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Saturday, June 08, 2002
exclamation points and driver's ed
Trying to be happy! Cheerful! Upbeat! We're graduating, and, oh the beauty of endings. Right? Not exactly. Maybe I never got panicked about graduation, but man, I'm getting depressed. It's like when I was learning to drive. Audience: How can it possibly be like when you were learning to drive? Well, I sucked at driving. (I suck at anything which requires physical coordination and has complicated instructions.) But I got behind the wheel all brave-like and steered tentatively and gingerly. Then my driver's ed teacher told me that was wrong. More action! More motion! She told me. So I felt like a complete failure (the timid one, yet again) and overcompensated by jerking the wheel too far all the time. I'd swing around a sharp right turn near my house, steer too hard, and realize suddenly that I'm about to careen into the ditch. That's pretty much what I'm doing now. I'm trying to stay upbeat about graduation. Trying to be unfazed, unbothered and most of all, undepressed. Because no one likes a depressed girl. And more than that, it solves nothing but keeps me from enjoying anything. Unfortunately, I'm overcompensating. Sometimes I just feel like I'm not myself at all, putting on a smile while my mind is calculating: "This moment will never happen again. How will I remember it?" I'm trying to stay ever-cheerful, contrary to my nature. But I think I'm trying too hard. And instead, I'm just heading for a ditch.
21:48
quote
"I am getting to the point now in my undergraduate career where most of the things I enjoy most are now preceded by that word, 'final,' and I find that knowing I am doing something for the last time prevents me from enjoying it." -- Newtonline
21:29
Friday, June 07, 2002
quote
"The story in front of me is as light as the wind, it means
nothing, it flies away from my hands. I'm fighting panic, the fear of having
nothing to say, praying, Please, and lie all night with nothing but the steady
tick of the clock and the murmuring seashell roar of my ear against the
pillow. All I want to convey is what happens to ordinary things, the journey
of grime and wonder through the world, that's all. And I can't." -- Sallie Tisdale
12:08
realization
I don't know what I'll miss most after I graduate and move out, but I can guess. One of them will probably be the silly things that happen here at 2 a.m. ... Last night Amanda knocked on my door to demonstrate her "devil voice," and I scared her away with a fork.
11:44
Thursday, June 06, 2002
anybody? anybody?
I've remembered pieces of phrases today and can't, for the life of me, figure out where they're from. Google, sadly, has been no help. I'm thinking of something where someone was walking along and (for some reason this line sticks in my mind): "decided a nice day was a nice day." And another is a poem we read in French class in high school, written in French, by a famous contemporary French poet, about sitting in a cafe and stirring coffee and pouring sugar. It's not T.S. Eliot's thing about measuring life in coffee spoons, but it contains a similar line. In French. And I think the author's first name starts with a "J" but I may just be thinking that all French men are named Jacques. Somebody be my Google.
13:37
quote
"You can't have your groove and eat it, too." -- Eddy, on Dillo Day
10:33
Wednesday, June 05, 2002
read
On campus drinking statistics: "The researchers also claim that frequent binge drinkers were more likely to have engaged in 'unplanned sexual activity.' Disregarding the fact that 19-year old boys 'plan' to have sex the way pools of tire store workers 'plan' to win Lotto, isn't virtually all sex the unplanned kind?" (in The Morning News)
16:05
Tuesday, June 04, 2002
update
On this rainy Tuesday I walked out of my last class at Northwestern. Actually it was a class that I'd already dropped, on War and Peace. But I decided to show up because I'd had the prof for three other classes over the years, and his last lecture of the quarter always features a dramatic statement about human existence. This one was no different. The challenge is not finding out the meaning of life, he said. The challenge is finding meaning *in* life. After the class ended, it took me about ten minutes to even realize the meaning of what had just happened. It's no big deal, I told myself, just a class, and since when do I even care about classes? But somehow it mattered, just a little bit.
22:07
Monday, June 03, 2002
update
Everyone who takes out student loans must attend an "exit interview" before they graduate. Today I went to mine: 80 wide-eyed undergrads crammed into a little room, facing paper work that asked us to list things like "anticipated employer." Oddly enough, I felt almost like an adult when I walked out of the room. If the government entrusts me with $20,000, I must be able to handle it, right?
20:25
more: archives
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