good morning.

Sometimes waking up at 9:30 in the morning and forcing oneself out of bed feels pretty damn good, after the first few minutes of regret and drowsiness are over. Back to my usual habit of hitting up the only Trader Joe's in Manhattan just after it opens. I'm feeling pensive today, maybe because I don't have much to do, except go the gym and do some laundry. And clean up the apartment before the animal handler comes and call Gilda and go get some wine.

The pictures of me and my friends that are all over my walls are more representative than the pictures I brought in frames of me and my friends before freshman year, except for the Camp pictures. But out of all the kids from home (non-Camp) that I am pictured with, I am still friends with two and a half of them: Whitney, Mike, and sort of Chris. And Jennessa, I suppose. Okay, so three and a half of them. Or four, if we're going to be kind to poor Chris, which I so rarely am, and who is far happier than I am on a regular basis, and so should not be referred to as "poor Chris" any longer.

I got the job I interviewed for on Wednesday, so I am hopefully going to have two jobs. One as a babysitter to a 9 year old boy with autism two afternoons a week. And the other, the interview job, as a mentor in the life coaching program at a company called JobPath, mentoring and helping one, two, or three, depending on how schedules work out, young adults around my own age with high-functioning autism. I am pretty excited by the prospect of working again.

School is kind of like my job, and work is kind of like my extracurricular - in my brain, that is, though both are entirely necessary. School this semester is going to be hard and take up a huge amount of my time. Drunken nights are probably going to become mostly a thing of the past, and I am either going to be working or studying just about all the time. I don't mind that, though, even though I don't know how interesting Cognition will be to me, and even though writing for Pat C. Hoy II will take probably hours, twice a week. Late nights, coffee, study. I don't know why, but studying actually sounds fun to me.

I'm kind of tired of being a drunken, staggering fool, as fun as it was and always will be, I'm sure. I think my classes this semester are going to be harder, less intuitive, and more ass-kicking than last semester, though Child and Adolescent Psychopathology and Developmental Psychology, classes that came pretty easily to me, will always be near and dear to my heart. I like being a homebody. And if being a homebody involves a drink or two, well, that's fine, but once school starts, those nights where I would drink a bottle of wine in one sitting are going to be a thing of the past. No bars, no clubs. Snuggling at home and watching a movie or playing Uno or something simple, having a good conversation. It's all I want. Maybe this is a function of so many of my friends being abroad - I wouldn't doubt it, but still, I am ready for school.

My Cognition textbook is waiting for me in the mailroom downstairs. I'm scared of it, but hopefully in the next four months, I will be able to get something out of it.