Quickie

These days I seem to alternate between frantic anxiety about the future, and an almost zen-like acceptance of the scary inevitabilities of life. Sometimes I'm making myself near sick with worry about where I'll live, what kind of job I'll have, how Sean and I are going to handle being separated, etc etc, and sometimes I just think that it will all work itself out and there's no use worrying about it right this second.

I forced myself not to open up Greenwood Press' website to download the internship application before bedtime, because that just causes more stress and plus, I have to talk to Dr. Bridgford about it first. I've decided I want to intern fall semester, so I can get an earlier taste of whether or not I'll be into publishing. I think I'll also apply to the grant-writing program in Bridgeport. The New Yorker one sounds glamorous, but I hate the city and fetching coffee for a semester would make me hate it even more.

The knowledge that Sean will be in grad school until 2013 is a weird and foreign thought at best, and it's usually one of the things I worry about the most (this is one thing that you single people can feel a measure of satisfaction in, that you don't have to factor another person into your future plans). Long-distance relationships are never easy and heaven knows I haven't loved them in the past, but I have an incredible amount of confidence in our relationship and its ability to thrive even under adverse conditions. It will just be quite the transition when I no longer get the pleasure of seeing him on a daily basis (thinks of Sara's flower/gardener analogy, smiles). We'll be OK, I know we will. I just have to suppress the childish demand for everything in life to be easy.

Carla always emphasizes, as a Protestant would, the virtue of sacrifice, and how you can't-have-it-all-you-have-to-choose blah de blah--well dammit, I DO want it all and I intend to have it, one way or another. I'm like the Antigone of the post-modern Jean Anouihl version: I want everything to be beautiful and amazing and with all of the infinite possibility that the world ever held when I was a child and if I can't have it then I'll just let my uncle wall me up inside a tomb and hang myself. OK, so maybe I'm not quite like Antigone. But I'm still greedy, I still want so many things--most of them aren't material things, it's more ideals that I desire. Like the library with the roaring fireplace and the cushy chairs, or the living room aglow with holiday decorations like you see in those ridiculously smarmy television commercials, or the yellow kitchen with the green plates! (I really want that last one).

I think the best way to describe the way I feel is the part in HP4 (that's the Goblet of Fire) when Mad-Eye puts the Imperius Curse on Harry and tells him to jump on the desk and he resists--he says that he was both trying to jump forward and trying to stay put and just wound up just crashing head-first into the desk. Yes, that about sums it all up. I think with that it's bedtime.