After it's all over

I just turned in my last paper on Thursday and while I have another final exam, it's a ways off now and feels distant. In any case, I can now start sleeping for eight hours a day and stop drinking energy drinks. I'm free now.

So why did I spend all of Friday sitting around in my room not doing anything? Why do I suddenly feel so harried and lost my desire to do anything.

This might seem like a strange comparison, but it's similar to the way one feels after a funeral.

There's a lot to do for a funeral. You have to go to the funeral home and pick out the type of casket you're going to get, the color, the type of wood, do you splurge on the nice casket or go for a cheaper one (it's your loved one, isn't he worth the expensive casket? But does he honestly care?) You have to call everyone and let them know about the death, listen to a hundred people tell you I'm sorry, while you repeat your rehearsed story of the sequence of events. You have to pick a date for the event and send out invitations, write something to submit to the paper for the obituaries page, find some place to put all the flowers you're getting. You have to pick a church, meet with the church representatives to discuss what hymns will be sung and who's going to carry the casket. You have to answer the phone when they call you about donating his organs answer a series of a hundred ridiculous questions about where in what condition those organs have been. It's quite a headache.

You have to meet at a friends house after the ceremony because they won't let you have the reception in the church basement and you wouldn't want to anyway. You have to tell a hundred people how you're holding up and wonder about what that even means given the circumstances. And then you have to say goodbye to everyone and get down to writing thank you cards for all the flowers.

And then it's over.

Now what?

In a way is like a form of procrastination. You can get yourself really worked up and busy about something that honestly isn't going to make a bit of difference a week later, but which at the time seems very important.

I put off a lot of things while I was busy writing papers during my last week of classes, so many things that I just couldn't think about because I needed to get these things done. And then Thursday night after I was done, I didn't want to think about all those things I'd put off.

All the other exchange students (almost all of whom are staying only for a semester) are leaving soon. I need to think about what I'm going to do next semester, what classes I'm going to take and, more immediately what I'm going to do during the break between semesters. I had about a half dozen people that I'd wanted to write long emails to, but told myself that I didn't have time because I had so much work to do. I had more blog posts I wanted to write. And now that I'm finally done it's taken me three days to work up the energy to write this.

I've started listening to Dale Carnegie's "How to start Worry and Start Living" on my iPod (it's been on my computer for a while, ever since my mother put it on there). In one section he talks about the importance of work, of keeping ourselves busy, in staving off worry and keeping ourselves sane. I'm a big believer in that; even more so when I'm not doing any work. There's something very leisurely about doing a study abroad program that bothers me at times. It will be good when I finally come back home and can get a job.

In the meantime, I have to find something else for myself to do that feels like work to occupy my time and to keep me from losing my mind.

I'm considering rock climbing.