May 9, 2002

    With a day of class left and a week of work remaining,  I feel like I am standing at the edge of a diving board.  Since I am too much of a pussy to jump off with my eyes open, the rarely seen assertive portion of myself will materialize in the decisions I have made, and push me into to the extreme deep.  The latter part of May can only be compared to a giant weekend.  It will be my opportunity to plunge headfirst into everything the ties to Union County College and its affiliates have compelled me to put off.  I just hope the pool is filled, lest I suffer a massive concussion and hibernate my way through the merriment of spring.

    Since September I have been leashed to the same routine: class in the morning, work until it got dark.  Daylight Savings Time offered minor redemption, but I cannot help but desire more than bland, languid afternoons spent repeating "Twenty-five cents," after each pack of gum and bag of chips is sold.  Is it terribly wrong to want more from my summer?  By quitting, as least temporarily, I have succeeded in answering that question myself.  The fear of being broke usually accompanies this type of choice.  However, I am young and frugal, and have known for far too long that I have the rest of my life to halfheartedly devote to a job of such mind-numbing proportions.  Stifling my creativity is infinitely more self-defeating than any of the shit I pulled last year.

    The shellshock of having more than two and a half days at a time to hear myself think in an environment of my choosing is what I am anticipating now.  Next week, I have a test and a final to study for, and then I am on my own.  If I were one with a limited attention span and less able to tolerate myself, the reality of free time might pose a threat.  I remain unfettered by looming boredom, and riveted by the potential embedded within in time interrupted by nothing.  

    This is probably all sounding a little fucked up.  So much time passed before Lyme Disease allowed me to get out of my house and my bed on a regular basis.  The days I was alert were spent feeling like I had been flattened by an eighteen-wheeler: nine of those wheels belonged to Lyme Disease, Fibromyalgia, and the inevitable mental infirmities resulting, and the rest of them represented Cranford High School's failed attempts to placate a hopeless case.  Now that I know what having a life is like and frolic down the boulevard of structure, not stricture, I want just the opposite.  I want time all to myself, to be forgotten by the external universe and have as little relation to it as possible.  Isolation on my own terms has been appealing for months.  Follett deserves much less of me than it has received.  Thank you Follett, for contributing to my unswaggering sense of stagnation.  I'll show myself out.

    There's still pain, but with my Dad suffering visibly, my right to complain has been duly stifled.  If I can miss four classes in a four month semester and not a day of work, I must be mildly functional.  What I want is to direct the surfaced health and energy to worthy causes.  Being erudite has its perks, but there are more dimensions to me than reported on my grade transcript.  Excuse me while I glean the darkest depths of my soul for vestigial profundity.

    Today was as easy as they come.  The task of sitting through my final Mass Communications class is as facile as they come, especially since I know I am getting an A.  Since it rained and no one ever seems to come to school when it rains, the bookstore was deader than Elvis.  Helping people find textbooks, ringing them up, and buying them back sporadically provoked twinges of nostalgia.  Being helpful and doing what I am paid to do are momentarily fulfilling, but it fades faster than a caffeine buzz.  The customers need not appreciate me for me to feel like I have helped them.  It is just all of the sitting around, trying to focus on my reading while my ears are polluted with stale, bad music... and the sense I have written this all before.

    I am sure this entry has facilitated in making me sound ridiculously self-absorbed.  That's fine by me, because life is too short for me not to be true to myself and inner musings, and if that's the label I get branded with so be it.  Currently, my ego is excited by the reality of only being repressed through four days of work, three classes, and two finals.  Soon I'll having nothing to do but become enamored with having nothing to do.