You too, cookie?

I'm having a minor meltdown today. I just feel so get-drunk-and-watch-Billy-Wilder- movies. As Addison DeWitt from "All About Eve" would say, "you're maudlin and full of self-pity. You're magnificent." Maybe I'll just sit in my apartment playing Leibestraum over and over again, knocking ice and whiskey against the side of a highball glass.

I feel like I can't actually quit school like I want. I feel afraid of my future, like it's all scary and uncertain. I feel terrified that I'm not good at anything. What am I going to do outside school? I feel panicked. Today is a day where I think, who am I kidding. I'm no writer, I'm no nothing. Not a scholar not a student, I'm not anything or anyone. I feel like I don't have anything to give the world or myself. And I wish I did.

I skipped class this morning. Another class I hate- jesus, which one don't I at this point?

I feel like my life right now is fraught with failure everywhere I look. This isn't who I wanted to be at 25. I wanted to be more successful, smarter, something.

I'm feeling just a profound sense of rejection from the world lately. I feel like someone who doesn't fit in anywhere. Where is my sense of home? School doesn't want me- no vocation seems to want me. I just don't belong anywhere. And I'm scared I'm not going to find anywhere to belong. Ever.

I think I'm coming to resent people whom I suspect of knowing what they're doing. People who have careers and families. I think I might hate them a little. Because the nature of their lives makes me feel deficient. They occupy spaces that I would like to go, and maybe places in which I would also like to take up residence. But for some reason I can't book tickets there to save my life. Why do they get to go and I don't? It makes having a mortgage seem as exotic as finally taking that trip to Europe.

My life is all theory and no practice. My brother, in contrast, is all practice with very little theorizing. Instead of contemplating the nature of the universe and the genesis of life, he found a wife and had a baby. Instead of worrying about the sustainability of modern living practices, he went out and bought a house. And I am racked with jealousy over this ability to move through moments of life without stopping to try and make each one pregnant with profundity.

Yesterday I got off the train in a foul mood. I couldn't believe another Tuesday had rolled around and that I had no one to blame for Tuesdays as they were but myself. I signed up for a marathon day thinking this would make me happy- to pack work all into one highly concentrated 14 hour period. Lesson learned. I do NOT like this approach to work anymore than I do to juice.

I walked slowly down the concrete steps at the station because I think this makes me better than others who are rushing. Near the doors, there is a dunkin donuts stand where two or three people are queuing up for coffee. They are all standing in an enormous puddle on the floor, waiting to order. And for some reason I find this deeply reassuring. It makes me almost affectionate towards these strangers. I like that they are in line for something. In a puddle no less. Human nature, in this picture, seems very solid. Coffee is worth stopping for. Waiting for. In a grimy puddle of mystery liquid at a subway station if need be.

I wanted to stop for coffee, but I didn't. Because I had no cash on me. Because I never have cash on me. Because a wallet perpetually full of cash is a hallmark of grownups with real lives and jobs and routines that include going to the dry cleaner and ATM regularly. And with this, Tuesday turned, on a dime, into a big conspiracy against me- every tableau of people on the street looked like an indictment of my delayed adulthood and ungrounded life. Even the cookie I bought three hours later to feel better didn't cut it for me. Because next to the single cookies for single individuals are boxes of cookies. Boxes of cookies imply a series of lives and mouths than can surround these cookies- a group that will be accountable as a team for seeing to the cookies' timely mass consumption. I couldn't handle a box of cookies. My life cannot accommodate that.

So this is where I'm at today. This is how bad it's become. That even the fucking cookies are against me. And I thought we were such good friends. When even the reliability of refined sugar flees from you, it is very clearly your own personal no good horrible sleep it off ides of march kind of day.