5-Day Run Down - In Fragmented Form

June 6-10, 2005

The beginning of finals week--comparable to "hell week" in theater, labor, the flu, going through customs, getting a very bad haircut, dental work, the peak of allergy season, something beaded coming unstrung, forming a painful zit, the first day of an aggressive workout program, learning to ski ... you get the gist.

Monday: Mythology, mythology, and more mythology. Comprehensive final exam, enthusiastic professor, uninspired/indifferent students--a sense of future fear as I realize that one can lead a horse to water ... Messages unreturned, e-mails accummulate.

Tuesday: The aftermath of wrenching anxiety, jitters that wrench you in and out of sleep, the roller coaster of hyperventilatio; unable to attend two meetings. Mounting fear as pressures cave-in instead of diffuse, even while tasks are accomplished. Send off story for class anthology despite a deep wish to continue "tweaks." Up until wee hours as Word of Mouth website creative work seems irretrievably lost. More messages, more e-mails, more loose ends that beg to be tied-up prior to end of term.

Wednesday: A paper written in one morning (unheard of for me), the breathlessness of being deadline-driven for more than one week now. Those outside of academics take on a glow of surreal serenity. Unforeseen traffic makes me half-an-hour late for class, a presentation, a realization that the first of my friends at school is done and moving on. A sense of dissatisfaction born of a term fraught with obstacles and pressures that obscured the beautiful, simultaneous growth. Dancing to Insomniac Music Theater at 1:30AM.

Thursday: The final brush-strokes on my term. Gathering information on publication twists the knife of my writerly insecurity. The chaos of the week leaves me unable to emote properly, instead I feel like a vehicle in the energy of the day--left with a sense of forgotten "thank-you's," left with an aching nostalgia not yet actually formulated, but projected. A night of such high-voltage creative and social energy I nearly spring out of my skin. More alchohol than I've had in years--the release of it, and the guilt of it. An epiphany about someone I feel I should have been more aware of, reading at 3:00AM and then decompressing in the bathroom by weeping.

Friday: The aftermath of all the above. 16 e-mail messages first thing, a string of unanswered ones from the entire week. Unreturned phone calls beginning to be addressed. First hangover in years, resolution to never have another one. A nasty intrusion from someone I do not know via e-mail, the retaliatory snake that I conjure in response. Finally, the bureacracy is overcome--I am vindicated. Begin internship with esteemed author, share with her the spiders that are creeping from my currently revaged center--she gets it. Hearing myself referred to as a writer--the headiness of it. Traffic again, stops and starts the whole way home in deluges of rain. Still, at the end of the day the sense of beginning to feel rooted in these choices I've made over the past three years. I begin to see myself as a character, to develop a vantage point from which I can be my own friend.

A desperate need to reach out to the person from Thursday, it is heard. A sense, perhaps for the first time, of profound connections to my life.

Good-night. (3:18AM -- Saturday morning).