The days have been perfect this past week but the nights are getting pretty chilly. I'm talking long underwear and an electric blanket. I'm talking adhering myself to Nick at night like a snoring, covers-hogging barnacle.

Tonight B resolved to stoke the enormous wood-burning stove downstairs. Drinking a beer while feeling sorry for myself about the paper I have to write beside a flickering, popping fire is far superior to drinking and procrastinating and being cold.

When I was in high school I read about how nostalgia used to be the name for a medical condition, and that in olden old-timey times people were actually said to die from it. It's just the sort of thing that sixteen-year-old me would cling on to. When I moved in September, I ended up going through all my poems and journals from high school. Man, did I ever emote some emotions. "Your eyes are the trash-can fires curling smoke signals into the smog-pink urban sunset." YES, REALLY.

Oh, I'd like to think I'm heaps more ma-toor than I was then, but I'm still the same crybaby ball of feelings. I gained some perspective. I learned to separate hurt from pain. And sometimes, I learned, even the pain isn't really so bad. Daniel Johnston said, "Got a broken heart/and you can't break a broken heart." Like that.

Still, sometimes I wake up here smelling the lovely, dying leaves and I'm so steeped in nostalgia I can't move. Mandarin oranges in a Jell-O mold. A fly in amber.

Seriously, though, by what alchemy does Autumn smell exactly the same every year?

This is what the fountain outside the library looks like when you finally finish your paper.

It's funny how suffocating feelings of incompetence and dread show up to the party as soon as I have a bunch of beastly work to get done. I want to tap my brain on the shoulder and say, "Just because work isn't fun doesn't mean you have to flood my bloodstream with feelings. Sack up."

These feelings tend to spike at 11 p.m. and increase exponentially as each hour of the night passes.

Nice fountain, though.