, a day of doubts and yawns and things put into slots of time from 8:45 a.m. to 11:20 p.m. It was a long day, and I’m blinking too much now, and my bangs are stuck together, and that aching feeling of weariness is hanging behind my eyes. I had a midterm and three classes and three hours of work and two hours of sorting through scholarships and deciding who deserved to get $500 or $100 or none at all when all of them deserved something for just making it here. I made mistakes and remembered that I’d forgotten to do stupid little things that normally come as easily as putting on my rings in the morning–the one with a blue and a green Swarovski crystal I bought for 5 euros from an old man selling them on a table in the street in Rome, the one with an orange stone that I place on top of the first one to make a triangle of crystals, the silver one that looks like a wedding band but twists at the back and says, “Nothing is impossible.” I can’t not wear them, just like I can’t not call to confirm prices of a theater show since the figures I found aren’t from the official website. It would be stupid to assume they’re right without verifying. But I was stupid. In other news, the prices were also right. 

But I digress. All of these, these stupid, ridiculous minor details that made me angry at myself and tired of this long, long day, went away when I did three hours of interviews with two different groups. I have my doubts about being a journalist all the time, and I’m sure I’ll have those same doubts when I go to write these two pieces, especially since I always feel pressure to live up to the calibre of the people I’m writing about. But for now, I’m content. There are people who find ways to have fun and be weird and strange and unpredictable in completely different ways. But the fact that they’re out there doing it makes me happy. Is it odd that it makes me happy even when I’m not involved? Especially because I crave — more than anything in the world — some group of people who make me feel safe and comfortable and loved? It should make me jealous. I’m not jealous. I’m incredulous — at the talent that is out there, at the love between people and between them and their craft, at the things that happen every day that go unnoticed to so many people. That’s why I write — to try and express some semblance of the life that pulses around us. I have said and wrote that many times and still, it boggles my mind that there is so much out there. Because in the end, it was just a day. There will be another one and another one and another one. All different, but all days.