No Good Can Come of This

I derive a surprising amount of inspiration from my cynicism. This is what you get when you put a white-trash father from a ghetto hick town with a trilingual transplanted South African born Chinese mother together in a too slowly legitimizing backwater town. I listen to music in my room to bask in the daze of my history, the air so thick and humid that when you move, it feels as though your limbs are cutting through something tangible. My room is baking like a sauna because my parents are too cheap to use the thousand dollar air conditioning that we paid so dearly for years ago. Then again, prices for everything have increased, and who am I to battle peak hours?

I am not looking forward to the lunch in my honor that I am about to go to. Everyone is celebrating my graduation, but never have I been ripped so violently from my safe womb of existence, save for my birth, of course. I've experienced more within the past few weeks than I have within the past few years. Why do people celebrate this sudden abandonment of your entire world for one that seems so devoid of purpose and aim? And why the hell didn't anyone think to tell me about it? You get this kind of shit when you're about to go into high school, plenty of support and preparation for the "big school," but they really throw you out into the water when it comes time to end your 17 years of institionalized education.

And now I'm going to sit with a bunch of strangers and treat them to lunch so they can congratulate me on my great achievement, which consisted mostly of me just showing up to certain places at certain times and maybe having to write a bit. Perhaps it's just because my prefrontal cortex hasn't completely matured yet in spite of my age, but even still, with such a strange existence, how do my parents expect me to relate to my relatives? Relative is a strange word... it means close to something, and yet not the same. Most people would take the positive of it, I think, connoting closeness, though. I guess there's a pessimistic and an optimistic side to the word. I don't feel a relation to nearly anyone I meet. Perhaps I don't want to.