I am currently sitting in my dorm room, blasting my music because my roommate is out of the room and therefore I can control what I am hearing sans headphones [as opposed to all the other times when she is here watching all her favourite telly programmes (for those of you who do not know what my roommate likes, here's a quick rundown: the Jonas Brothers (especially Joe Jonas), Hannah Montana, Wizards of Waverly Place, notsomuch Sonny with a Chance, anything Disney/Disney Channel, TLC, Toddlers and Tiaras, The Biggest Loser, Desperate Housewives, Lifetime, Oxygen -- pretty much everything I hate. Well, okay, I don't mind Wizards and Sonny so much, if only because Selena Gomez has nice hair and her character's name is Alex and Demi Lovato can actually sing. But her tastes pretty much run opposite to mine)].

Ho hum.

I am going home for the weekend because I haven't seen my parents in a month and I feel somewhat obligated. I sort of want to and don't want to. I feel my independence growing and, every time I go home, I like it but at the same time I feel somewhat... urgh-faced. It's strange and I don't quite understand it, but it happens. Speaking of my parentals, I was talking to my Mum on the phone last night and she gave this quote that I thought was fantastic: "Well, he was a bit of an odd fish anyway, wasn't he?" (And we were not discussing fish.) The description was just so spot on that I've been mulling it over all day, har har har. Odd fish indeed.

Anyway, that wasn't really why I started writing this entry. I've been having a lot of thoughts as of late. Well, my brain has been overactive, but that's beside the point.

Let me clarify: my life is currently excellent at the moment. Everything is going swimmingly: new friends, classes are fun (my brain was leaping all over the place the other day in my modern fiction class because I was making about a million different connections and I might actually end up writing about The Basic Eight for an essay, I win I win I win I win I WIN), there's this splendiferous literature conference coming up here next week (oh my God I'm so stoked). Excellentsauce squared to infinity, really. But something is troubling me. Namely, Amanda.

I was supposed to have dinner with Amanda last night before book club. "Meet in the lobby at six," she said. So I was down there, waiting, making conversation with Kelsay while I sat. Amanda walked in at 6:15. She immediately comes in and starts apologising. "Oh, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, my lab ran over." Sure, that's fine, I told her. Then I mentioned that book club started at 6:30 instead of 8:30. I began to apologise, because I thought I'd told her the wrong time. She then has a minor flip out:
"I won't have time to eat."
"But you can take it there and eat the food there!"
She begins to gibber a bit. (Amanda has a tendency to gibber when she is frustrated.) "Yes, but I don't want to be late."
"Amanda, it's book club. They're not going to eat you alive for being late. There are normally, like, four people there."
"Yes, but I can't be late anywhere. It's a personal thing. I just, I can't even be late to something like book club." Here she makes a face, looks very frustrated, almost as if she's about to cry.
Okay, fine, it's a personal thing. I can respect that. "You don't have to go if you don't want to... besides, all we're doing is playing games."
She sighs. "I don't think I'll go. I have too much homework, anyway." Then she starts apologising again. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry." She sits down closer to me and launches into rant mode, which she seems to do quite frequently. "I just keep worrying about my grades. I'm not doing well on paper. I know I'm smart -- if anything, I know I am definitely above average, not to be a braggart, but it just doesn't show up on my tests. On tests I merely look average."
Insert conversation with Kelsay here about free tutoring available at REACH for bio and chem (although Kelsay isn't taking bio/chem; she's a liberal studies major so she's taking tutoring for Italian, which seems to be the third language she's taking, along with French and German -- Kelsay impresses me quite a bit). She says that she initially didn't want it because she normally was the one tutoring, but it really helps her. For Amanda, it seems to be the same sort of issue; she doesn't want it because she tutors others as well. Then it's the whole "it's my learning disability" conversation, which, I'm not going to lie, gets a bit irritating after a while, even if it is true. (She has some sort of learning disability, although I'm not sure what sort it is. It's not like a really obvious one, but it seems to be a mixture of things.) She begins to cry a bit; I feel bad because all I can do is watch. I don't try to cheer her up or change the subject, because whenever I've done that in the past, she's berated me because she "can't be happy if she's not happy," which makes sense. So lame jokes don't help at all. Non-sequiteurs used to try to cheer her up don't help, either, because she just gets angry and I did that once to the effect of "well I'm not going to tell you stuff if you do that to me." Okay, fine, I get that.

I like Amanda. I really do. I just have absolutely no idea how I'm going to live with her next year. We're definitely roommates and I am not backing out on her. I cannot. She's already lost two roommates this year -- Bailee moved out to a single room and Anne just left, leaving a note on her desk saying, "Oops, I'm not coming back for the semester!" Thankfully her new roommate is nice? But I want her to get through a whole year without losing a roommate. Without losing a friend. Too many people have given up on her, and, as Seth put it, "you are her rock."

I don't know how I can be her rock, though, if she's always going to be like this. She is prone to panic and anxiety attacks and I've seen her cry umpteen times since we got to college. She flips out over little things and... I don't know. I feel frustrated because, although I love her, sometimes I just don't know how to deal with her. She does not deal well with stress. At all. She studies so hard, she really does, and sometimes I think she makes more work for herself than she needs to -- then again, she's an English major on a pre-med track, which basically means majoring in English, minoring in biology, but it's pre-med bio. (I keep wondering: why is she majoring in English? She enjoys it, which is good, but... oh, never mind.) So she's taking all these biology and chemistry courses and last semester, she would get really worked up over world lit and criminal justice. Gen eds that were easy, not work-intensive at all. She found them easy enough but she also stays up until two, three in the morning studying. She worries so much about her grades despite constant reassurement that she'll be fine. For example, last semester during criminal justice, she kept asking, "What's an A? What's an A?" The professor kept saying, "You're not going to have trouble getting an A." She kept insisting she would, and then he gave us all hundreds, so she didn't really have anything to worry about after all. And honestly, I don't know how to deal with all her emotionality. She can be a fireball of emotions at times, and that frightens me. I don't know what it is, but I normally think of myself as tense and stressed out. Having said that, I've only cried once in college, and it's not something I freely admit. (It was the after Seth told me he liked me, and my brain was so confused that I shed three tears while in the shower. That's all. Three tears.) And yet Amanda is so... she's so uptight. She's like a really, really uptight version of myself. Sometimes she can have fun, but she worries so much. She can't do anything without planning it and has trouble adapting to stuff. Makes sense why she's so stressed out; college is a huge change for most people. In contrast, I have learned to let things go, even though it took me a long time to do so. I know it's not fair to compare myself to Amanda, but I really just don't know how to deal with her at times. And then I feel like a bad friend because I can't adequately help her cope with her stress levels and stuff, yet she always turns to me.

Hopefully it will all work out?

I don't know what it is, but sometimes, I feel like looking at Amanda is looking at a warped version of myself. She makes me think of why my mother always says, "Don't be so tense. Don't be so uptight." I never realised what she meant until I met Amanda, to be honest, because she reminds me of what the consequences of becoming too serious can be. I don't care how horrible that sounds, but it's the truth.

I refuse to give up on her, but sometimes, she really just overwhelms me, and that's even just from taking her in small doses. What to do, what to do?

That is the main quandary in my life I am facing. The other is where and how I shall buy more blank CDs so as to make more funkadelic mixes for friends, both here and far away.

PS. I have been leaving anonymous comments on my friend's blog, trying to cheer her up. She mentioned it to me the other day, saying that it was "nice" that someone was doing it for her. I can only hope that my comments give her a small reason to smile, even if only for two seconds. That's two seconds she wouldn't have been smiling for ordinarily. Hopefully it also lets her know that she does have support out there. Oh, Being Love makes me feel good.