shield with the mindset “he can take it” often enough I don’t really know where to go but to be kind of dead inside.

No, this doesn’t mean woe is me; it’s more of the perpetual “fuck-everything” air I adopt when things go stupidly for stupid reasons. Like, of course I’ll find new roommates and figure out a way to keep saving money, and run my shit, and do side jobs and whatever else. Of course I will. I’m Nick P. I don’t need the respect to be talked to deliberately. I shouldn’t expect honest conversations or assessments about the how or why I influence people’s lives or try to provide for a certain kind of lifestyle. That has nothing to do with it, Nick P. If you don’t first and forever remember people do things for generally irrational or selfish reasons, then consider the fallout after, you’re setting yourself up to get pissed off again.

I suppose I always fall back to the expectations of myself. I expect I know how to treat people in situations that are going poorly. I expect I know how I’ll find a way out of it. I expect to polish the jaded shell and work out all the commentary in jokes that hit a little too close that I laugh a little too long about. That’s fine. I think I’m lucky that I have standards. I’m lucky I have people in my life that I can point to as examples of what I respect and what I want everyone to be like. When you’re “on my bad side” it has nothing to do with you, you’re just like the rest. You don’t have the capacity to understand what I seek in a friend. That’s your choice and I hope it makes you feel comfortable.