After five 12 hour days of class, many of us hit a wall Friday night. Classmates were sobbing on the phone with their mothers, classmates were laying in bed wondering what the hell they’re doing here, classmates were passing out cold at 10pm despite invitations to go out on the town. Sheer exhaustion on a group level. I was right in tow with everyone else, having realized that if I want to go to Los Angeles to work, I am going to be 100% on my own. Unless I can find some of my own good leads there, it makes much more sense for me to stay in New York City since not only are 90% of the nation’s magazine published here, but this is where all my connections are being established. Naturally, a few tears were shed at the prospect of leaving the Left Coast on a more long term basis.

Luckily for all of us who hit the wall, we only had one seminar yesterday (Jim Wilcox, a novelist, spoke to us), and then the rest of the day off. After brunch in the village with Terra, and a nice long nap, I met my old Seattle pal Courtney Reimer at Union Square. It was good to see an old Seattleite. We had dinner at a place called Republic, which had good asian food and communal seating, but needed a some sound absorbers on the ceiling–imagine three hundred people shouting in a huge bathroom. Loud.

Afterward, Courtney took me to a rooftop party. The weather had been incredibly hot and humid all day (I’m getting used to it, although I’m also loving the A/C), and so we got quite an electric skychurch show on the rooftop: streaks of lightening flashed around the horizon as we drank bud lights and admired the metal work on the roof (crafted by a nice man named Linus). It was still warm, and the drops of rain weren’t bothersome. I spent some time looking down over the street and feeling eight million people around me. It’s sort of comfortable, like an enormous blanket of distraction you can wrap around you to keep you warm from the lonliness and isolation of being human.