Chipped Polish & Wornout Jeans

I am sitting here looking around at the boxes that hold my life. That's sounds funny, but its true. Exams are over, and I am packing up the apartment to move back to the Boro for the summer. My lease is up on the eighth, and I'm moving out either Wednesday or Thursday. Mama is drivin' up to help, which is awesome, especially since there is no way that all my junk is going to fit into one Blazer. I was going to move this afternoon, but the flooding happening everywhere makes that impossible. I'm not going to write about packing though. Instead I'm just going to do a stream of thought entry about all the things that have been on my mind, and maybe I'll throw in a brief note on my plans for the summer.

I am not the woman I was several months ago when I came to Louisville, and that is both a good and bad thing. Back in August when I arrived in L-ville I was wide-eyed, ambitious, and excited. Law school was an adventure I'd been looking forward to for a very long time. It became complicated the second day of orientation when I soon discovered that my accent was a great deal stonger than most of the people there, and I was definitely a little fish in a great big pond. I got the feeling I was out of place. And it was a brand new experience. I was two hundred miles away from everything thing I loved and everyone. It was frightening and exhilerating all at once. As an undergraduate I could handle most of my classes in my sleep, and I balanced everything relatively easily. I was a mock trial captain and a college senior facing three years of more work than I could imagine, but I could handle it. Law school isn't easy, not at all; I have to work three times as hard as I used to, and I was on my own. Living on my own is not the difficult part; its the being absolutely alone, isolated from everyone and everything I am close to, that made life unpleasant. Even Jake and I felt the strain, and at that point, our relationship was still going strong. In December, my grades were not great, and, I knew I was here for the next two years. Things weren't weren't smooth anymore. And then I thought they were getting better, and I was wrong. I don't have Jake anymore, and that breaks my heart; I threw myself into working, outlines, case briefs, and learning the law, anything to keep my mind off what I'd lost. It hasn't really worked, and now the semester is over. I am leaving my first year of law school, and I am not really going back to the Boro the same woman. I feel like I've lost some of my strength, some of my spark. I'm all jaded and even more cynical than I was when I came here. I've lost some of my confidence, some of what made me, Nic. This summer I hope I can get some of that back.

This summer I am also going to lose this weight. I looked in the mirror after my shower the other day, and my reflection made me want to cry. I'm fat, and its disgusting. This is not a "I hate the way I look cause I can't wear skinny jeans"; this is a "I've gotten so big that it's unhealthy and disgusting, and I have to do something about it" thing. I'm not saying that the break up caused the weight gain, but I really started to gain all this weight after it happened. I guess its because I had nothing to do but work; its not an excuse at all though. I shouldn't have let this happen to me. I should've kept in shape; I should've taken better care of myself. I was pretty much wallowing, and it does not suit me well. I'm angry at myself, and I'm disappointed in what I have done to myself. I have to fix this; I look terrible and feel just as bad. I can't stand it any more.

The idea for this summer is to catch up on my reading, do some writing, get a job for the summer in the Boro, work on jewelry, and practice with my camera. It's not exactly the summer I was so looking forward to when the semester started, but I will make the best of it.