Like Zarastrutha I have spent these past months in relative solitude. Electronic means has afforded some companionship. Friendship without voice or body, electronic ghosts, caused only a desire for more pure interaction. By pure luck a conversation across wires wove its way into the realm of the physical.

In high school, if you can remember it, one develops many different types of associates. Some friends are without basis within the premises of the edifice except possibly before and after school. Those friends lurk in the corners of your house at all hours. Other friends come from mutual long term electives: band, football, and rotc mates. The friend that this story is about hails from the purest survival instinct. A person whom originally you have little noticeable commonality, but due to the arrangement of a seating chart your proximity is forced. Our first interactions were within the context of Algebra II. The most incompetent of teachers, Miss Franks, supposedly taught the class.

A truth about high school: a poor teacher can be easily noticed if she gives notebook grades. The more points that are assigned to it, the more bottom barrel the educator. In this class the notebook earned 20% of your average.

I spent at least one in every three class sessions in the office. You would think that since I despised the teacher so, I, the hooligan extraordinaire, kept the teacher from her duties. This was not the reason for my banishment. Her teaching had left the mostly non-autodidact students bemused. I took it upon myself to assist them with their work and explain hazy concepts to the masses. This was considered talking during class time, even when the teacher wasn't up giving lesson. She wanted questions to come to her. When she left I made rounds helping the students and filling in the blanks of the lesson. I'll admit that I even assisted them on tests when the ill-fated Franks was away. This is not to say I cheated or gave them answers. I assisted them through the problem, to give them a working understanding. After a year of my complaints, she did actually get moved into an administrative position, away from the poor souls of students.

This teacher, as most notebook test types do, had us sit in a seating chart. The chart did not come from any rationalized order, to my perception. We were not seated in alphabetical order or divided away from our friend groups. Through this chance juxtaposition I ended up next to an intriguing band girl. She loved Jesus and played clarinet. She read series of fantasy novels. Despite her deep attachment to the nailed one, she longed for emancipation of thought. During the passing period, we would have mild discussions although at the time she was secondary to those I knew better.

Eventually we became aware that we had one of the lunch periods together. I sat with a group of band members and free thinkers, and she easily found a seat being already friendly with the band kids. At these lunch tables we would have comical and insightful conversations about politics, god, and quintessential high school lewd sexuality.

The next years we would have classes together, and always arranged ourselves to be a desk apart when possible. Our discussions became more personal and dealt more and more with my philosophies and her relationships with god and politics.

After high school she took the initiative to message me over AIM. We kept this type of correspondence on at least a monthly basis. Due to my recent solidarity I have been online more, at the same time as the increase in the difficulty of her courses have caused electronic communication while doing homework to be her primary means of non-scholastic communication.

Eventually, our close proximity, at the scales I am now living in, of one and a half hours travel time caused us to visit each other. First I went down to cook her dinner. This weekend she came up for us to work on her laptop.

We have had a jolly time. We played soul calibur, she helped me baby sit, we practiced martial arts, I said curse words and prayed to her Kubuntu partition, and today we rearranged Katie's room. We have secured each other as, trite as the term may be, best friends.

This though has brought to light certain demons of my relationship with Emily. Emily and I do not have similar interests on the more specific end. With Laura I can talk for hours about books, politics, religion, and philosophy, where Emily and I are strained to have serious discourse for longer than twenty minutes. Being with Laura was also new and passionate. I haven't had a serious newish friend for a long time. I forgot the joy of being a predator, trying to find borders of discussion or new topics of interest, doing research and reconnaissance on a person, and finding the unexpected.

This caused Emily and I to have quite a discussion. We both have been lonely for the passion and excitement that we once had together. She expressed her desire to talk big people talk with me, but as always she is uninterested in those topics. She feels always that she is attempting to impress me, but never can.

This comment... This comment eviscerated me. The damnable hex of words removed all inertia left within me.

My relationship with my father remains mostly nonexistent. The most I've heard of him in the past year is in the background of my brother's cell phone. I fear becoming like my parents more than almost anything else. My brother and I have always sought to impress or make proud my father. The rarity of honest reception of his praise caused my brother and I to participate in things that were completely against our nature. Even those things could not buy his love. When Emily said that she felt similarly, my heart's palpations traveled into an abyss. I have since the earliest days of our relationship attempted to let her know of my feelings for her. I tell her in both print and aural forms how much I love and appreciate her, but she says she still feels this way.

Such gloomy discourse troubled me greatly. The rest of our conversation that night contained mostly bliss. I fear she feared causing me such distress again. Thus my friendship with Laura has assisted me two fold. First, I have made a borderline acquaintance/friend into a close friend. Secondly, our relationship has helped my relationship with Emily to be analyzed for the assistance of our perpetual kaizen.

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In other news, my progress in moving to Shreveport has been recently dampened by Laura (Michael's mom, not new friend). This past week instead of searching for a vehicle, I have been attending to her errands. This probably won't delay my exodus, since I can just rent a uhaul to drive to Shreveport. Perhaps I will delay another week since the days I planned occur during fall break, and my friends may not be there to assist in the moving.