Does this mean I should go scream into an abyss?*

When I was home I got to participate in a few contemporary pop culture phenomena – I purchased and devoured the sixth Harry Potter book and finally got to watch Garden State and read The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, both of which had been recommended to me by Joanne, whose taste in movies and books is eerily similar to mine. In keeping with my new fun “let’s analyze everyone's personalities, especially mine” kick, I saw parallels everywhere.

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants was a no-brainer:
Four girls, dissimilar as anything, but friends since before the dawn of time. We are everything to one another. We don’t need to say so; it's just true… You know what the secret is? It's so simple. We love each other. We’re nice to one another. Do you know how rare that is? Indeed I do. And it is, and I have it. I thought maybe we were just a fluke, my suitemates and I, but really, this book reminded me that you don’t have to be exactly alike to build a friendship that endures decades (well, we're just starting on our second).

Of the four Septembers, I am so clearly Bridget (affectionately “Bee”). Check this out: Bridget's last letter worries her. Bee followed her heart with such manic abandon sometimes, it scared Lena. Usually Bee sailed along in triumph and glory, but once in a while she crashed on the rocks. That’s me, in a nutshell. I’ve learned to bounce back very resiliently, but “manic abandon” and “following my heart” are things I am not planning to grow out of. My sixteen-year-old self resembled Bridget quite a lot, but I have hope for her in the next couple of books, because I know it's possible to grow up from where she is. It helps that she has amazing friends.

It wasn't that we hadn't shared the big outline of our stories. Of course we had... But there were a million little lines of shading that we couldn’t convey so easily. They were subtle things, and understanding them, even knowing when you missed them, was what separated other friends from real friends, like we were. I am so astonishingly, thoroughly blessed to have that kind of “real” friends.

And then there was Garden State
I must say, Zach Braff keeps on impressing me all over the place. It was more complicated to find myself in this movie – maybe because it hits close to home in a couple of ways. Did you catch the shot of his bedroom at the beginning? As numb as his soul: whitewashed walls, hospital corners, nothing warm or comfortable or cozy. White. Blinding. Numbing. My bedroom here looks exactly like that. White walls, white curtain, white sheets. It's no tragedy, since all I do in there is sleep and store my clothes (and I am certainly not Ms. Hospital Corners), but it hit me what sort of an impression that must be making on my subconscious.

There are ways in which I'm trying to numb myself, cut myself off from life. For example, I've convinced myself that in less than six weeks, everyone I know will be leaving me. That's not really true. OK, so Elizabeth, Heather, Steffi, Tom, Felix, and two others are leaving. But even though it might feel like it, it is not everybody I know (just a little over two-thirds) and they are not leaving me, they're just leaving. There's a difference. I'm pretty sure, though, that all of these impending goodbyes are why I never really feel like going to our Thursday-evening Stammtisch anymore. Why bother to have that much fun when it's all going to disappear anyway?

Ugh. This is the danger zone that I really can’t let myself fall into. Because I am so not a person who can be content holding herself back. I have to enjoy my friends. I have to stay connected to them. I have the innate and unflappable urge to wrestle the tiny joys out into the open, to rejoice over the minutiae, to be ceaselessly, relentlessly optimistic. So why am I resisting my life so much?

I am not Andrew Largeman, numbed to the world, struggling to break through and let myself live. Nope, definitely not him - though I’ve known several of him. And while I have never done the honors of single-handedly pulling someone out of a lifelong numbness into the joys and struggles of real life, I am much more a Sam, quirks and all (although I do think you can get away with more quirks if you’re Natalie Portman). So, unlike “Large,” I don’t have to cast about for someone to pull me out of my whitewashed walls.

I’ve got all the tools myself.

*On the other hand, what is blogging but doing exactly that, hoping to hit the echo just right?