The Middle

Monday 28 April

ONE WEEK MORE. Thank the gods.

Yeah so yesterday began too early at 6:30 AM for some reason, where I tried my hardest to brief a case in 20 minutes, and I almost finished all of the Roe brief, so you could say I'm killing it. I'm totally going to be the best lawyer ever.

Organic chemistry ended up with me sitting in the back of the classroom basically like this:

WHY DO YOU DO THIS TO ME

because this unit is really disorganized and my teacher just keeps throwing mechanisms up on the board and random reactions and quite frankly I looked at my TA and he had the same look on his face. We connect on a spiritual level, I'm sure of it.

Then I trekked over to Constitutional Law, which was another session of throwing half-cooked spaghetti at a window because there was no rhyme nor reason to what we learned. I think professors at this point in the year are basically just panicking because they realize how much material they still have. What they don't realize is that we're in the same state of panic and have about half the effort as last week. Seven hells student life is hard.

I then went and hid in the library reading Slaughterhouse Five and making a nineties grunge playlist because that's what I do when I get bored. I need help.

Anyway, then came organic recitation and for the first time in forever I actually knew what was going on and I only had to ask Thomas one question about the worksheet instead of sitting there in a wave of WTF IS HAPPENING. So yay!

After that, I ended up hiding in the library again and wrote a blog, which was better than writing a gloss on Vonnegut, and I almost turned that in instead, though somehow I doubt Jonas would want to read about my existential crises hiking up mountains and dealing with 20-year-old stuff when he's expecting my on-point literary analyses. I'm surprised and thankful all of you keep coming back for more day after day.

Then I was off to writing. First I tripped on the way into Hellems, which was great. Then I talked Thrones with my friend Connor and that was delightful because he was mindfucked too. After that, we talked about Kurt Vonnegut and that's always my favorite. There was one description by a Chinese writer about Vonnegut that went something like, "He's funny and contemptuous, but underneath all of that is a sad man who needs comforting," which, as I told my class, is the most accurate thing I've ever heard about Vonnegut because he's fucking hilarious and I find myself laughing out loud more often than not. But sometimes, the gravity of what he's saying hits you and you realize it's not a game and maybe we won't get out of this alive, and this world really is kind of a terrible place. And that's honestly how I feel a lot of the time. But humor is often how we face some of those tough truths. As Oscar Wilde said, "If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh. Otherwise they'll kill you." And I've never head anything more accurate.

Afterwards, I walked home in the ever-quickening winds of winter that came from the west, and it was hella cold, but for some bizarre reason I was just so happy that none of it even mattered, and that was okay. I've found myself in that position a lot this year, which has been such a nice change from everything else. Sometimes the storm is raging, but sometimes there's an eye in the storm moment and that's so nice. Believe me. It's so nice.

My roommates were absent when I got home, so I made some pizza rolls and read a couple chapters in Dance With Dragons because I deserved it, and that was so nice. Then they came home and we played Charades again until Davis came down to Paige and I shrieking "America the Beautiful" in a rendition that makes Lana Del Rey's SNL performance look brilliant. It was great. We then went to the store and I bought caffeine and food. Woot. Came home, ate dinner, and finished my prelab for the LAST ORGANIC LAB EVER YASSSS, and then I opened the word document that would become my synthesis paper. But then Dani was like, "Do you wanna watch Thrones again?" and of course I was like, "FUCK YEAH THRONES" and so we went upstairs and "Oathkeeper" was great again and things make more sense. I can breathe again.

We had a long Thrones chat afterwards again, which is always fun, and we decided we're doing A Song of Ice and Fire for Halloween and it's gonna be awesome. So far I'm going with Crissie as Elsa to her Anna and Margaery Tyrell to Thrones (though I did want to be Cersei because she's my spirit animal but I get to throw shade either way hell yeah). What have I done? Evan and I talked about episode 10, where theories concurred and that was nice, and then we talked about Ser Pounce being the One True Knight of Westeros and finally we talked about which Houses we'd be in (and I'm totally Martell because Dorne is hella progressive, plus I have a habit of telling boys I don't like that my name is Nymeria so yay).

After that, I went on another music binge whoopsie and wrote a paper about the synthesis of polystyrene while fighting the urge to sleep, failing and falling asleep, and typing some more when I woke up. 

Moral of today: I am not a successful adult. I am a huge geek that loves some things a great deal more than others and is simultaneously thrilled and dismayed this year is ending.

So my writing teacher just started watching Game of Thrones and he really likes it and I'm just like "Oh you sweet summer child" because he seems like a Stark Fan. He also said he knows what happens in Red Wedding, which led us to a talk about spoilers. Vonnegut starts off Slaughterhouse Five by telling us that the first words are "Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time" and the last are "Po-Tee-Weet?" and tells us that the whole book is largely about the firebombing of Dresden, but we don't see it until the end of the book.

But honestly, isn't that how life is? I'm a fatalist, and I'm weirdly bounded my my fear of my own mortality. We know how we came into this world. We know that it's all going to end someday. And all the rest is a whole lot of middle. You know what happens at the Red Wedding? That doesn't diminish the importance of the story. That makes it a whole lot more important. I became fiercely attached to Catelyn (and to a certain extent Robb Yolo Stark) because I knew her fate. I become fiercely attached to all of my friends and care deeply for them because I know how it ends. I know all this will someday end, and I know that we'll all become ash and dust once again, and all the things we've ever loved or will love will be obliterated and we'll fade into oblivion's eternity. But that doesn't mean that now is diminished. The now is finite, but it's not unimportant. It's beautiful, and it's yours. This is the middle. There are more stories to tell and more adventures to have and more days to stand with the earth strong and alive beneath your feet. This is not the end. Not yet.

Anyway. It's time for me to go brief a case or two (yaay).

Thanks for reading :)