My iPod is the soundtrack for a simpler time

You know, I don't get all those bloggers who are professors who talk about the start of the academic year like it's this great fresh start and new beginning. What I learned this summer is that it never really ends, it's just that the paychecks let up for awhile.

I'm not sure I was ever happier or more optimistic than I was last year at this time.

Considering everything that happened last fall, maybe it's better this way, to begin the semester exhausted, broken, shattered, and fighting back tears on the 4 train, trying to decide whether to go with the half-Xanax or two beers to get to sleep...the Xanax may be more reliable, but it's easier to replenish the beers.

It's not like I had a lot of expectations last fall. But still. I was so happy.

The problem is that it's not like I have nothing left to lose, either. I would say, there's nowhere to go but up but that isn't true. There's so much farther down it isn't funny; best case scenario I'm still force to have to be thinking in years when I don't know how I'm going to survive November.

And I have to keep pressing forward.

Is it wrong to want a knight in shining armor? And why are the most harmless fantasies published so brutally, as if the fate of the entire world rests on whether or not you think you can be happy on your own. (This, for me, is one of the questions raised in my hundredth reading of Tennyson's Maud.)

(I can only react; I can't initiate. I can only hope that someone will be passing by. And you know it, more than anyone--no matter how badly you wanted to see me, you never would have come to Brooklyn if I had picked up the phone and called you. And you're the only person I've called my best friend in ten years.)

All this time I've been worried that having someone love me and telling him I loved him back would be scary. But it isn't that at all. All I want is a tiny space of stability, something easy.

Or, failing that, a reason to go for Xanax or beer and possibly fewer bugs.