THE LAST WEEK IN AUGUST

Around this time of year I feel sentimental and stir-crazy. I know that's an odd mixture, but that's the way it is.

In the past this last week in August brought with it the overarching feeling of something new. While it usually meant school, it was the sense of something beginning that got me revved up. Nine months layed bare before me, open to everything I could dream up. And last August this peculiar feeling first overcame me, and I didn't quite know what it was. I didn't have to make a haul down to Champaign, or buy books, or perform any apartment duties. I just rolled from August 31st to September 1st with nary a lost wink of sleep. It was simply a new day, but something felt different. I missed that beginning of something new. Even though it was school, something I generally didn't like, the fact that I was not experiencing some kind of change caught me like I didn't expect it to.

Today, stuck where I am without any change or beginning on the horizon, I find myself once again, feeling nostalgic and annoyed.

I'm filling this "void" this week by keeping busy. I'm busier than I have been all summer and it is all absolutely calculated.

This is not a post revealing any kind of deep depression, not at all. Just an awareness that I'm continuing on my course, like it or not, on a road that leads to somewhere I don't know, without an exit in sight. Nothing is changing this fall, nothing large anyway.

What to do....

RAY, GONE AWAY

My cousin Ray left last Thursday for a semester in England. He is studying in a castle, once owned by Stanford, now by Univ. of Evansville; the joint has a pub in the basement and room entirely of gold. Pretty sweet. It's in Grantham, England, a hundred miles or so NW of London.

My family is going to visit him over Thanksgiving (good rates, decent (enough) weather) and I cannot wait. I only saw Ray twice this summer, on his first day back from his first year of college at our cousin's First Communion party in May, and again on the night before he left for another continent, but I'm gonna miss that kid. I really wanted to use the word "first" as many times as possible without the sentence breaking of its own weight. I think I succeeded.