Turn and face the strange ch-ch-changes

As of late, I have been struck by a strange feeling of something akin to anxiety, but not really appropriately or adequately expressed by that word. Existential restlessness might be a better term, but I'm still trying it on for size.

There is exactly one month until the end of school, but for the first time in 18 years, I am not anticipating a summer that is bookended by the eventual return to class, routine, new and old books, teachers, and faces. It is a summer that signifies the end of my sojourn as a student, rather than a brief and restful hiatus. I am extremely, unbelievably, ridiculously excited to graduate, but the pangs of uncertainty are beginning to hit in a very palpable way.

It's been beautiful out lately, and all I want to do is lay out in the sun and daydream about the future and think about a life without obligations and school. I want to tan in Hudson River Park and take naps in the breeze in my bedroom and walk around NYC for hours in the warm weather and complain about the humidity and understand why people are always so happy to leave the city in the summer. But it's only April. And it's too early. The weather shift automatically does positive things for my general mood and outlook on life, but it also wreaks a little bit of havoc on my work ethic.

It doesn't help that the impending summer, for the first time in my life, is one for which I have no plan. I couldn't identify that this was part of the cause of my anxieties at first, but for this compulsive planner the fact that I can't even say with 100% certainty what CITY I'll be in for the summer, much less what I'll be doing there, is starting to give me pause. I'm waiting to hear from about 11 different internships who all promised a "beginning of April" date to hear back; because I haven't heard from any yet I'm of course beginning to assume that the real world sucks just as much as NYU and no news means bad news.

Then there's the Cleftos/5 Women debacle. For those not in the know - though I'm not sure why I qualify; I allegedly have readers but it seems odd to me that my musings reach an audience. I've strayed. For those not in the know, my final Cleftos concert is the 24th of April, a Saturday evening. My final show at NYU is 5 Women Wearing the Same Dress, scheduled to open Wednesday April 28th. Astute theatre people might already be seeing the conflict here, of course that a show opening on the 28th would logically be teching on the 24th. I've bored myself to death with all the things that suck balls and are killing me about this conflict, but suffice it to say there is no day that goes by that I don't think about this since I learned about the crucial error in judgement I had made by alleging that, why yes, it is in fact possible for me to be in two places at once. And suffice it to say that I feel acutely the quantity of people I WILL be letting down with my inability to do that one crucially important task.

I'd be remiss not to recognize that this boils down to this being the final month of an extremely important first chapter of my life. And I'd be lying if I said that that wasn't a large - if not the undeniably largest part of my... funk?

But how to combat it, when I move from excited to anxious to stressed to apathetic to elated to terrified to confidently motivated to blasé to serene ten thousand times a day.

The same way I've always dealt, I guess. Have another sip of a strong cup of coffee, take a deep breath, and just keep on keeping on.