August 22nd, 2007

September 6, 2005

My stressed state persisted all weekend, through an awesome bye-Becky party on Friday night, having Jaime in town until Saturday, going to see Merchant of Venice in the park, volunteering, picnicking on P.’s roof and then dinner with J. last night. I thought booking up my weekend would distract me and calm me down, but it only brought on this weird, MPD-ish multitasking stress, in which my brain pursued two channels of panic simultaneously. Ie. “I have nothing witty to say! Nothing! And I can’t fit this leaf of lettuce in my mouth. I shall bite part of it off the fork. It won’t come off the fork, but my teeth are already dug into this end. I can’t spit out bitten lettuce. Ok, now lettuce is dangling from mouth. I am covered with greenery and I’ve never even read ‘To the Lighthouse.’ I have no time to finish Mrs. Dalloway, either, and I can’t read it on campus because then people will see the cover and realize that I have reached my advanced age and never read ANY VIRGINIA WOOLF at all, and yet I presume to take a class on her work and they will laugh me out of the program. I cannot go on. This dinner must end. I have to go home and read The Mrs. Dalloway Reader. Possibly while under the bed.”

But I did not do that. I survived and showed up for orientation this morning. It went *fine*! Actually, some parts of it were pretty good. Like, on the subway to campus, I was reading Nancy Franklin’s TV column in the New Yorker, and she mentioned, just a throwaway remark when she was really talking about something else, Showtime’s “asymptotic” relationship with HBO and I actually stopped reading and looked away and had think about it before I laughed. And then I thought some more and laughed some more (this is all quietly, in my head, mind you. No one looked at me funny) and wondered why people don’t talk that way in real life. And then I got to where I was meeting my big sibling, who was to escort me to orientation, which was in no way his job but he is nice and I am incompetent when scared. Anyway, we were walking and he asked if we could cross the street because it was too sunny and he’s super-fair and easily burnt. He remarked, “I don’t get the point of sun, myself. I mean, I get the photosynthetic point of the sun, but…” And I felt a little inkling that I might be in the right place.

Orientation was a bit daunting but nice. The chair of the department said we were all awesome and deserved to be there, even though we might doubt ourselves and wonder if we were smart enough, which was good of her to say, because I certainly wonder that. And she reminded us to be social and not get isolated and constantly worry about grades, and I was like, Oh, yeah, grades! Because, in my extreme anxiety about being too stupid to live and not having read anything worthwhile and generally f*ing up this wonderful opportunity, I’d kinda not thought about what form said f*ing up would take. Like, no one’s going to put me in the stockade or anything, they’ll just give me a C. It all seemed kinda ludicrious, when I thought about it like that.

Wow, I’m babbly. It was quite a day, I guess, though I should also admit that not all that much happened. I should’ve known better than to think that orientation meetings and a reception were worth all that stress.

Every few years, radical life change. No problem, right?

The cabaret was quiet
RR