For Teenie.

I'm taking an honors class right now on "Stress and Coping." I just had the class for the first time today, so I've only learned two things so far:

1. The class is in the exact same classroom as an honors class I had last quarter that I dropped after a week because there were only like twelve people in the class, sitting in a circle around the teacher, and I had already fallen asleep three times in the first hour. I figured it would be all downhill from there. I'm crossing my fingers that this quarter will be better.

2. Compared to what I learned about every single other student in the class during those awkward self-intro speeches, I am really behind on life. Like there was a girl who was interning for the Conan O'Brien show (this coming on the heels of her internship with the Make-A-Wish Foundation), and a guy who spent part of his summer in Haiti volunteering in hospitals. Over half the class had taken either the MCAT, the LSAT or the GRE. A typical 'what I did over summer' speech would go like this: "I spent this summer putting in over 40 hours a week at my internship with a sports agent representing dozens of professional athletes. In my spare time, I studied for the LSAT and did some volunteer legal work on the side. I took the test last week and now I'm working on a few dozen applications for law schools across the country." And then there was me: "This summer I worked until I saved up enough money to go to Hawaii. And then I did and it was awesome."

After that whole thing, the professor went through some of the logistics of the class. It was all very basic, but one question she asked stuck with me. It might just be because it's the topic of a quarter-long assignment and I like to do my worrying in advance, but this is the question: "how do you deal with stress?"

It sounds simple, right? No. Sucker. At least not for me. I thought it was obvious at first. "Oh," I thought to myself, "well, that's easy. When I'm stressed I snack a lot. Ugh weight gain. Maybe I should start going to the gym. But I have no time and I hate being sweaty and moving around. Maybe I should just stop buying snacks." But then I realized that this isn't always necessarily true. Sometimes when I'm stressed I stop eating. Like there would be stretches of time where I'd be too busy to cook or grocery shop and I'd subsist on whatever non-perishables I have left in the back of the pantry. Unfortunately, if you're thinking "oh at least that helps her weight balance back out" this does not seem to be true. Apparently my body is in a kind of lose-lose situation -- or should I say gain-gain?-- where if I don't eat it goes on survival mode and manages to wrangle 300 calories out of a single stalk of celery. And then when I do eat it rejoices by safely tucking all these incoming calories in little pockets of fat known as my appendages.

So my point is I was trying to figure out how I personally cope with stress. And I was drawing a blank until just now, when I was having a conversation with Teenie about how confusing and annoying feelings are, and basically just bitching about life in general to the point where she had to calm me down by quoting Red Hot Chili Peppers and telling me that I'm pretty. I'm not saying I'm superficial, but just fyi: telling me I'm pretty often has a calming effect on me. It's like what a tranquilizer dart does to a charging bear. Song lyrics are optional.

Anyway, we started talking about this ongoing fantasy I have where I uproot my life and move to somewhere exotic and romantic and then do something charmingly destitute like be a waitress in a small cafe by the ocean. And then I realized: this is my coping mechanism. Like when I'm in my beautiful apartment in Westwood, which at the moment might not seem so beautiful because there is nothing in the refrigerator and I have a pile of unfinished assignments and hundreds of pages to read and nothing more exciting than Shakespeare on my horizon, I think "well you know what? in a year I'll have graduated and I can do whatever I want and if what I want to do is buy a one way ticket to France and spend my life savings on a small apartment over a bookshop and work in a bakery selling cupcakes, then what's stopping me?" Or sometimes it's Bath, an apartment over a shoe store, working at the spa; Hong Kong, in a high-rise penthouse, something with banking and investments where I get to wear killer heels and flattering suits. My fantasies about the future aren't always so far-fetched, however. Once in a while I'll be feeling tame and domestic, and it'll be something more along the lines of a Victorian house in San Francisco, where I sell antiques; a cottage in Maine where I lead tour groups through historic landmarks; an apartment overlooking the cityscape in Seattle where I, of course, work in a coffee shop.

That's the thing about being an English major, I think. On one hand, I have little to no prospects. On the other, I could be anywhere, doing anything.

And if nothing else, that makes me appreciate my sunny little apartment with its french doors, soft carpets and familiar, friendly residents for the short time that I have it.