Home Stretch (I Wish)

But somehow, I’ve turned into the biggest bundle of depressed stress I’ve been in a few years. I can’t possibly have as much work as I had in previous quarters, but somehow it seems all I’m doing is work, and somehow I’m still behind, yet without even the trade-off of hanging out with friends. Recently, I also found out I have to re-write a paper from last quarter in order to graduate, so all of a sudden it’s like I have an extra class.

Then earlier on my campus bike was stolen, so I’ve had to walk to and from class once or twice a day, which adds at least a half-hour of nothing (I live almost a mile from class). Then last week I somehow forgot my really expensive noise-cancelling headphones on an airplane. Then splendourhyaline.com goes down, and neither the registrar nor the web hosting company sees fit to respond to any of my e-mails or phone calls. That should be (and probably is) illegal, but there’s nothing I can do about it now, even if I had time. It gets me so riled up I want to hit something, but usually I just think nasty phrases in my head.

Basically, a lot of the things on the periphery of my life are falling apart, so to speak; these are things that are not essential but whose presence and functioning I took for granted. Since they’re not really essential, when they go, I try to tell myself not to bitch about it; after all, compared to most of the world I’m insanely rich and pampered and if I really care that much about my noise-cancelling headphones, well, I’ve got a scary life ahead of me. All the same, given the timing of it all, my patience is being sorely tried on all fronts: school, financial, physical (I was sick for a few weeks), emotional (seeing your friend get married is awesome, sort of like dying of thirst while your buddy’s got a brand new case of Evian), and spiritual. Needless to say, such trials are unwelcome as I face my last month of college, drawing as they do a picture of gloom and an expectation of a hard, gasping crawl to the finish line, instead of the leisurely stroll that I’d planned on. Well, whatever. I don’t even want to think about it.

Of course, lots of good things are happening too, though my mind allows them to be overshadowed by the threat of final papers due. The last two weekends were awesome, as I went to Atlanta for the aforementioned wedding, and then to Orlando, where I was able to see Pedro the Lion, Over the Rhine, Ester Drang, and several other awesome bands, as well as (more importantly) hang out with my family and hug my mom on Mother’s Day. Incidentally, I picked up the vinyl version of Over the Rhine’s recent record and got Karin and Linford to sign it, which was awesome, especially after practically weeping at the beauty of their live performance.

Unrelatedly, but more or less simultaneously with all these other things, I also went through a couple days of very intense self-history. For a sort of group project I was doing with some close friends, I mapped out over 500 events that happened in my life since the day I was born, with an eye to their significance. This included (as it always does) those deep-dark-secret type things, as well as various errata that most people wouldn’t consider significant but that somehow held meaning in my life or were a turning point of some kind (for example, how I treated the girl I had a crush on in third grade). I am still sorting through the aftermath of that endeavor, since I’ve never quite seen my life from such a bird’s-eye perspective, and I’m somewhat disoriented. But, as I hoped, certain themes began to spell themselves out in relatively stark relief, and I am not quite sure how to deal with these aspects of me that were uncovered. While this truth is refreshing, it is also debilitating, and with everything else that is going on I think I have tended to hopelessness in my relationship with it so far, instead of hope. May that return.

Anyhow, this is all just to say that I am decidedly less sanguine about this quarter now than when I started, and I want to kick something in the knees for taking away my sunny dreams for it. No doubt in the future I’ll be glad for the struggles; maybe it will make being done that much sweeter. I certainly can’t imagine anything sweeter right now than never taking another class again (so yes, that means plans for going on to a PhD program are being reconsidered and postponed indefinitely). Well, one month to go. See you when it’s over.