Kittens to cats

The week of September 1st is always a bit jagged in Boston, and especially for me. Between the move-ins and move-outs, the crap on the sidewalks, the moms and dads navigating badly as they drop off their freshmen/women, pretty much everything reminds me of school.

Now, I miss school, and not just because I have a fondness for anxiety. I miss the smell of new notebooks, the click of new pens, and the neat, exact edges of unopened books. I love peeling price stickers off of things that are so new that the price sticker is barely on there. I miss the reunions with people you've missed all summer, the eager introductions with people you're just meeting, the promise of brand-spankin'-newness everywhere.

But these days, I miss feeling the rusty cogs of my brain begin to turn again. I try to self-educate, but I miss the brilliancy of the moment when someone else's perspective cracks a window in my brain and I just... see new things. Of course my reading and poking does this for me, but I love a conversation that challenges my every thought.

Which actually comes down to this: I miss my fellow nerds.

I talked to Arahsae today via gchat, or whatever it's called. And I ran into two other Simmons peeps near various train stops. And I have more and more people asking me, all the time, "Why are you at Starbucks? Aren't you in school or something?"

Or something.

But here's the underlying truth, the covenant with fate I seem to keep... All ends in entropy. Everything goes pear-shaped eventually, as my favorite Brits say. Some things start new and make life better while you work on them, but all things unmanaged age and fade and fall apart. Kittens inevitably turn into cats. Cats are okay, but kittens are waaaay cooler.

That's not a direct line of logic, I guess. More than preferring my metaphorical kittens, I'm just sick at heart from all the people and things that have left me here in my dismal patterns. It's completely natural to leave things behind and therefore to occasionally feel left-behind, but I'm just tired of it. Sus once said that every friendship has an expiration date; it may be tomorrow, it may be seven years from now, it may be the year 3012. I guess in my life this has held true, but not only for friendships. Every new situation has an expiration date. That's what kills me. These days I'm apt to obsess about the ends of things before they start because I'm sick to death of entropy. I've had my fucking fill of cats.