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Apparently Jennifer mostly hangs out with people from high school as well.
And she's over forty. That's saying something, isn't it?

But I had fun tonight. I showed up when only the boozers where there, and stayed until the diners came, and then even stayed when the rockers came. I watched people shake their fat asses and rock soccer mom haircuts and it was neat.

Hard rock isn't my thing, though I like live music -- of the jazz/blues variety. My ears are ringing but there is a big new pillow waiting for me upstairs, and I just thought my mantra quietly to myself: You best learn to live while you're alive/

it's better to burn out than to fade away/
(ha ha hey hey)/
best learn to live while you're alive/

That has kind of been my mantra this whole semester.

I love that. I say semester, as though my life were still bound to increments of sixteen credit hours and deadlines and articles and term papers. No more. I could mark my life with anything. Decathlons. Road trips. In midnights, in cups of coffee. Something positive anyway. Something based on me, and not based on someone else that's for sure.

You best learn to live while you're alive

I guess that's what really got me through this -- besides the caffeine and you and the Saturdays of laying on the floor listening to four solid hours of public radio without moving. The knowledge that at the end of the day, I would most likely get to be sleeping. Comfortably. At the end of the day, I could drink somerthing warm and go to sleep. It could all end there. So it didn't matter what happened from the moment my head left the pillow in the morning until my head hit it again that night. Because it would be bookended by sleep, and comfort.

It's an insomniac's method to be sure. And maybe not the most uplifting method, but it was helpful to me somehow. It seems familiar -- similar to the thing I used to do in science class in the 6th grade. I would excuse myself for extended walks to the furthest possible bathroom I was allowed to go to, running my fingertips on the rough cinder block walls thinking to myself, time keeps moving. No matter how slow and hopeless it feels in this room, at this moment in this hallway, time is moving forward. Eventually it will end. It will.

It's hard to remember that things aren't forever sometimes.

People struggle with how ephemeral things are, but I think the possibility of stasis is even more frightening. Change can be daunting but what kind of person stays in one place while great waves of change carry other people in directions you envy? What kind of people resist the pull of currents? I understand having goals, ambitions, but what does it mean when you swim against what's pulling you? What kind of person are they, these people who say no?

I've seen them. I've worked with many. They say I would but. They say I wish I could. But nothing you can, could if you wanted and it felt right.

But none of them can do what we're doing, in two cities. That's what they say anyway.

Really, they probably can't.

But they can all meet at a dim building filled with harsh looking men and women, eat crabs and shrimp dumped onto the table with their fingers, and dance to loud covers of 80's classics. They can do that. And no one should ever stop them.