"That's it! I've had it with this dump! We got no food, we got no jobs, our pets heads are falling off! What the hell are we doing here, Harry? We gotta get out of this town."*

        I know for sure that I will never murder anyone, because I’m quite confident that if I ever did murder someone, I would have a nonstop panic attack until I was found out. And I hate panicking.

        I wasn’t always this way.

        I have a distinct memory of driving to the Oak View Mall in Omaha with my dad and one of my sisters (I think it was Penelope) at some point during college. 

The Oak View Mall.

        My dad said something to the effect of, “You don’t worry about much, do you Lacey?”

        And then I felt proud. As though it were something my dad admired about me. “Lacey: My One Kid Who Doesn’t Worry.”

        At the time it was true: I didn’t worry too much about anything. For one thing, what’s the point? It’s a waste of energy to worry about the outcomes of events that we aren’t even sure will happen. And even if we did worry, it wouldn’t prevent anything from happening.

        When you’re in college, you sort of feel free from worry because you’re actively working towards a concrete goal: graduate from college. Also, you’re in a sort of in between stage: handling money and paying bills, but not actually earning much of anything. And in my case, spending money that you didn’t have to make yourself.

        Once you graduate, and especially if you graduate with a degree in the “Arts” and even more especially if you graduate with a degree in the “Performing Arts” you start to worry a little bit about what the goal is and how the hell you’re going to pay rent until you achieve it.

        In the last couple of years I’ve started to panic a bit. Not about anything substantial, just a sort of general panic that sets my heart racing and makes my hands shake. When I take a moment to center myself and try to figure out what’s causing the panic, I can rarely figure out the source.

        I will say that since I moved into my own apartment I feel less anxious, but the idea of panic always seems to be hiding around the corner. I keep waiting to feel anxious and the anxiety of waiting makes me anxious. Yikes.

        What’s worse is that I’ve taken to envisioning problems that don’t even exist. Upon exiting the shower today, I imagined I saw something coming out of the little side drain in my bathroom sink. It turned out to be a portion of my own reflection in the opposite mirror. But still. Then I thought, “What if something actually did come crawling out of there?” What if it were a worm or a snake or some sort of tiny mouse? Or a creature like that one in Ghost Busters II? (Okay, that might actually be kind of funny, after the initial shock wore off.)

Ghost Busters 2. Scary!

        What the hell could I do about that? Scream? Tape it up, like I did with the bees? Run away? I live alone now, and I’m the only one here that can kill the spiders or what-have-you that show up, uninvited, in my apartment.That's the stuff horror films are made of. Shudder.

        Yeah, sometimes being a grown-up really blows.

        I’m thinking more and more that I need a change of scenery or at least a change of focus. A thought that was driven home further by the presence of YET ANOTHER dead bee in my kitchen.

        Sigh.

        In other news, I got a professional haircut today, so my bangs are under control yet again. Hooray!

*Lloyd Christmas, Dumb and Dumber (Peter and Bobby Farrelly, 1994).