I was living my life the way I want to right at this instant, I’d be on the patio of some cafe, drinking coal-black coffee and smoking a vanilla clove. However, since I’m living in a place that has very few cafes (and even fewer with patios) and vanilla cloves are no longer available for purchase in the United States, I’m in my bedroom, drinking coffee with milk and eating a hard-boiled egg.

I’m trying desperately not to throw myself a pity party, because in the grand scheme of things, I know that my life is pathetically easy compared to what it could be. With that disclaimer, I’ve given myself free reign to complain like a trust fund brat. I didn’t sleep well last night. I had too many blankets and I kept tossing and turning, too lazy to get up and remove the sherpa one against my skin. Prior to that, I was crying over videochat with my boyfriend because I had confrontation with my cousin/roommate over a petty point. I overreacted and consequently made it a bigger deal than it really needed to be. Without going into details, I’ll simply say I decided to act like a selfish, entitled child whose self-righteousness borders on Nazism.

Immediately before the tiff with my cousin/roommate, I was feeling sorry for myself because my boyfriend lives 900 miles from me. It was one of those nights where I just wanted to cuddle and be distracted from my own melodrama. Perhaps it’s debris from being single for the majority of my high school career, but I hate to hear girls’ rants about their boyfriends. I don’t care what she’s complaining about, if it’s not one of my close girlfriends, if I hear a girl say “Oh my god, my boyfriend…” my first instinct is to tell her to shut up, that there are bigger problems in the world. So when I get whiny about my own relationship, I annoy myself. That’s an interesting sensation to to experience, self-annoyance. In the last few years, I’ve adopted the philosophy that you’re responsible for your own happiness. If you take that just a step further, you can say you’re also responsible for your own misery. That being said, I’m great at being a hypocrite, because I complain constantly. It’s practically a hobby of mine.

Now, I’m going to ride my bike the mile to the campus where I’m enrolled in classes. I’ll sit through a biology lecture, then return home for lunch. Next, I’ll endure a two hour biology lab, then finish up my day with a meeting for the Wisconsin Review. There, I will establish my power as a fiction editor and tell the readers they ought to look for quality fiction to publish. At the end of the day, I’ll put on sweats and read a couple novels for my English classes.

Yeah. I live a hard and tumultuous life. My whines are completely justified.