Love Means Always Having to Say You’re Sorry for Being a Lunatic at the End of the Semester

Never fear: things with The Dude are good – great even.

But what happens to me at the end of a semester is that I become a giant conflagration of stress and pissed-off-ness.  And that extends out to the people I love, because, you know, I love them, so that means I like to treat them badly when I’m overwhelmed and stressed out.  I think my mom said it best, when I talked to her this weekend:

Poor Dude!  Normally you lose it on me at this time of year, and I’ve learned to leave you alone as much as possible!  Now and at the start of the school year!  (You might want to warn him about that ahead of time.)  But now he gets it and I don’t!  This is fabulous!

Seriously, though perhaps this quote is not totally verbatim, what with the fact that she used his real name and wouldn’t have said “fabulous.” 🙂

Now, to be fair, my freaking out was provoked by comments like the following:

1. “Is all of this really that important?”
2. “But you’re going to be on vacation in two weeks: can’t you just suck it up?”
3. “You’re totally overreacting.”

Those are totally direct quotes. So perhaps he deserved a tiny bit of what he got.  I mean, vacation!  SERIOUSLY?  The next thing you know he’ll be accusing me of working only 12 hours a week!  You’ll be happy to know that after the “vacation” comment I listed off the litany of things I need to accomplish this summer, as well as blamed him for me being behind on my book project.  And I cried like a baby.  Because I’m cool like that.

That said, what’s different about this relationship as opposed to other relationships (and, objectively, I have a list of them that have gone the way of the dodo at this point in the academic calendar, and as I informed The Dude on Saturday, probably I should provide him with their contact information so he can understand just how much I’m not being as much of a lunatic as I have been known to be) is that I do actually care enough about him not to want to do this to him.  And I did apologize.  Because, really?  He deserved an apology.

But so anyway, we talked it through, and we are fine.  Better than fine, really. (No I don’t believe in the wasting of time/ But I don’t believe that I’m wasting mine)

He certainly has seen me at my worst now, and he hasn’t abandoned ship, so this is a good thing.  He did suggest, however, that at this time of year I should procure marijuana and smoke it daily in order to chill out.  I retorted that maybe a person who is in such a competitive career didn’t get there by waking and baking.  He then suggested more alcohol. We laughed.

So, one final down and the grades for that course are mostly tabulated.  By tomorrow afternoon, I should be all done with two classes – ready to post grades.  And tomorrow night The Dude and I are supposed to go to a Sporting Event, which I hope does happen, but may not because his dad had surgery today and I think that he may have to cancel, depending.  (This is also why I’m an asshole: yes, the end of the semester sucks, but it probably does suck more for your dad to be having a major surgery, and maybe I should have thought about that coming up and respected the significance of that before I lost my shit.  Or at least acknowledged it while I was losing my shit.)

And then I have finals for my other two classes on Thursday, and I’ll grade like a maniac between Thursday and Friday, and then graduation is Saturday, and then I will be FREE!  Yes, that’s just free to do other kinds of work, but it’s still FREEDOM!  And then I can be my Best Summertime Self, which is really my best self of all.  Which of course is why it’s very good that The Dude and I met in November, as if he met me during my Best Summertime Self Time and then he got the bullshit I dish out during the academic year?  No WAY would he put up with it.  No, my Best Summertime Self is really the reward for what I’m like 9-10 months out of the year.  Even for me, really, and not just for gentleman callers.

But until I become my Best Summertime Self, this is the song that I have been listening to on repeat.  And perhaps it suggests both my mood and my inability to be giving and nice and all the things that I wish I could be, and will be in just a couple of weeks.