failure ii

“Who needs this anyway?” I ask Kathy, the girl who lives down the hall from me later in the day. I’m in her room playing beer pong with a few others.

“Beats me,” she says handing me a quarter filled cup of cheap beer. “Just worry about making your cups. They’re killing us.”

She’s right, my heads definitely not in it, tonight. All I can think about is my academic advisor’s glasses slowly slipping down her face when she told me that I was a failure. How attracted to her it made me.  All my life this is a title I’ve strived to achieve. I should be proud, happy, anything.

Kathy’s computer speakers belt out some garage band music from the early 90s and I’m trying to focus on the lyrics. They’re singing something about losing hope in everything and being mad for no reason. Typical.

Then, just when I’m starting to understand, I feel my face lightly splashed with the sprinkles of some liquid.

“Jeez, you’re killing me,” Kathy scolds.

Looking down into my cup, I find a ping pong ball floating there, mocking me.

The death cup.

“Game over,” someone on the other team exclaims, jumping up and down. “We win.”

“Pull it together,” Kathy warns me when we sit down to watch some one else play in our place. “What’s with you tonight?”

I’m at a loss. The song changes to rap.  Jay-Z.

 I ask Kathy, “You ever feel like no matter what you do, you are destined to fail?”

“I hate this shit,” she says to the room, not hearing me at all. “I could never respect a genre of music whose sole aspect of creativity comes from stealing other people music and putting such crappy words over it.”

“Beat your wife. Smoke a blunt. Fuck the police,” I mock sing over the bass line. We both laugh.

Kathy finishes another beer. I think she’s five ahead of me now. It’s rare that she out drinks me. Scratch that, it’s rare that anyone out drinks me.

Opening another can, she confides, “I just don’t know how anyone can listen to this.”

“You reap what you sow,” I mumble, losing interest.