My first year of high school was especially bad. High school is a bad time for a lot of people, but my first year was my worst, possibly the worst year of my life to date, although I'm sure I have plenty more time for other years to bump it from the top spot. Anyway, I had always been bad at making friends, and at the very beginning of freshman year I was pretty emotionally hollow, as being dumped by my first girlfriendthe previous summer was for some reason especially hard on me. So at the time when everyone was getting to know each other and as social groups were coalescing and quickly hardening, I was holed up within myself, resisting friendly new faces and not so friendly ones, bitterly hating them all pretty much alike. At the time I was into some pretty silly stuff, like, say, Deftones, Marilyn Manson and Cradle of Filth, but what I especially latched onto at the time, oddly enough, was one album by a band called The Jazz June, They Love Those Who Make the Music. I listened to it pretty much constantly that year, and it quickly became the proverbial soundtrack to my life, not to mention the first time I began to do terrible things to myself. I listened to it to cheer myself up when I got sick because I hadn't eaten in a day and a half or so. Luckily the album seems to be relatively obscure as I haven't heard it since I deleted it from my computer a few years ago.
On a slightly related note, I'll always remember that the day that same girl dumped me, my first ever girlfriend, she did it right after we finished watching the movie Coffee and Cigarettes, which she said she could barely sit through as it was so boring. One could hardly expect a 13 year old girl to appreciate Jim Jarmusch, but I do take some small satisfaction in knowing that while I was starting to have a real interest in good movies, her taste in them was rubbish.
