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- Weekend after Thanksgiving, just a few weeks till Christmas, catch your breath. I have homework to grade - they'll turn in one more homework assignment next week, which I'll also have to grade, and then they'll have their final assignment and grad student term papers and I'll grade those and the semester will be over. This is really only a few weeks away. We've got three classes next week and the week after that is grad student presentations and everything's pretty much over. Things are moving along. Long-lost friend, planning to leave town again. He owes me dinner, said he'll take me out to a restaurant and then he's taking off. I tell him I'd rather have him cook for me again. (This is a way to get to spend more time with him, have another evening with him in my kitchen.) When can we do this, he asks. (It will destroy me for a couple days, I can't do it in the middle of the week.) How about next weekend, I say. How about next weekend? (I will be fine - I lost him years ago and survived that, I know how to live without him - I will be fine, it will just take me a couple days to pick myself back up.) (Meanwhile I've been reading about how to deal with an alcoholic and I know I have to say to him that there is help if he wants it. He thinks he's defective, he thinks there's some terrible curse on him, he doesn't seem to realize that he's suffering from something that's very common, that is not unique to him, that there is help for. He can leave town [but fuck I don't want him to], he can do whatever he wants but he needs to know if he doesn't already that there is help.) Meanwhile I have to keep my focus, just two more weeks. I've felt like I was barely hanging on, this entire semester - this entire semester. He and I found each other again just like 10 days before the semester started and I've felt like I've been barely keeping it together this whole time. I will be quite proud of myself if I can make it through the next two weeks without losing it completely. (Not sure why things have happened the way they have. We were so young when we met. There's no use thinking that whole thing was a fluke - you don't just find someone again like this. These things don't just happen.)
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