Lasting Advice Comes From Funny Places

No clue why, but today I had this flashback of anxiety. Maybe because I took a mid-day nap and dreamt I was driving a van with this girl I knew when I was 15, a totally random I-was-more-friends-with-her-brother girl, and the brakes went out as we whizzed down a hill. I woke up one second from death.

Anyway, this anxiety memory: when I was a high school freshman, I was in the band room rehearsing for an Edgar Allen Poe performance piece. (Ugh. My life.) Anyway, I was in it with this guy--let's call him TR. TR was a senior and the best friend of my first boyfriend. When we started dating, TR said, "If you hurt him, I'll hurt you," which is a funny thing to say to a braces-bearing pipsqueak, but whatevs! I thought TR was soOoOoO wise. A. He wore these all-black outfits. B. He played a lead in the school musical (Thenardier in Les Mis, WORD). C. He had been dating the same girl for, like, a full year. This was foreign to me just getting off the middle school boat. Dude was the height of maturity to me.

Anyway, this day in rehearsal, we were on a break, and I walked over to a chair and saw an open notebook. I stood over it reading. I honestly didn't read a full sentence when TR came over to me, scooped it up, and said, "Don't read other people's stuff." And I said, "I didn't know whose it was...or if you minded...or..." This is the anxiety I was talking about. And he said, "It doesn't matter. It's how you get in trouble."

Looking back on TR...some things: A. He and that long-term gf broke up because he randomly got a crush on some other girl. He moped around for a good several months spitting lines like, "I don't look put together? Maybe I'M NOT." B. He wore pajamas to graduation and this t-shirt with wolves on it. Before irony was cool. C. The last night of the spring play, he ad-libbed a homophobic slur. Good. So, he wasn't actually a sage or anything. But, that advice is really good right? It's true. Reading other people's stuff, whether you know whose it is, or if it's personal...it never creates a GOOD situation, right?

And literally any time I am considering opening someone's medicine cabinet or something, I think of TR. It is amazing what we tote around and from whom we're toting, and what we've tossed into the world to be toted.