I'm almost 100% I'm going to regret posting this, which makes it all the more thrilling to write it

I finished, in one way or another, with my final paper for Introducción a la Novela Picaresca on Tuesday at 5:36 PM. Even though I felt like I was sweating blood over every...single...blessed...sentence I wrote for that paper, I did enjoy the frantic research and connection I kind of did, and I actually wished I had way more time to write several more pages on what I had just found. So I guess it was worth it. That part of my college career is over, that class is.

So now I'm sitting here with my half-heartedly packed boxes of random papers. Going through my pictures, papers, and letter will have to be another post for a different time because, wow, there were some goodies I found stashed away in between dust bunnies there.

What I'm more anxious to talk about is the escalating amount of knots in my stomach that have been keeping me up quite frequently lately.

When I was applying to the UC schools, I remember writing what I would now consider to be a pretty cheesy personal statement essay involving my white 1994 villager that figured quite prominently in my high school adventures. Rory might fondly remember the time I drove him home and I sat a full five minutes in the car speculating out loud what looked so funny about my car. Was it that the side door was smashed? Was it that the arm rests were broken? Was it that there was a dwarf living in the trunk? No, the rearview mirror was off.

I always have enjoyed zipping around the greater Los Angeles area and in random areas around the state, mostly because I don't like sitting in one place too long when I have the means to get around, but also because I just like enjoying what I can find. This, naturally, involved the long and sometimes torturous process of getting lost because I had never visited some of the areas before. However, once I had visited the place before, it was rare that I would be utterly without direction if I ever did get onto the wrong road around the area. I could basically tell which way I needed to go by licking my finger to test the wind, smelling the scent from my previous trip, and I don't know, making use of the internal compass that emerges in me when I actually need to start acting like a bonafide 20 year old with two years of overpriced private university education under her belt.

However, the situations I've found myself in lately have left me high and dry without even a direction to point me in to fix things I know went wrong. To continue beating the dead horse that is the driving metaphor, today Kat was Kool enough to drive Mary Kate and me to the Target on 86th street. There, the problems were easy to identify: Oops, we have to turn onto 80th street instead of 79th, no matter, we can just continue on since they're parallel, we'll end up in the same place we need to be. Oops, Panera has no knives, guess we won't be cutting the apple in half.

Or, OOPS, my teacher gave me a B+ in a class i got an 89.8% in, I guess she's a BLAZING IMBECILE WHO LEADS A LOVELESS LIFE.

(Don't worry. I'm over it. Totally.)

(Only not at all...that witch)

Basically, if I've done something before, it's easier for me to identify the problem. Or if I've been somewhere before and I go wrong, I feel like I can fix it or move on without fixing it. But when I'm stranded without someone to point me in the right direction or to show me that here and here is where you went wrong, what are you going to do about it? I am thrown into a great state of unnecessary worry and self-interrogation that, you know, does make me stay up till 3:32 AM.

I know what you're thinking now. That's life, that's growing up, honey. You're not always going to have someone to tell you what you did wrong, and you just have to figure it out yourself. Which, in a way is comforting. Billions of other people before me have probably gone through very similar situations, and well, granted they are dead now, I'm sure that it's not the situation like this that put them in their graves. It's just natural that this happens and well, eventually I'll get my bearing somehow. By either never figuring out what really happened, realizing that it's not the process that mattered but rather the outcome, or that I'm imagining things.

In any case. It's time for me to get to sleep. I blame my Lost withdrawal on this post. Or my the papers I need to throw away. Or the bright lights in the room. But I kind of actually just blame myself.