I’m supposed to be packing

but for some reason it’s more difficult than I expected. After all, I am excited for a new place, a new city, a new set of vocational and academic pursuits, and a new outlook on life every morning – one where I don’t hit the snooze button eighteen times… hopefully. The thing is, I never used to be a snooze button person. In college I was a regimented 8-hours-of-sleeper, meaning that I could sleep eight hours at a time, and that was about it. I would just wake up after that. I rarely got [or get] eight hours of sleep, but the point is that I could usually wake up when my alarm went off once, and know that I had to get up, and just do it. The promise of coffee as soon as I could climb out of my jammies and into real people clothes was mostly all I needed. But all of that changed when I got a job I hated going to last summer, and it still didn’t even change back when I traded it for a job I liked instead.

This is something I tell myself to feel better about the future. Through experience, I know that school makes me crazy, alllllllmost literally, as I steadily accumulate more than my share of wild-eyed absent-minded ramblings and obsessive neuroses, and enter into periods of mind-racing insomnia and bi-weekly mental meltdowns. I have certainly enjoyed a year away from these things. But at the same time, I still used to be able to get up on time, and I think it’s because there was always something to get up for—whether it was a friend to see by the mailboxes, or a new song on my ipod for the bike ride to campus, or even a paper to finish and hand in before noon… because as crazy as school makes me, it still makes me feel vital and happy and accomplished and ALIVE and like I am doing what I should be.

So as I procrastinate and procrastinate with the packing up of my Harrisburg year, I think about waking up and sincerely being happy that I am awake, and excited for the day to come. But it’s still slow going. I know it’s a good thing we have going here, and I am very sad to leave it—even if I am mooching here for another month, squatting in a claim shanty corner of Liz’s not-big-enough-for-two bedroom on an army cot, my term here *technically* ended last weekend… I admire the so many people I know who embarked on more solitary exciting journeys after graduation, and I know that I probably would never have survived such a thing. I never trust myself not to be lonely. And I am pretty sure that even if my job/life pursuit was something stellar, I would still be lonely if I wasn’t with my friends.

Yesterday, I biked the entire Green Belt—a 20-mile ring around the city that weaves through some of its more forgotten corners—on a wildly impractical beach cruiser, which is one of those cases of style-over-functionality to which I often fall susceptible. It was the perfect cap to a perfect weekend, and tt was lovely and glorious to be out in the summer with friends, feeling worn out but accomplished and happy by the time we made it back to the river and home. It reminded me again that I’m glad to live here, and glad to have this year. I want to always be this thankful for having laughter every day because I know not everyone has been this lucky. This is why packing has been difficult.