Worry

My sense of dread is back. I had lunch with my advisor today, and he seemed worried that my letters of recommendation would be the death-knell of my application. Naturally, this made me even more anxious than I already was. The fat, murky question mark that hangs so drippingly over my future looks ever fatter and murkier.

I bought GRE study books yesterday. I opened one up last night and there in its introduction it recommended an absolute minimum of four weeks' worth of study. I'll have exactly ten days. My life, of course, is a sloppy amalgam of near-hits and near-misses (do "near-hit" and "near-miss" mean the same thing? Be damned, you English language), with a good dash of poor foresight thrown in, so by necessity there must be at least one extra confounding force. This time, its name is Sam.

Chris moved out last night, after a month and a half of escalating passive-aggression wars, and lo! Our instiutional alcoholism runs deep, for we have traded a sommelier for a goddamn bartender. Sam, our new roommate, is my boyfriend's good friend from his old high-school bartending days in the industrial Midwest. M. borrowed a car to meet Sam at the airport today, and immediately--in the early afternoon!--they hit the bars.

My worry is this: M. has poor impulse control. Sam, a bartender by trade, will persuade him easily to share his hours, drink heavily, and spin records late into the night. These activities will be particularly likely to occur over the next week--i.e., the zero hour--as Sam goes searching for jobs in bars and M. happily follows. As I am nervous of disposition, their reveling at late hours will mean sleep deprivation and more anxiety for me. Catastrophic exam results may follow.

In the longer term, I worry how this will affect my relationship with M., which is unbelievably healthy for the moment but which could credibly deteriorate under stress.

Even were I to get into the masters program, I live paycheck to paycheck and cannot even conceive of how I would pay for it. So I worry about money. Yes, I know: welcome to the human condition, Penitent.

Looking beyond myself for a moment, I worry too about my family in Southern California. My brother, it seems, is in a depression so severe that his physician warned my parents that he was a danger to himself and recommended that he be institutionalized for a week. He agreed, instead, to some kind of intensive outpatient treatment, but I worry.

My mother worries, but her solution is to pray. To pray very, very hard. I did not want to irk her on the phone and tell her that her prayer, with all its fervor, was far more to her benefit than to my brother's, but I did say: "Medication works. You need to get him to take medication."

Imagining myself in his place for a moment--which I suspect, at its core, to be a psychological world similar to mine, but ten shades darker--I see how group counseling could be oppressive in itself. How the dingy institutional settings, the self-awareness of dysfunction, the judgment read into a ring of strange faces, could depress someone mightily. On the other hand, I told my mother, I have seen what good psychopharmeceuticals have done for my boyfriend and for my friends.

My parents are being idiots, though. "I don't think he should go on medication," my mother said. "He's been drinking alcohol, and alcohol could react with the medication."

"Then get him on something that doesn't react with alcohol."

"I don't know about that. I also think he should be doing the counseling so he can get over his alcohol problem. You know, your grandmother's sister was an alcoholic and she killed herself, and I'm worried that he has her genes. And alcohol is a depressant, you know, so it is probably making him more depressed."

I hadn't known that about my grandmother's sister. My family doesn't talk about such things, at least not with "the kids." But I realized on the phone with my mother today that my parents' teetotaling is so fanatical that it's dangerous. It means they tread in ignorance. That my mother sincerely thinks my brother's occasional drinking is as much of a danger as his suicidal state of mind is plain crazy. Has it not occured to her that alcohol might be a way he copes with his unhappiness, not a cause of it? That it might be a way he copes with a social anxiety that's much worse than mine? That, independent of depression and drunk driving, alcohol need not be a problem? That a single great-aunt with alcoholism is probably a statistically insignificant predictor for addiction? And so on.

Then there's the news. Reading anything about Iraq makes me feel ill. I did not exist during Vietnam and I wonder how it compares. My advisor, who did exist during Vietnam, works at a conservative think tank and he thinks Iraq is worse, that this country has been torn apart even more by this war than in that earlier era, draft and burning monks and 4 dead in Ohio and all. I don't know if he's right, or if comparisons matter.

Well--time's a-wastin', and there's yet more worrying to be done.