Free Love and Other Things I'm Bad At by Catherine Clark

again. Told him to call me no matter when he gets in.

9/10
    So far I have spent the morning doing 5 things:
    1. Trying not to puke.
    2. Remembering embarrassing things I did and said last night and cringing and then wanting to puke.
    3. Waiting for Grant to call.
    4. Waiting for ibuprofen to work so this god-awful headache goes away. (Am writing this with one eye closed. Ow.)
    5. Waiting for Thyme to stop telling me what’s wrong with patriarchal society.
    “Hey, I wasn’t even raised by my dad, so why are you lecturing me?” I said, wanting to annoy her so much that she’d just realize I was in pain and didn’t want to chat. Especially not, with feeling so embarrassed over being blown off by my boyfriend and dancing with people I don’t know and discussing the meaning of life and the relation of animals to God in between shouting out song lyrics. But I guess that was sort of sucking up to the patriarchal society in her eyes to even care about a boy (like she doesn’t have a crush on Ben, she only comes in every day to see me at work so she can see him, and she wanted to dance with him last night when he showed up, but he didn’t want to dance, he only wanted to talk to me about the concept of alienation not being so alienating when you’ve had a few beers).
    “Courtney, it goes much, much deeper than you realize,” she said.
    “I know,” I said. “I was just joking.”
    “Well, it’s not something to joke about. Remember, no one is truly free when others are oppressed.”
    She says that about every situation that bothers her. Which is every situation.
    Now she’s examining everything on my dresser for environmental correctness. Maybe having Thyme for a roommate would not be such a good idea.
    “You know, the binge drinking that goes on in today’s college society is just awful,” she said. “We never would have gotten so plowed last night if those guys hadn’t kept filling our glasses with beer. That was so patronizing of them, to just assume we wanted more, like we didn’t know how much we wanted.”
    “Maybe if we hadn’t kept drinking it,” I said. “They wouldn’t have refilled . . . um . . .” Really vivid memories of keg beer were flooding my stomach. If a stomach has memories. Which I think it does.

LATER THAT SAME DAY. MUCH TOO MUCH LATER, IN MY OPINION . . .
    Grant finally called. Let’s just say that it did not go well. I needed him to tell me he was home visiting his parents and grandmother in Denver and that’s why he wasn’t home at 1 and 2 A.M. That’s what I thought he was going to say. The only explanation. But that wasn’t it.
    He was at a party. He had fun. He went out to breakfast at 2 A.M. He wouldn’t stop talking about how much fun it was.
    “So how was your night?” he asked after he’d finished telling me the details of his late-night donut selection. “You sounded kind of wild. What did you mean about the pen thing?”
    I didn’t know what he was talking about. “You must be talking about someone else’s message,” I said, sounding hopelessly and pathetically jealous. “I wasn’t wild and I never mentioned a pen.” Although as soon as I said that, I remembered.
    “Whatever you say, Court.” Then I heard him yawning. It made me miss him so much that I burst out crying. Why couldn’t I be there to lie around on a Sunday with him?
    Ended up with him spending 10 minutes trying to cheer me up. The whole time I could hear a football game playing in the background. How could he listen to Broncos and console me from darkest depths of depression at the same time? How rude.

9/11
    Major mistake tonight. Very embarrassing. Did I leave my brain in Colorado?
    I thought I was at the anti-growth-hormones-in-milk meeting. Didn’t see Wittenauer (what is his first name?), but decided he must be running late. Meeting started. A lot of people had been there before, but a lot hadn’t, according to the group leader. So we went around the circle and everyone