I notice that it’s becoming harder and harder, almost physically painful, to listen to mainstream media, which for me means the general run of popular NPR shows.

During that deep beautiful third week of April when I’d figured out what to do for the last half of the semester, and didn’t go anywhere, and didn’t have any nicotine at all for five days in a row, they were already muttering about how hard this was, how boring, with nothing to do.

I felt exactly the opposite about it.

Now it’s all about "getting back to normal", and going to work again, and how everyone wants to …

I want no normal thanks. I want no crowded roads or stores. I want no concerts or nightlife. As for work, it’s a hopeful, necessary evil, something to be pursued dutifully, but not with delight. It’ll be good for me, long term. But I don’t miss it (I do miss this), and I hope to have at least one more full summer before it must be endured for two more years give or take.

The world allegedly feels one way about everything, and I feel another.

I vividly feel myself to be the opposite of normal and I find it comforting–the return of the native … mode. Of living.

I’m twenty-three again. More gut and less hair, finally fully radicalized in my heart, but my self, my old young self.