And then reality hit.

You see, while a normal, sane person might look at a day like today—a day completely free of prearranged responsibilities—and say, “Hey! Today is my opportunity to do all kinds of things! I can get together with friends, I can write, I can draw, I can take care of projects that have been nagging me,” I took one look at today and said, “Too many options. Overwhelmed. Going back to bed.”

And that is how I found myself, after I returned from taking my roommate to the train station this morning, sleeping away half the afternoon. You could argue that I needed the sleep, but all the same, it left me feeling bitter at myself for wasting all that precious time.

One of the nice things about having a confining, crazy-making school schedule, I’ve discovered, is that it tends to crowd out all the ways you could be spending your time and focuses your attention on the task at hand: completing schoolwork. In that way, it actually removes responsibility. It also prevents you from sleeping through the whole day.

There I go again—eyeing that grass on the other side of the fence. Don’t worry… in a few weeks I’ll be longing for summer break.

…

I was afraid of that. It was a romantic idea and all, but now that I’m sitting here staring at this blank entry field I’m wondering if I made my promise in a moment of misguided fervor.

I’ll talk about my room.

The room that I share with another student named Tiffany is on the bottom floor of our house. And by the bottom floor, I really mean the basement. Right outside our door is a little hallway, and off of that is the main room of the basement.

Our room has a huge walk-in closet on one wall, big enough that even divided in two it provides each of us ample storage room.

My side of the room has a bed, a bookcase, and a wee wooden writing desk that I found at Goodwill two days before I moved in. I absolutely love my desk; it has tiny drawers and a leather writing surface that pulls out to make more room.

The wall above my bed and my desk is covered with a collage of photographs and two drawings that I did in art practicum this quarter. Directly above my bed is a set of four mirror tiles arranged in a diamond pattern that were here when I came—and they’re glued to the wall.

The wireless internet modem is upstairs, in the kitchen—which happens to be directly above Tiffany’s bed. This means that if you sit on Tiffany’s bed, your internet connection is just about perfect… but it wanes a little bit with each step you take away from that spot. By the time you reach my desk on the other side of the room, your connection is iffy at best.

So you can imagine how it is out here in the basement hallway, where I am sitting because Tiffany is already in bed, and I do not want to disturb her with my ticker-tapping and my bright computer screen.

Come to think of it, I guess all that is just my way of saying that I would kind of like to get up off of this cold, hard basement floor and go to bed. So I think that is what I will do. G’night.

P.S. Tonight we watched Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. It was very interesting. It’s a very quiet movie, but I think I liked that about it.