CA on the down low

There's a common factor with my depression: generally it's other people that make me feel shit. It's a feeling of inadequacy, or social ineptitude. A need to stand apart and watch the fun from afar while at the same time a desperate need to take part. It sets up a conflict in my head and I go spiralling around and around and around until something clicks. Today, that something was this:

http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/stoo/11/1322190946/tpod.html

See, I'd begun to think it was me. All these people in Central America are having fun. If it's me that's miserable then it stands to reason I'm a freak, right? Party capital of the world and all I want to do is sit in a corner and watch TV. It hadn't occurred to me that maybe everyone else was just gobshitingly awful. A version of the worst kind of Essexland (for I know some lovely people from there and wouldn't denigrate all of it): drunken, drugged up, vomit stained, loud and noisy Essex where the aim is to do all of the above 'large'. I hate it.

Sometimes I just want to sit and have a cup of tea. Maybe even a chat. I'm 35. I don't do drinking games anymore. I don't want to talk about the ways I've opened beer bottles. Is it too much to ask to talk about politics? Or the environment? Or the American election?

Why should I be the one to feel excluded? How dare you make me feel the outcast? You're the one exhibiting moronic principals. You're shallow and vacuous. Your greatest achievement in your young life is to have dropped the two most important balls of your life. I forgot this for awhile. It's OK for me not to take part because to take part, and enjoy it, I'd have to drop my IQ by 40 points and not only am I unwilling to do that I actually can't. I've tried. My conversation doesn't dumb down enough for you. I can't get my head around some of the things I'd need to say. It's like I'm talking to my biological sibling. It's good to have standards, don't you think? And my standards tower above yours. I look down upon your standards from my ivory tower and all I see are ants: we're both unknowable to each other but one of us has got the bigger cock.

I don't like your parties. I can never hear what's being said and I suspect it'd bore me to rigor mortis if I did. But just once I'd like to be given the opportunity to know for a fact. It's just that I can't be bothered to find out. I'm already disappointed in you. I'd hate to find out the reality is even worse.

Now it has to be said I've disliked other groups of travellers for other reasons: in India they were smug, in Europe too young. For the best travellers go to Africa. Everywhere I go in Central America, and the places where divers congregate are the worst for they think they're so fucking cool, people treat it like its the last night of legal alcohol and they're mission is to be as loud and obnoxious as possible. Like its Freshers Week ad nauseum. Maybe that's what it is: they remind me of students. I hate them, too.

No doubt you'll make me feel like shit again in the future but for now, by which I mean the next few minutes, I'm happy in my supercilious reverie. So, please fuck off.