Lana feels

I don't know if it's the moon or my period or what but I'm all mood-swingy. Today I was sitting in my room getting organized for the doing of homework and listening to my new Dar Williams CD and I burst into tears for no reason at all. Listening to the babysitter song, in case anybody knows what that means. "The Babysitter's Here," it's called. Pawing through college stuff, trying to write an application essay on how Alanna of Trebond influenced me, and listening to Dar Williams. Tears sprang to my eyes during the babysitter song and then I laughed because I couldn't understand why they were there - no sadness, really, just the physical tight-throated teariness of remembered emotion. That song ended and another one began, a song called "The Christians and the Pagans," and then in the midst of my laughter the tears flowed over but I was still laughing, at the song and at myself and at the very idea of college. Ces and I talked a lot this weekend about the future. About college, and how that's where I'm going to be next year. I can't quite bring it into focus yet. I'm applying, I know the two places I really, really want to be, I'm doing so well this year and I'm beginning finally to feel like I really have my life under some kind of control, but none of it makes any sense. I've accepted it, and now I want it to be the here-and-now type of reality. I have to go to college? Fine, then I want to go now. Not this time next year. I want to stop having all these little moments of saying to myself, hey, this time next year I'll be in a dorm in Ohio or Massachusetts. I'll be in a new place, making new friends, learning incredible new things. I'll be a college student, a legal adult that November, on my way to being a productive member of society.

And then there's that. Ces said something as we were lying in bed the other night that stung deep into me and scared the shit out of me. We had just got back from seeing the Banger Sisters, which was a better movie than I thought it would be, and we were talking about... Something. About the movie and about suburban soccer moms who are rescued by friends from long-gone-by party days. That having been the theme of the movie. And she said that one day she would show up in my life and rescue me. That I would be married to a man and have three kids and a minivan and cart them around in it to all the things that children do, living in the suburbs. She didn't say this, but what I heard was "living my mother's life." Every girl's nightmare, I guess. We all say we'll be more than they were, we'll do bigger things and better, we won't grow into middle age and settle into the routine of jobs and children until we don't know that there's anything else in the world. She was laughing about it, and I don't know if she was laughing because she wasn't serious or because she thought it was/would be funny. I know she didn't mean it to hurt me, because she's Ces and she wouldn't, but it absolutely terrified me. It really is my greatest fear. That none of this is real. This social consciousness that I'm developing, the sense of wholeness that I felt with Linda, the eroticism that I felt with Bree, the idea of being a whole person in this world where everybody has a role and I don't want to fit the one allotted to me but I don't want to be anybody else... I'm so scared that in growing up I'll lose that. That I'll someday find myself with a graduate school education, a glass-ceiling job, a husband and a bunch of spoiled children who have no idea who I am, and I won't know anymore myself. I don't want to have to be rescued. She pulled me once out from under that bush, but I've grown so much since then... I don't want to be rescued anymore. I think I've finally reached a place where I can go out on my own and make my way through the misty morass of college and life, and I want to get out there and do it already.