Part One in the Saga of Alexis' Self-Pity: which will get better but not before a few additional rants. I apologize in advance, and encourage you not to read if you find teen angst and dejection to be off-putting.

what I'm trying NOT to be

Brief Note: If you for some reason think you might somehow make things better by reminding me that there are people in the world with AIDS or inoperable forms of cancer, or whose intelligence quotients are lower than that of my dad's goldfish, or whose parents are fighting bitter divorce wars in which they use their own offspring as pawns, or people my age or younger who are literally going to battle in some war-torn section of the world as I sit in my comfortable bedroom typing my woes as though I think I'm a modern-day Anne Frank, you probably should read no further and definitely should not leave a comment. The "you" to whom I address this are primarily my frenemies [God, how I hate that word, though it sometimes applies] from the RFM site. I recently registered there. While most people have been kind (primarily the  people  whom I thought were kind when I was just reading and not commenting [for more than 5 years, by the way] some people there tend to think a person did not exist on this planet until he or she registered at RFM) others have been worse than ugly to me. There are things I've been asked not to explain here or there, but at the same time, I'll pose a simple question. If a person were fortuitous to the extent that one's parents knew a talented photographer, one's shrink's wife knew cosmetologists "in the business" AND,  even before the application of  makeup,  one happened to wake up on the the day of a scheduled photo shoot slightly better than one usually looks, should one take the resulting photograph (which took the place of the"senior picture," which wasn't done at the time it should have been done because my face was swollen and bruised) and burn it? If someone offers a person money for limited use of his or her photo, is it so wrong ton accept the money? (For the record, I thought I was selling to a specific company and not for someone else to have the right to sell the rights to the photo and a couple of others from the same shoot, but in the end it matters little.) Bottom line: People from anywhere  who love to figuratively shout "FAKE" at me: fuck you. 

Please indulge me in a brief escape into the world of self-pity. Another girl who lives in her parents' home in the cul de sac in which my parents' home is also located is hosting a gathering of some sort.  The girl and I are not well-acquainted, although we typically converse at neighborhood events, and we  wave in passing. I will note that the girl is similarly not-well-acquainted with my cousin Josh and my brother Matthew. If anything, she knows them less well than she knows me, as they both live on campus at the universities they attend and come home only on weekends. Even when I was theoretically living in the dorm last semester, I was home more than I was at the dorm, and I've been officially out of the dorm since January.

Josh and Matthew received formal invitations to tonight's soiree. Despite the fact that my brother and cousin were invited to this event, I still don't actually know what it's about, as I do not snoop into the mail of other people. My mother, bless her poor meddling soul, thought the lack of an invitation to me must have been an oversight and concluded that she [my mother] could remedy the obvious oversight by discreetly speaking to the girl's mother. What my mom learned through speaking to the girl's mother was that A) one hosting an event cannot afford to invite everyone living within a given zip code to said event; B) the neighbor girl and I have never really "hit it off," [ the neighbor's actual words]  though no personal ill will was intended by my non-invitation; and C) I am "just a little too nerdy for [her daughter's] social set"  --a direct quote, according to my mother, who is usually neither a liar nor a known trouble-maker, all though she has brought herself precariously close to the level of "stirrer-up-of-trouble" with her involvement in this situation, however harmless her intentions may have been.

So now, even though I have errands to run and things to  do, and my dog, as well, would love a walk right now, I'm self-quarantined inside my own home because this social event is taking place in the home just to the  outside of my home on this otherwise uneventful cul-de-sac. I don't wish even to be seen by those socially adept creatures deemed worthy to attend this event. In my mind they would all be laughing at me even if they had no clue as to my identity nor cared why I was not in attendance. This feels too much like middle school, and I thought I was long past middle school. Maybe that's the lesson of the day: no matter how old you are, you're not as far past middle school as you would like to think.

The girl who is hosting the party is about four months older than I and is just finishing her first year at the community college in our city. It's not her birthday. I don't think she has a highly serious romance in the works, so I don't think she's announcing an engagement, though almost anything is possible. My only point here is that I don't think one of life's typically commemorated milestones is the focal point of this celebration, not that it matters all that much. 

Someone decided to have a party and didn't invite me. It only matters symbolically. Truthfully, I'd probably rather be holed up in my bedroom than at the party, anyway. And I obviously have better things to do, although my own pride is keeping me from doing any of those things right now. I do admit that the invitations issued to my brother and cousin added to the sting of the absence of my own invitation, if only for the idea that I wouldn't even have known about the party until the caterers and other vendors began to make their appearances, which started only an hour or so before the party began this evening. With my brother's and cousin's invitations, I had plenty of advance notice.

I am acting like a martyr in being upset that I haven't been invited to a party I'd rather not attend in the first place. I readily admit this. Still, the lack of invitation was very clearly a deliberate slight. My cousin said it looks like there are more than 100 people there. One more -- especially one more who eats or drinks as little as I do, would not have added much to overall the cost of the event.

It seems from the loudness and raucousness that alcohol at the very least is involved in the frivolity.  I could telephone the police to let them know that alcohol is being served to minors and tell myself that I was being a  be a good citizen in doing so, but I would know perfectly well that being a good citizen was, if present at all, at the very bottom of any existing heap of motives I might have. Still, I

hope no innocent bystander is harmed. All of our cars are parked in the garage. 

The neighbors hosting the party have extra-persnickety neighbors -- think Gladys Kravitz --living directly across the street from them. Those neighbors may very well become fed up and inform law enforcement if the party doesn't wind down soon.  I hope the people on whom a report is made are allowed to know who made any report against them, because I don't need the blame for something I didn't even do. Regardless, it's out of my control.