Exhaustion Comes in Many Forms

The past week was pretty difficult for a number of reasons. It started out with me waking up at 6 am on a Saturday to attend that last management class I wrote about in the previous entry. It was a great class, but I had to get up at 6 in the morning because a twelve-page paper was due as the final and I can never sleep well the day before I turn in such things. Also, I’m dependent on the campus printers because I don’t have one at home, so I always have to get over there early to make sure my paper comes out formatted the way it should be when it gets printed.

So, exhausted and taunted by a children’s lit conference I couldn’t attend, I started my finals week of summer semester. Monday was work, Tuesday was another 6 am rise and shine kind of deal, because our whole class got to go to the North Eastern Document Conservation Center for a tour. It was fabulous! They had every kind of book making supply I’ve ever wanted and then some stuff I’d never seen before. The people who worked there were predictably very, very cool. At NEDCC, they restore and preserve some of the world’s rarest printed materials. There were WWII propaganda posters, a medical text book at least 300 years old, and giant scrap books from the baseball hall of fame. It was certainly one of the neatest field trips I’ve ever been on.

Some of the girls went out drinking that night, but I couldn’t go. It wasn’t just that drinking out is expensive, but that I had my final paper for Preservation due Thursday morning,and as luck would have it I found some research at the last minute that sort of changed a lot of my paper. So I stayed up too late again, and still went to work the next day though I should have called in. I was exhausted! When my final class rolled around Thursday morning (another 6 am morning) I felt spent. After my presentation and those of my classmates, I went down to the comics shop to get myself a little $7 treat, and then I went home and just fell down.

Friday I cleaned house a bit, but mostly just sat around and recovered. I did manage to get Aral and my sister Sara their birthday presents, but other than that I was still sort of wiped out by that sucession of pre-dawn mornings, by all the stress of finals, by all the energy it takes to get those big graduate school papers together.

And then there’s today.

I’m having a bad day today. My modem has decided to hate me, and won’t let me hook up to the Internet. I’m typing this on my wonderful roommate’s computer. It’s raining heavily, and I’m trying to decide weather I feel like I can call my ex-boyfriend over to fix the computer problem. I hate having to call him for that; he’s “The Computer Guy” to everyone he knows, so they all bring their problems to him. Also, calling in Ryan makes me feel all traditionally girly. I have always prided myself on being able to fix minor car problems, on being unafraid of power tools and having the ability and will to change my own tires and move my own furniture. Having to call in a guy to fix my computer is embarrassing.

And besides, my ex isn’t home today. I know that because today is the day of a big wedding we were going to attend, the wedding of his friends that live in Arizona that we visited last March. They were super cool. Also, today was the day of another wedding I wanted to attend but didn’t book tickets to partly because of the cost and partly because I had decided to cave to Ryan on the issue of where to go. My computer crashing made me remember all that – the fight we had over it, my wimpy decision to cave, and how it ended up not mattering anyway because my friends called off their wedding and Ry and I aren’t together anymore anyway.

Tonight some of the girls from school are supposed to come over and we're going to have a little going away party for those who are going to graduate. It's got me down. It was so hard for all of us to move to Boston from other parts of the country, but those of us who came here to get our degrees made friends pretty quickly. And now, after only being friends for ten months, some of our number are all ready leaving. The party tonight is for Erin and Mairi, who became a couple while living in Simmons dorm, and are now moving to Baltimore and into promissing jobs.

And I'm all bummed, because I was just getting to know them, and now they're going to be gone. After December, it's going to happen again to more people I just felt like I was getting to be friends with. Looming over me is the prospect of what's going to happen when I graduate in five months. I really don't want to leave Boston, but I'm seeing that as an increasingly likely chance. It'll be a year that I've been here in just a couple of weeks, and I still haven't "got it" culturally in a lot of ways.

But I love this place! Here there are so many possibilites for my career, and I'm living the kind of life I've always wanted to lead. I don't have to own a car thanks to the lovely train system, and anything I could want is well within close reach.

It's just that I'm exhausted in every way a person can be. I'm tired of dating the wrong guys, I'm tired of living in the wrong places, I'm tired of what exams to do me, I'm tired of not having enough money, I'm tired of dealing with family problems, I'm tired of not getting to be around the people I love enough, I'm tired of not getting enough snuggle time. I think I've whined enough now, and will wind up this post so I can get ready for tonight.

Aral's computer tried to eat this post several hours before I finally managed to get it on my web site. Well, this is just a bad day. Sometimes you have to have one, I suppose. I'm going to go eat Little Debbie cakes and take a nap before the party, maybe that'll make everything better :)