High stress

Greetings,

I am under high stress. I think people don't consider the work they love stressful. What is really stressful is when you have to do something but you keep thinking about other things. My life isn't particularly difficult (well, it is, but only in the sense that math is difficult), but I can't focus on one thing. The sword of Damocles is hanging on by a thread.

Actually, I wish it would just fall. Somehow I think I would be more formidable at picking up the pieces than holding things together as they stand. I'm only on day three of my two month adventure through dry math, and my heart won't stop beating like a madman's. My brain won't ever consider a single aspect of this life, and, in considering it, make it beautiful. So it's all ugly.

What I would consider relaxing, besides racketball, would be to speak broken French with Agnès the way I used to. What would be really relaxing would be to spend the evening of a truly hot summer day in a coffee shop near union square, reading Joyce or Bukowski or the Power Broker or the Death and Life of Great American Cities. Or to silently peer over these books to contemplate a woman not as a part of my life but as a part of life as a whole and remember that since it (life) keeps chugging I have nothing to worry about. Suddenly age 22 can be romantic again, and age 30 is a dream as is 70. But this won't happen until I'm 23, I'm sure, so my heart keeps beating so incredibly fast. And my brain still surges with useless intellectualism.