Since I had finished all my homework due Monday, when Luke invited me to Blues at the Crossroads, a blues festival in downtown Terre Haute, I jumped on the opportunity for a little fun. That, and the fact that I almost never go out on Friday and Saturday nights, but often want to, clinched the matter. For a Terre Haute gathering, it was crowded. It had nothing on city-size festivals, and even UNC’s Fall Fest was substantially more crowded. I could easily move through the crowd without touching anyone if I judged my paths correctly. I’m still weird about crowds, so it took me a minute to warm up to…

An eight-hour night of sleep has done wonders for me. There’s a certain… distance or barrier, like a thick pane of glass, between my current emotions and my angst of yesterday. Just yesterday evening at dinner, I couldn’t talk about anything related to my state of mind without fighting tears. Bleh. This morning, though, I felt a lot better; I don’t know that anything is “fixed”, per se, but I’ve danced back from the precipice I was inching towards. What this has to do with me being a padawan, I don’t know. Then again, maybe it’s more related than I think.

How am I going to break down and blow up at Bob tonight, followed by almost a half-hour of uncontrolled crying? It rendered me useless for a good hour, and I still cried even while I worked on Comp. Arch. before starting the Thorn. The problem? There ain’t one. There is absolutely nothing fucking wrong with me other than a little fatigue that I can’t even justify in terms of sleep or stress. So my schedule is busy. It’s not undoable. Hell, I’m doing it. So my research is taking a lot more of my weekday time than I planned on. We all know that life is what happens while…

After all, I didn’t know him, really. I read what he wrote. I thought when he wrote. My little world expanded when he wrote. Over the past year and a half, his writing introduced me to political and social issues I may never have heard of otherwise, much less pondered. He introduced me to Ani DiFranco’s music. He was quick to respond to my e-mailed request for (socio)linguistics authors to start fanning my blooming curiosity about the field. His passion for recognizing and pointing out social injustices piqued my interest and helped me step out of my computer-geek-bookworm-anti-social box into a more world-conscious box. I never met him in person.…