--Suzanne Vega

My counselor has an annoying habit of asking inconvenient questions.

Questions about things I've taken for granted. Obvious stuff, really, like why, exactly, I feel compelled to take a full course load every semester. And it sometimes takes her several tries, but the annoying thing is that eventually I start noticing that I don't actually have a good answer.

I mean, it's obvious why I take a full course load every semester, right? There's no reason why I shouldn't be able to handle it, after all. And I want to graduate already, right?

Neither of those are very good answers, when you come down to it. Sure, in theory I should have no trouble at all handling twelve credits. But that doesn't explain why I keep feeling overwhelmed every semester. Which either means that I'm just doing a bad job of things, or that maybe I ought to reconsider the reality of the situation.

As for wanting to graduate already... why? Sure, I feel as if I ought to be out of here; I'm 26 and still a junior, for Pete's sake... which actually puts me somewhere around the median age at my college, I suspect. Hmmm. But then, my grandmother wants to know why I'm still in college, and every time I go back to Far Rockaway, everybody I run into seems surprised when they discover that I'm not about to graduate. The prevailing assumption seems to be that given how bright I am, I should be able to cruise through my entire college education in two years flat. Which might not be so far-fetched if I weren't a bloody perfectionist, and if I weren't looking for an education, rather than a degree. But I am.

So, anyway, I'm finding myself reconsidering matters, as I begin figuring out which courses I want to take next semester. I'm now considering a 10-credit schedule for next semester. Ironically, the 10 credits I have in mind would take 15 hours a week, which actually exceeds the time allotted for the typical 12-credit semester, but I'll get to this in a later entry. I have other fish to fry just now.

This is not something I have generally considered to be a problem. I'm an introvert. I need my privacy. I'm generally okay with that. And, more to the point, I don't have time for a social life anyway, as you could probably guess if you've been reading this journal for long. So I've gone to the occasional poetry reading, and I schmooze with professors and some classmates on campus, but that's about as far as it goes, on the whole.

Others have tried to point out in the past that perhaps, just perhaps, I've been piling on classes and other commitments in an effort to avoid having to, well, deal with people. (Not to mention deal with my own problems. Heck, I still haven't had a chance to write about the accident here, and I know I need to do that. But now I'm drifting from the immediate topic.) Anyway, the suggestions of said others have been noted, but mostly ignored, until recently.

I've started thinking that there just might be something to all this.

It helps that I've noticed that in each of the past couple of semesters, I've chosen one class on the basis that a friend of mine was going to be in it. Mind you, in both cases, I was already considering the class in question. In the first case, I was simply drooling over the course description, but wasn't certain I could make it there at the relatively early time it was being offered; in the second, I had a choice between two or three courses that would fill a requirement equally well. In both cases, knowing that she was going to be in the class in question was the final factor that caused me to choose that one.

The streak is probably going to end, though, 'cause we both indulged in a whole lot of English courses early on, and I think we each have only one class left to finish our major... and they don't overlap.

At any rate, perhaps the fact that I'd still consider this to be a factor ought to tell me something about my need for human contact. And maybe I ought to be upping the ante a bit, finding some way of hanging out with people outside of school.

Not that I have the foggiest idea of how to go about doing that.

In a nutshell, they and Lucy's husband had all been planning to go to a taping of a Comedy Central show featuring Lust Pollution, a band headed by a friend of Kymm's. I became acquainted with the band via Kymm's mix tapes, and liked their songs a great deal. And, coincidentally, I had mentioned to Kymm earlier in the week that their CD was really high on my famous List of CDs to Buy Once I Win the Lottery.

So when Lucy's husband got a ticket to see Letterman's taping instead, Kymm kindly invited me along, and I jumped at the opportunity. Well, as close as I get to jumping at the chance, which is to say that I had the usual misgivings about meeting anybody in person, but I'd decided awhile back that I wanted to meet Kymm in person, so I'd already gotten most of the psychological work out of the way.

And so off I went to meet them on October 8th, rushing out to TriBeCa as soon as my poetry class ended, thus quadrupling the number of escribitionists I've met in Real Life. And becoming something like the 32nd online diarist Kymm's met. The mind boggles at the thought.

Anyway, after the show we went to this place called Bubby's, where the band was, and stood around near the bar for a bit while we waited for a table. During this time I felt very much like a fish out of water, wondering just what I was doing there, and whether I really belonged there, and what I should be doing, and so on. My experience with bars has been virtually nil. But then we got to talking, and matters got better.

And then we got a table and we sat down so everybody else could eat dinner, while I confined myself to drinking water. (Somewhat ironically for a restaurant named after a Jewish grandmother, the place wasn't kosher. Which incidentally means that I really shouldn't have been in there in the first place, but let's not get into that just now, okay?)

I spent most of the time talking to Kymm, who speaks exactly the way she writes, and is generally a really cool person. And Tracing and Lucy were fun to meet, also, and, basically, I wouldn't have minded spending more time with any or all of them, were it feasible. So it was quite the enjoyable evening, all around.

To add the icing on the cake, Kymm's friend gave me a copy of their CD, which was really nice of her, and which I've really enjoyed listening to since. (My favorite songs would be "Sex Toys" and "Deadly Diva," for what it's worth.) It might have been nice, however, if, before we'd left, I'd managed to tell her something a little more articulate than "Umm, I really like your stuff." Sigh. Oh, well.

Anyway, I had plenty more to say here, but it's late, both in that this happened almost a month ago, and in that it's past five in the morning as I type this.

So, anyway, the evening ended as we walked to our respective means of transportation, with the other three imparting the Wisdom of the Elders to the new kid on the block, or so they'd have it. And, as part of this dealt with my discomfort in social situations, this would dovetail with the stuff I wrote earlier in this entry, were I currently awake enough to fit all this together neatly.