I noticed that over the past few days, I've been acting extremely sarcastic. Not worth mentioning, maybe, except that I don't think I've acted like this since high school. And not only that, but the things I think about when I'm not thinking about anything - you know, on the bus or on a long walk alone or something - seem different over the past couple days too. Normally the mental screen saver is full of politics, my work, or stuff that I think would make cool stories if I ever got around to writing the damn things. But over the past couple days it's been straight-up power fantasies - the books I read or TV shows I watch, with myself and a friend or two in place of the main characters.

Just like back in high school.

Of course, there's a 99% chance that worrying about this is pointless. There are so many possible incidental explanations and the "back to high school" trend is so recent that it might not exist at all, and even if it is happening it might not be the bad thing I'm imagining. But it's what I've been thinking about today, so I might as well take a few minutes and write it down.

And just to fill in the gaps for, well, pretty much everyone except my mom, dad, and sister: I used to be very sarcastic, sardonic, and maybe other things as well. Maybe the phrase "biting wit" is appropriate, or "cruel sense of humor". But that pretty much ended with high school. In France it took a while to get good enough at the language to joke and stuff, and even then there just didn't seem to be an audience for it, or something. And my first girlfriend was pretty insecure (not to say I'm not/wasn't as well) and we did most of our communication by methods like AIM. So it was rare that she wouldn't take my kind of joke personally, and even rarer that I could be sure of that. So basically, my personality changed a lot in the six months after I graduated from high school and stayed changed.

And it sortakindamaybe looks like it's changing back. And I don't like that. Because high school was not fun. My social life back then was about like it was this past summer in South Carolina, only in high school there wasn't a good reason for it and I didn't have any of the compensating freedom.

Bleh. This whining seemed insightful or at least relevant three hours ago when I started writing it, but since then I've read a bit and gone to two meetings. Now it just sounds like whining. I have actual work to do - too much actual work, in fact, since I didn't do much earlier today, but it's still possible.