Lunch was pleasant and amusing, but it wasn't entirely successful at distracting me, through no fault of my friends'. I suspect it's because we were still inhabiting the real world; the most successful distractions I've found so far are gaming and fiction. Pure escapism.

Ray and Stacy graciously stuck around for several hours and we had several good conversations, but then they left and I started to backslide almost immediately. I can't keep my emotions in check for more than a few hours at a time. I've got to get a handle on this, somehow.

My hope at this point is that it really is the impending move, with all of the uncertainty that it engenders, that is forcing my mind to return to walk these bleak paths of fevered apprehension time and again. I have put myself in a situation where I need to have long-term stability in order to extricate myself, and suddenly, as I reach the penultimate milestone, I'm thrown into extreme uncertainty.

Whatever it was that I was thinking about when I wrote the end of the previous entry, I've forgotten about it now.