midnight phone calls

My older sister has a rule (okay, a few, I'm sure, but I'm only focusing on one): no phone calls between 9p and 9a. At some point in my life, I have internalized this rule. Whenever I call someone within those hours, anxiety boils up in me. Whenever someone else calls me during these hours, my first reaction is always, with varying degrees of panic, 'Oh god, what's wrong?'*

Anyhow, there've been plenty of nights when I feel like I just want to call someone. To call and say something so pointless as, 'I'm meeting with Dr Chair today and I'm afraid that all intelligent thought will seep from my head into the the nether-regions of the universe not to be retrieved EVER.' Or, to call and say nothing at all, but just to connect with someone, like some non-physical handholding. Or, to call and say, 'I quit. The end.'

And, although I've been assured by many (and I'll probably be reassured here soon) that you are out there for me when I'm ready to call on you, I can still never quite make that phone call. Every freaking time, I hesitate and think, 'I'll just be wasting her time. He has his own stuff to deal with and doesn't need my whining. And, that's what it is anyway: whining.' This doesn't even begin to get at the mental screwiness whilring through my head, but you're getting an idea here.

So, tonight, it's the Dr Chair variety of anxiety (actually, it's the exact anxiety typed out above). I'll just send this off into the ether and hope that calms me. And, I'll remind myself that in twenty-one days, this semester will officially be over, but that really, I hope to have it wrapped up in fourteen.

I can do this.



Carole King and James Taylor "You've Got a Friend" [I've been somewhat in love with Carole King for most of my life now. Just thought I'd share.]

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* Let's set aside my own neuroses. Please, if you need, feel free to call me whenever. We all know that my sleep pattern is so non-patterny that I'm more likely to be asleep at two o'clock in the afternoon than two o'clock in the morning anyway.