Fears...

I'm up early this morning and I'm stressing about money.

I look at my bank account and I see that I am living paycheck to paycheck. This is normal, Nathan, you're a college student. I can't help feeling like I am living so far beyond my means that it is going to come and bite me in the ass later.

In my history of the american working class class the teacher was talking about the need to make capital. The need for property. The need to dig our way out of the poor who live how? paycheck to paycheck.

It's daunting. It makes me wish I could turn back the clock. That I could take the last two years back and instead fade into obscurity at some university with half the debt, studying something like anthropology, or mythology, or philosophy or something that could make me some money maybe. Instead I'm studying fiction writing at a college that has sucked me clean dry of money for the next thirty years.

It's one of those things I think about now with only 8 days left of school. That I think about with the fact that I am about to go to grad school. That I haven't published anything yet. That I'm not even trying really. That I think about when I'm sleeping on my friend's couch because I don't have anywhere else to stay.

I was raised in the land of middle class. The land of creature comforts. The lands of cheerful mediocrity. And right now there is this daunting worry that I may not be able to achieve that. That I am living on a dream of publishing. Something that is so hard and so unlikely. My Fantasy Teacher, Tina Jens, tells me I have talent and that I should be publishing now, so does my friend Mort. I believe them, I do. I just can't seem to find a way to finish stuff.

This is all so daunting. And at 6 in the morning on a friends couch there isn't a thing I can do, and I have never felt so powerless.

I wrote this in my journal a while ago:

I'm dreaming of a small two story house right on the threshold between the suburbs and farmlands. On the edge of a small town, but only a short jog from a college town. Maybe an hour or so from a city. I'm dreaming of having some decent acreage with a little bit of woodland. A garden near the house with corn and potatoes and tomatoes and carrots and beans and jalapenos and strawberries like what my mom used to grow. I'm dreaming of comfort. Not of wealth. I don't want wealth. I am dreaming of a place that has areas where I can get away from the bustle, but also get to it easily. This sanctum sanctorum from which i can write my novels, and do my library science world changing. It's safe. It's comfortable.