what matters?

i know everyone is out there thinking, another year down, another one to come (or any variation of this). in reality my new year doesn't start till 13 JANUARY (this is the SECOND TIME i have mentioned this, now you have NO EXCUSES for missing my birthday) because when you go back in time i actually started my years on this day in 1981. so... i am not yet reflective on the year. i don't think i have grown up at all; i just believe that i have gotten even more stuck in where i already was. i guess what matters is that i have realized this; 2005 will see an actual solution thought up and carried out. i hope. perhaps this is why i get so easily distracted - i have no direction. and *sigh* what am i doing at home at 2:30 on new years? does it even matter? as my brother said to his friend Imran earlier this evening, "it's just another day." so i don't need to feel any pressure to party and have a good time - i already did most of my partying beforehand... like two weeks ago (drank all the liquor i was going to drink in my entire two weeks of break in one night!), like five months ago (taking my 7th flight between north and south america, by myself, to meet up with friends i have in argentina and chile - it was awesome. i love traveling alone). like countless other times in the summer where friends would come over and we'd build a fire and laugh till it got too cold to stay outside. how many times i almost cried this evening? about three. but then i thought better of it, i didn't want my face to get all messy. why? boludeces. i'm kidding myself if i think this pendejo even matters. what matters is the overall idea - that yes, it is possible for me to feel something for someone. that yes, i can recognize it when it happens. and most importantly, that i shouldn't waste my time with those to whom i don't respond. when i think of all the guys i dated in argentina, i think there was one, maybe two people for whom i could have possibly felt something, had things actually worked out. the rest of them, it was to pass the time. right, go back to the exact moment i was stressing out over wether Federico or whoever would call me. i wouldn't say the same thing then. but, if i could go back i would take myself out of that situation and ask, is there really any thing i see in this person that attracts me? maybe everything i'm saying is just boludeces...

and now i'm stuck. i was at a party earlier this evening. during one of the times i almost cried i had just said, "god, i need a drug or something to smoke," and then i thought about going home and taking some PM painkiller to make me sleep that hazy sleep that reminds me of long flights and overnight bus rides. but instead, on returning home i decided to type. this reminds of the one time i started crying in a bar.

it had been a particularly rough evening (some guy was giving me crap and though i insisted that he tell me what was going on he continued to shrug it off) and i knew that some of my friends (scott and others) would be at this bar where fernando is a bartender. so after crying about this boy (and whithout tears - completely symbolic) i got dressed, hopped on the bus, and arrived. now all these friends i met up with were guys. and i didn't have to pay for anything. they kept giving me red wine. pretty soon, i was quite tipsy. i think i had been left to my own thoughts, and that's where the trouble started. i thought about wanting to drink enough so that i could go home and sleep through the whole next day. it occurred to me that this thought was really sad. and then i started crying. fernando said, let's go for a walk, so he walked me out of the bar and around the corner, to the kiosk where he bought cigarettes for himself and a few pieces of candy for me. so yeah, that was the only time i had ever been walked out of a bar crying. but why did i decide to tell that story? what ended up mattering that evening was not sebastian (the boy for whom i cried without tears) ; what mattered was that i was really lucky to have people in my life like fernando to keep me from embarassing myself too much when i'm drunk and crying. he's the one straight argentine that i hung out with that didn't ever try anything. and scott - who rode with me in the taxi to my house (in the morning i couldn't remember for like five minutes how i had gotten home the night before - good thing he was there).

so i guess right now, what matters is that i'm here, typing, about ready to bury myself under my covers, which is exactly where i want to be right now.