All this confusion is leading to cleaning the house, so I've got that goin' for me, which is nice.

The air is crisper in Houston these days, and although I'm sure that's the temporary effect of some recent storms rather than the onset of autumn, the season is changing. Dusk crept in a little earlier tonight; I saw sweater sets for sale at Target the other day. Students have returned to campus at Rice.

And I haven't.

I think this more than anything has underlined for me the magnitude of the transition I'm making. After seventeen years, I'm no longer a student. In some ways I'm pathetically grateful—I'm not faking my way through another O-Week, nobody's demanding tuition money, and the writing I do consists of rambling sentences on a blog rather than focused commentary on a book I haven't read for a midterm I'm barely worried about. But in other ways, I'm terrified. I have to make a life from scratch now, without the Betty Crocker brownie mix of school—add eggs and oil, bake 30 minutes at 350º for delicious work and social life—to add to. I have to figure out my own answers now; there's no ready-made option.

Until I started thinking abut it today, I didn't realize how much this transition has been affecting me. I've been existing in limbo this summer, denying the end of school and the beginning of "real life." Now that school's started again, I can't do that anymore, and everything is taking on a different signficance. It becomes a question of what has to be dealt with in the five weeks before I leave Houston. Is the leak in the bedroom so critical, or can I leave it for my landlord to deal with when I move out? Can I really finagle enough money to buy a computer in that time, or is paying off my plane ticket going to break me? Is it completely necessary to patch up that broken relationship, or can I just let time and absence heal it?

I no longer have the luxury of "just seeing how it goes." Things have to be figured out now, decisions have to be made, action has to be taken, one way or the other. So I'm a little stressed out, a little fragile, and a lot tempted to do whatever's easiest instead of whatever's best.

But at least I'm not steam-tunneling.