And so it begins, part II.

Today was incredible for a bunch of reasons, the most obvious of which is the end of my graduate school academic requirements. But there were so, so many more. I'm pretty sure I'll wake up tomorrow with a new outlook on the near future...

Note to self: We only do this life thing once, so why don't you stop stressing out and instead try to live a little bit? Things will work out.

I think I'm depressed.

I don't feel specifically upset or morose or anything like that, but I have all the other symptoms -- consistent anxiousness, indecisiveness, lack of appetite, exhaustion, etc.

The most frustrating thing is that I don't know why.

Worried about the end of my program at Hopkins? Probably.
Already feeling detatched from my friends here? Yes.
Concerned about my ability to work at Lewin? Not as much, no.
Recent concerns about my dating life? Yeah, that too.

Ugh. It's odd...I know I don't have any logical reason to be upset, but I'm also painfully aware that it doesn't make any difference.

Time for a glass of wine and a movie on TV.

Mood: Blahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Song: Ozzy, "I Just Want You" and Van Halen, "Humans Being"

As school comes to a close, I thought I could look forward to a few weeks of relaxation. But as my mind stopped filling itself with the continual day-to-day reminders of my academic responsibilities, it started to fill with the continual day-to-day reminders of other aspects of my life.

Who am I going to ask out next week?

Where am I going to live in DC?

When am I going to finish my med school application?

I hate worrying about things in the abstract. I can be stressed about a paper I have to write, but I know that it's due in four days and after that it will be over. With these abstract concerns with no real deadline, though, my mind could run endless circiles around them and not make any progress whatsoever.

Oh, wait, that's what has been happening for a week now...

Mood: Anxious, but for no good reason.
Song: Foo Fighters, "Everlong" (acoustic)

It's getting late, and I have to be up early (5 hrs from now? 4 and a half?) so this will be quick:

I will miss Friends.

Hold on a second. Before you release your hitmen or let slip the dogs of war, let me explain. First, I will readily admit that Friends was not the greatest comedy ever or my favorite time of the week or anything along those lines. It was just a TV show. And, for those fanatics out there, I'll admit that I was not the most die-hard watcher of the show. But over 10 years, I certainly watched a lot of episodes and enjoyed most of them.

I'll miss the idea of Friends. A simple show about six people, living their lives, facing the silly-yet-not-entirely-unrealistic challenges of young adulthood, finding jobs, finding love, losing love, finding it again, and experiencing the various oddities that make life...well, life. Were some things unrealistic? Sure. Did some plots seem a bit contrived? Of course! But did it address many of the entering-the-real-world concerns and odd experiences that we've experienced in our short adult lives? For me it did.

And Friends was decent. (And, no, I don't mean 'decent' as defined by the FCC.) I mean that it was simply about normal people living relatively normal lives. More importantly, I believe it was fundamentally good. It didn't rely on violence. It had romance without relying on the near-pornography of certain other shows. And it certainly related more to my life than does America's new opiate-like addiction to the barren meaninglessness of reality television.

A Washington Post article online tonight said,

Now, "scripted" TV shows seem to be falling out of favor as so-called "reality" shows that feature real people in allegedly unrehearsed situations proliferate. NBC promoted its own tasteless reality entry, "Fear Factor," during the "Friends" finale; shots from next Monday's show featured girls in bikinis being covered with bugs and worms and then locked in coffins. Real quality stuff from NBC's ruthless, try-anything boss Jeff Zucker.

Friends was just about love and facing challenges together and making sure we didn't take life too seriously.

Maybe Friends was the first long-running sitcom for my generation. 90210 was huge, sure, but I didn't watch it very often and my impression in hindsight was that we -- and, yes, I'm defining "we" pretty narrowly here -- were too young to understand the inflated drama of the "real world" it referred to.

And maybe Friends will be the last sitcom of my generation, at least while we're still young. The Post article concludes, "Will another "Friends" come along to replace this one? There hasn't been another "Seinfeld" or, for that matter, another "Cosby Show" either. At the once-mighty networks, and for the viewing nation, too, this is truly no laughing matter."

Was I a rabid fan of Friends? No.

But was it an entertaining show with a positive message? Certainly.

Will I miss it? You bet.

And so it begins.

School is nearly over for the year. I have one paper, one presentation, and one final remaining. For all intents and purposes, it's almost nothing.

However, this week I started...

• looking for apartments in DC
  
• determining my budget for next year
  
• planning my school-to-work transition, including travel
  
• writing my personal statement for medical school, and
  
• filling out AMCAS for the third time
  

I'm particularly thrilled about the last two. Ugh.

And so it begins.

Early evening blogging. I almost never sit down and type now.

I just took a walk to the local grocery store, just a few blocks down the street. I was a little foggy-headed...insomnia last night, lots of caffeine this morning, class all day, mid-afternoon mental haze. It was raining lightly.

No thoughts in my head. Except dinner, perhaps, since that's why I was going to the store. For the most part, though, I just walked quietly down the street, absorbing everything around me.

Birds chirping. Runners getting their exercise before sunset. Lots of traffic, still. Pause, wait for crosswalk signal. Go. Smell of bread coming from the Subway on the corner, loud car going by, people walking with flowers toward the hospital one block east. Man walking dog.

It felt like I was in a movie, experiencing the world around me without really interacting very much with it. I walked through the store, picking up what I needed, but in an oddly detatched sort of way. Without day-to-day stress on my mind, I became strangely interested in each aspect of my shopping experience, mostly just regular little questions.

What sort of bread should I buy? How much cereal do I need? I think salmon is for dinner tonight. Must buy onions. Yum, chocolate milk. Buy that too.

But that was it. No concerns about the complexities of dinner, no thoughts of jobs or classes or responsibilities, not the traffic or the rain or the upcoming tasks I had to accomplish. Just me in that moment. And I wasn't working or trying to maintain this feeling; it just sort of washed over me.

And I enjoyed each little bit of it. I slowly walked back from the store, feeling the rain, seeing the puddles, and enjoying the peacefulness. The three blocks back to my apartment probably took 10 minutes.

Maybe this is what "stopping to smell the roses" really is.