officially the most antisocial lara ever

so i thought going to falafel night would be a nice change of pace and that it would be a nice friendly and simple way to get back into the swing of hanging out with my friends here... i live with colleen and leigh, and i go out to eat or see movies with eric, scott, and ben each regularly, but since august that's about it. if you catch me outside of the offices, or outside of the house with more than 3 people at a time, you must be seeing a lara clone and not me.

tonight, dinner at the guys' house seemed perfectly harmless. when i arrived, ian, leigh, sam, and bill were working on cooking in the kitchen, a few people were downstairs playing pool, etc., and eric was in his room working... i curled up on the floor of eric's room and read, which was fine.

when it got to be time for dinner though, i freaked. instead of getting dinner, i stayed put and read, my excuse to eric being that i was in the middle of a chapter. when eric got his food and came back up to be like "dude, what's wrong?, you need to get firsts so that we can divy out seconds", i shrugged and just kept reading. the longer i knew there were the better part of a dozen people around the table downstairs, the less i wanted to be the last to enter the room, and so i just stayed put. the more i just stayed put, the more i convinced myself that it was best to just stay put in a corner of eric's room until there was no one left in the kitchen or on the way from eric's room to my car, so that's exactly what i did. i left for eric's house around 4:30, and left around 8:45, and in that time i read 106 pages of "mostly harmless" curled up on his floor, basically not moving. i was honestly and sincerely freaked out about going one room over to a room full of my friends to get a plate of falafel, and so i played statue and read for 4 hours instead.

that can't be normal.

the thing is, i've been in this anti-more than 3 people at a time mode for so many months now (since the end of last summer) that even if ahead of time i think i *want* to snap out of it and do something with a *group* of my friends, when it comes down to it i spazz and freeze up at the last moment. i've been doing this so long without worrying about it, that i have no clue anymore how to reverse the process.

i'm officially a sociophobic-panic-attack-ridden weirdo. go me.

i'm having lunch with ben tomorrow... maybe he'll have something brilliant to say about all this. we shall see.

night y'all