I’m sitting in the Dirt Cowboy, a small coffee shop on the corner of Main Street in Hanover, right at the edge of the Dartmouth Green. It is 9:40 at night (though of course later by the time I get done with this), and I’m distracted right now by the people and noise and general turbulence of my surroundings (and NOW, and HERE, is where I end up feeling encouraged enough to actually write). I say turbulence, because I feel very much right now that I am adrift from the rest of the world, and that it continues along in its rushing river of reality, apart from me. I see people walk in and walk out, I see Dartmouth coeds sit down and work on homework together, I can see 3 laptops from my seat (there were 4 earlier, but one left… an iBook), and another is about to leave. I myself am on my PDA, using my portable keyboard. I don’t know why I do this: I have a very nice, more versatile laptop. I suppose that is why I use my PDA for writing: it is smaller, more portable, less dynamic, harder to become distracted from things other than writing. Or maybe it’s just that the battery lasts longer on my PDA, and the table that is near the power outlet is almost always busy. Or something.

Ponder this. Mickey spent a week with me. We both got sick, we did puzzles together, we had lots of really fantastic sex, and (of course) we fought. Why did we fight? What about? Little things. I’ve become to be overly sensitive to what she says, as has she to what I say, so it seems like one is attacking the other, even when we aren’t. This is very, VERY frustrating. I have no wish to hurt her in any way, but sometimes I wonder if I’m going to finally hurt her to the point where we stop communicating — the little death that signals the end of the relationship. I’m afraid of that, made moreso in that we’ve selected a date to get married. (Don’t get me wrong! I’m looking forward to marrying her. I WANT to marry her. Mickey is a fantastic girl, who fulfills in one fashion or another the things I’ve been looking for in a girl for ages. It just also scares the bejeezus out of me that I might alienate her, or that we might drift apart. Until then, I just have to try my damndest to make sure that doesn’t happen. We need to keep talking.) What happens if we drift apart after we’re married? I don’t want to put her through that. Hell, on a purely selfish level, *I* don’t want to go through that.
We’ll see.

I have about $35,000 left, though I’m going to be augmenting that soon with more money for school. (Woohoo, reimbursement for some of my earlier expenses!) This is relatively unsettling, since I have no clue when that will be increasing, and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to float until I’m done with school (I’ve been augmenting my normal school funds every year with that trust money…). This means I’d have to get a job. This isn’t the end of the world, but I desperately want to find a way to go directly into doing what I’d like to do: design (game, web, graphic, whatever), writing, and art. I suppose what it comes down to is being afraid that if I let myself settle for a job less than what I want, before I’ve had time to develop the skillset to GET the job I want, I’ll get sucked into the job and not find the time or energy to finish learning what I feel I need to know and moving on. Will I get sucked into the rat race? $35,000 is NOT that much of a buffer between me and that, despite what anyone else says. But that’s elitist of me. Why should I be so much more “privileged” than everyone else so that I don’t have to do the “grunt jobs”? In my defense, I have worked a few low level jobs (cashier/clerk, ticket taker, and a bit higher up: database jockey), but it bothers me that even on an internal level, I feel the need to defend myself about that. I suppose that is why I take it so poorly when other people give me shit about that.

Brings me to another topic: why am I so damn sensitive? I get offended/hurt when people give me shit (not always, but if it starts to seem excessive to me), and if it seems like they are patronizing me (or in general slighting/snubbing/looking down on me), I get really hurt and offended. I feel like I should be better than that. I shouldn’t always feel so hurt by the actions of others.

Enough.