Before all my friends went to college, I thought Marijuana was the real enemy. It ate people up, I thought, consumed them entirely. Little by little, they'd become less themselves, less witty, sarcastic and fun, and more...rastafarian. At first all they'd lose would be the subtleties of them, the things I'd spent so long memorizing in their faces and manner. And that would be the worst of it, the hardest part, but from there on they'd just continue to atrophy until they become a walking symbol of what they'd succumbed to: they'd become a pothead.

And there's nothing worse in life than a fucking pothead.


Now I see, though, that marijuana is a afflicition that can only affect a certain kind of person. There are people that are susceptible, and the rest of us are relatively safe. I didn't have too many friends that were the pot kind of person. I had smart, smooth, college-bound kids. They'd fall to something else altogether.


Serena and I commiserate sometimes about how they all drink, all of them. The people we went through high school with, we'd sit at tables with them and scoff at the jocks that were obviously going to spend the night getting drunk. These were the people we'd make snide remarks to about the intelligence and appeal of our fellow students social lives; these were the people who'd always laugh and bitterly agree. And what was alcohol to us? Surely, nothing that could be beaten by a movie in Katie's spare room or a carpool up to Applebee's. Surely, to us it was nothing at all.


I guess there's something about college though that makes you different. Something in classes you can skip without being noticed that makes you thirsty, something about parents being hours away that impairs you.

I guess what bothers me about it so much is that it's such a fucking cliché. This John Hughes teen movie bullshit isn't what it's supposed to be like. My friends didn't write all those essays to get accepted into Animal House. They didn't take the SATs so they could casually assume the roles of Jason Biggs or Molly Ringwald. They're supposed to be real people, and have real interests. Something as one-dimensional as drinking isn't supposed to be real to them.


I'm not the diehard about it Serena is, I have to admit-- I'd even tried it a few times before, the summer of senior year, but it didn't, couldn't, click with me. I always said it was the taste, but I think all I'm really tasting is my own disapproval. I've never had more than a few sips, never been drunk, and I don't think I ever will. And if I do, here's a shocker-- it won't be till I'm 21! GASP!

Because I think the law was probably made for a reason, okay? That's why. I'm not being a hypocrite, I'm not naive, I'm just chose to believe it's not a totally arbitrary number. I believe someone probably decided it for a reason, and that it was probably a better reason than I've heard from any of the drunken 16-year-olds who've tried to change my mind. Aside from which, I just don't have the energy to go around breaking laws on principle.


"She says she's tired of life, she must be tired of something."


I guess I'm starting not to care about the appeal my entries might hold for people, because I don't think there was an ounce of wit traceable in that whole thing. But certain people have been bugging me to write again, and maybe I'm just trying to make a point to them: there's just nothing worth saying anymore.

On with it.