I’ve been sort of down on and off for days, not just worrying about papers due and such, but whether I’m even in the right place. I was so frustrated this afternoon (in the moments leading up to the class wherein I had to present on Sir Thomas Browne–see previous entry) that as my friends and I were in the lounge waiting until it was time for class, I offhandedly remarked that I was going to shoot myself in the head, especially thinking of the venerable Sir Thomas.

Well. I got set straight on that one pretty quickly. Not five minutes later another friend walked up, something clearly wrong. It turns out that a boy in a fraternity house down the street from her…a fraternity that she’d been close to as a Baylor undergrad and the fraternity her boyfriend had belonged to…shot and killed himself this morning. Talk about showing how unimportant a presentation on metaphysical prose really is in the ultimate scheme of things. To make things worse for her, she presented today, too…and did fine…but she commented that we really didn’t need to worry about our presentations (we were worrying about them together, last night, sort of, on Facebook), given how small a thing a single grade in a single class really is. Thinking that for this boy life was so unbearable that he felt he had to end it puts our grad school stress in perspective–virtually all of us first-years have thought and said over the past few weeks variations on “shoot me now,” but he really meant it. What was that insurmountable to him? I may never know, but it’s sobering.