Dear Wigleaf,

Thanks for getting in touch. Today is Saturday. Today I woke up around eleven and ate cake for breakfast with my brother's girlfriend. Tomorrow is her birthday. Tomorrow she'll be twenty-two years old, like me.

The cake was good—it was tie-dyed on the inside and was topped with thick cream cheese frosting—but I could only stomach a few bites. I spent last night taking cheap tequila shots at a dive bar downtown. My boyfriend's band played there, and the lot of us drank so many of those shots the bartender ran out of limes. He was serving them to us with orange slices by the end of the night.

I'm on Spring Break for about thirty more hours, so I'll take all day tomorrow to prepare for the upcoming week at school. I spent today cooking three pounds of frozen Great Value hash browns in a wok for my hung over friends. The touring band from last night crashed in my boyfriend's living room. They were up until sunrise and slept until two in the afternoon. The hash browns worked like a charm. They were awake and on the road within a couple hours. And they seemed happy when they left, anyway.

Graduate school is weird. I'm a scant four years older than my youngest students, and my cake-for-breakfast antics don't help with my overwhelming anxiety and crushing sense of impostor syndrome. But oh well. Sometimes we need to allow ourselves to go to loud punk shows and take tequila shots with orange slices and eat cake and hash browns the next day. Sometimes we need to let ourselves be young.

Cheers,

Amanda




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Read Amanda Hadlock's story.

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