Technically, summer just started on Friday, but my internship is half over and my half birthday is on Tuesday. I’ve been experiencing a lot of where-the-hell-is-the-time-going stress recently. I keep thinking how I could have done things differently: If I had signed up for the six year joint bachelors/JD program in Albany, I’d already be done with law school and studying for the bar now. That’s just an example. I’m not saying I wish I had sacrificed undergrad electives, a year in Paris and a year in Germany just to stay in Albany and get out of school faster. And the thought of looking for a real job right now is terrifying, especially a career that wouldn’t allow me the kind of vacation time I have now. How many more chances am I going to get to bum around Europe for weeks at a time? That’s exactly the kind of thought that makes me have to lie down.

So what am I so upset about? That at twenty four and a half years old I don’t feel like a real grown up? Or that I’m getting dangerously close to the end of this phase of my life where being selfish and unfocused is still kind of okay? Can it be both? At this point in my thought process I start to hate myself for sounding like a spoiled child. I’ve gathered from general life experience that self-loathing is something a lot of people, especially women, experience often if not constantly. I generally feel pretty good about myself, so on those rare occasions, it really stings when I hear a voice in my head saying, “Rose, you seriously suck. No wonder you couldn’t get a paid internship this summer, no wonder you’re still single, no wonder people you thought were your friends ignore your attempts to get in touch with them. Because tu es nulle.” (The voice in my head speaks franglais.) And see, I’ve found a way to complain about the fact that my self-esteem is generally pretty high. I’m unbearable.

Let’s talk about something else.

Not work—all the juicy stories from there are confidential.

Not other things on my mind—I’m not going to talk about people here who may read this.

I could shut up, but instead I will share these random pieces of advice:

Vanilla hemp milk=delicious. But you have to shake it up first, otherwise the first glass will be vanilla hemp water, which is considerably less delicious.

If there is road kill that you have to talk past on your way to the metro in South Miami, and you keep hoping that someone will clean it up before it causes you any more emotional disturbances, stop hoping and find a new way to walk to the metro.

If you buy a non-returnable, non-exchangeable train ticket from SNCF, at least opt to print it out yourself. If you choose to pick it up from a machine at the train ticket, you will have a much harder time selling it to someone else if your love life takes a sudden turn for the better.

That’s all the wisdom I acquired this week. 

My internship is already a quarter over. It doesn’t seem right, but…I promised the state of Florida eight weeks of my free labor in their Department of Children and Families and I already put in two, so yeah, a quarter over. So far it’s been pretty painless—lots of researching and writing, plus observing in court, looking up criminal records, and listening to hours and hours of a trial for one sentence that may or may not have been said. There is plenty of entertaining drama involved in all of these tasks, the details of which I have to keep confidential, but just a taste: If a married woman in Florida has a baby, her husband is automatically the baby’s legal father, even if he’s not also the biological father. However, the record can easily be set straight if the legal and biological fathers appear in court for a paternity hearing. You wouldn’t think that kind of thing happened too often (at least I wouldn’t have), but, in Miami at least, these paternity hearings happen every. single. day.

The best part of my internship is that I work 9-5, Monday through Friday. After being an au pair and then a 1L, waking up after the sun has started to rise, having a few hours every evening to cook and eat a proper dinner and then veg out, and having entire weekends to work on my tan and my novel are downright luxurious. Speaking of which, my novel is coming along, as it better be, because my goal is to electronically self-publish it before my twenty fifth birthday and I’m going to be twenty four and a half on June 25.

I recently read (on the internet so it must be true) that telling people what your goals are doesn’t actually make you more likely to accomplish them, in fact it may have the opposite effect, because just telling people gives you some amount of satisfaction, possibly enough satisfaction that you no longer feel motived enough to accomplish your goal. But I don’t care.

My new objective, while I still have some free time, is to work on getting a Polish passport. I probably should have gotten on this years ago when Poland joined the European Union, but I didn’t because I was still counting on marrying a French prince charming, plus I had kind of always looked down on my fellow Poles as carnivorous bible-thumping xenophobes and wanted to join Europe via a more enlightened country. I guess as I get older I’m getting more realistic and less principled. After all, I am donating my time this summer to a state that names its public schools after confederate generals and is home to creationist theme parks.

But as a happy side note on the only thing that really matters: 51 days until Paris, and 54 days until Munich!

I got through another semester of law school. I gave in and started using supplements to study and my laptop to type exams. For some reason I started law school in the fall curious to see how I would do without the help of outside reading material or any technology invented in the last ten years. Now I know, and the answer is poorly. (Or, generously, kind of okay, given how much I handicapped myself while being graded on a curve.) The good news is, based on the one grade I got back so far from the spring, I’m not a complete idiot and can actually get a decent grade when I just suppress my instinct to makes things as difficult as possible for myself. By the way, if any evolutionary psychology experts have an explanation for why I even have that instinct in the first place, I’d be very interested to hear it…

Speaking of improvements from the fall to the spring semester, my Ader-wound is pretty much healed, or as healed as it’s ever going to be. There was a brief relapse last week when he called to tell me that he’s engaged to his new girlfriend, but I simply had to come up with a new, more realistic fantasy, and I’m back to being emotionally functional. Instead of holding on to my hope that we would get married shortly after I’m done with law school, I’m now accepting that he’ll marry this girl who his family approves of, move back to Morocco, and have kids with her.

I’ll get my career started, write a few books, eventually have three homes and rent out the two I’m not living in, one in Paris, one in Berlin, and one somewhere in the southern hemisphere so that I never have to deal with winter. Ader and I will keep in touch like we do now, a phone call every few weeks. Once in a while, if we happen to be in Paris at the same time, we’ll see each other for coffee, and I’ll always behave myself lest his wife forbid him from having any more contact with him.

Then one day, when I’m in my early sixties and a little wrinkly from all the sun exposure but still in reasonably good shape because I never had to get pregnant so Ader would stop talking about his damn clock, he’ll show up in Paris and tell me that his kids have left the nest and that he had an epiphany and got divorced and he’ll ask me to meet him at Place-de-Chatelet like we did for our first date. He’ll say, “Pousette, you were right all along. The point of life is not to get into heaven but to enjoy it while it lasts. If god even exists he doesn’t care that I marry another Muslim, just that I do my best to leave the world a better place than I found it. Which is why I’m sorry that I didn’t listen to you and used all those plastic water bottles and got a car even though I lived right next to a bus stop and a metro station, and why I’m begging you to please just let me spend every second of what little time I have left with you.”

Of course I’ll say yes, and we’ll travel the world with all the money I’ve hoarded over a life spent alone, glad that in the end, things finally makes some sense.