(Saturday Night)

Five more minutes until another day. I�m not quite ready to let go of this one yet, for silly, little girl reasons. Tonight was the perfect wrap-up for the semester. MTC took us out to eat at a very nice restaurant, and Dean Chambless footed the bill for the drinks from the bar (ouch!). I ate dinner with Amber, Erin, and David at the table with me, and we had such a good time. After we ate, we all just sat around and socialized for about an hour. The really cool thing was that �my he� showed up at the restaurant and played with us for the evening. According to sources (Heather, who was sitting at the table next to his), �my he� dropped my name quite a few times at dinner, telling the people at his table that I was the expert when it came to books, etc. Hey, whatever gets �my he� to think about me, I�ll take it. Sound pathetic? Perhaps, but I noticed him choosing to sit by me several times during the evening. Could be a coincidence, although I�d like to think of it more as a very selective choice. The funny thing was that I wasn�t doing anything I don�t normally do when I�m with my friends. I still drank (especially tonight, when all of my drinks were paid for, either by the dean or by my friends), I still talked about sex and other �naughty� things, and he still sat by me. Then I hitched a ride back to the hotel with him, and I told him about my research paper and about how my professor wants to help me get it published, and he was proud of me, thought that was a nice accomplishment. Eee Eee! I know he likes me as a friend. For now, that�s enough. For now.

I also called my dad long-distance from a payphone at McAllister�s today to tell him about the whole �wants to help me publish my research paper� thing, and he, too, was extremely proud of me. He wants me to call back tomorrow to tell Mom and Rob, because that�s such a big deal that he thinks I should tell them myself. There are reasons that I love my family so very, very much, and one of them is that they understand what I need, sometimes even more than I do. I miss my brother a lot today, and seeing Laurie and Paul together made me miss him even more. I found myself doing and saying a lot of things that he would have found funny, just to have �our� humor around me today. I think it may have been a bit of a defense mechanism. Most of my friends saw me absolutely fall apart earlier today, and I really just needed to restore my �non-fragile� status with them; humor does that. Sometimes I get tired of playing the �Carey as Fortress� game, but I have the feeling that if I let loose of control over my emotions for even a second, I�ll break down into an emotional heap o� something � I�m getting crispy around the edges, despite how it looks. 10 more days, 10 more days.

The alcohol is setting in. My stomach is all over the place. Going to go sleep now.