Happy Endings

I cannot remember feeling this ambivalent about a semester's end before. Maybe I finally internalised the fact that at this time next year, I will be graduating.
It might also be that I met so many great people in my classes this semester. We toiled and commiserated and whispered irrelevant comments for three months, and now what? In January we'll say "Hi" when we pass each other on campus, in February we'll smile, and in March we'll give each other quizzical glances and wonder, Do I know that person?
Obviously, I'm not that great at leaping from colleague to friend. If I were Roz, I would have invited all of my friendly classmates over to my house before Thanksgiving. But I'm not Roz, and now the semester's over. Over!
There's so much I should have said and so much I should have done. I hope I haven't thrown away a chance for something wonderful.

Breakthrough

As of very early this morning, I am over the guy I was stuck on all semester. This is a big step for me: I can now move on. I would like to claim responsibility for overcoming my completely inappropriate crush, but the truth is that he finally revealed a very petty and weak side of himself, and just like that, I was free.
Now if somebody would ask me out for once, I could start to like them instead of all these men I can't have. How easy that sounds!

Fuel

I have discovered that a lot of people run on willpower. I do not. I'm not even sure I have willpower. Stubbornness I've got (I used to have a lot more stubbornness before most of it was beat out of me), but not willpower.
I run on sleep and food, بس. Stimulants cannot replace them. Money motivates me to a point, but the last time I pulled a lot of overtime my body shut down. I was making time and a half! Yet there at work I crashed; it's a miracle I made it home after stumbling to the car.
Maybe these simple needs makes me earthy.

Then comes heights, corpses, and vermin

My second-greatest fear is that I'm not normal:
My greatest fear is that I am.

Sublime Euphoric Agony

Books seep under my skin and mingle with my blood as I read them. They stay with me for days after I return them to the shelf or the library, coloring my speech and influencing my pen. I dream about the beautiful and difficult passages. The very best books, the ones that press me down to black despondency and then, at the nadir, release breathless me to catharsis, blend into my psyche until I no longer know what came from me and what came from Steinbeck.
Below are some of the books which so affected me:

The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany
Hard Times by Charles Dickens
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
"Interpreter of Maladies" by Jhupma Lahiri
Hey, Nostradamus! by Douglas Coupland
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
A Room of Ones Own by Virginia Woolf
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
There's a Boy in Here: Emerging from the Bonds of Autism by Judy and Sean Barron
"pity this busy monster,manunkind," by e. e. cummings
Red Passport by Katherine Shonk
"The Lover Desparing to Attain unto his Lady's Grace Relinquisheth the Pursuit" by Thomas Wyatt