The title isn’t rhetorical or one of those self-help ads. I don’t have an answer, and I would really like someone to give me one. But I feel like it’s one of those annoying things where I have to “discover” my “answer” for myself. Just once I wish the hard questions in life, the ones that actually mattered, were the ones that I could copy someone’s answer. We live in a cruel world where I can cheat on a test—which I’ve only done once when I didn’t know the last kind of “volcano” in seventh grade—but no one can tell me how to find inner peace.

I feel like I could laugh from how tightly wound I am. There must be something animalistic about it, the desire to let out some sort of loud howl—disguised as a laugh—when everything seems like a big ole bag of shit.

I also wish that I were stressed with big things. But instead it’s like a sandstorm; small, separately inconsequential nuisances that together can bury a car under a dune, or, more importantly, get in your mouth and you can’t really get rid of it. But it’s just been little things: I sent a paper to the wrong printer, and ended up late for a class that I’m always late for, and it’s beginning to get less charming when I walk in after the start. My buzzcut has stopped being G.I. Jane and started being G.I. Plain—nothing good rhymes with “Joe” so we all make sacrifices. I had to buy a domain. And then I had to cancel it. And then I had to buy another one. And cancel that one. And then buy a third one, and finally that stuck.

And then just a bunch of other little things that, added together, make me want to do that charming and cute thing of punching a wall. Also the hallway outside of my apartment smells like cheese. And not in a good way. Or in a Gouda way. Am I right??

Maybe I’ll start meditation. I always try to say that I’ll start meditation, and then I do two minutes and think of something funny on YouTube, or I’ll get a text, or I’ll want to Tweet about meditating and all of a sudden my focus is broken and it’s twenty minutes of blue screens.

And I don’t like being stressed. I know that’s a total duh but for me it’s particularly negative. I find it so hard to write and be creative and focus when I’m stressed, and since that’s, like, ninety percent of what I do as a student and a writer and since I’m God’s gift to the world—very Kanye West of me (speaking of which, have you been following the Kanye-Wiz-Amber feud? So fascinating. I’m on Amber’s side.)—when my work suffers, the entire world suffers.

And since I live alone, I don’t really have anyone to vent to at the moment when I’m feeling super stressed, and stressed-out Danny tends to be withdrawn Danny, or “tries to trip others” Danny, and that’s gonna land me in a whole heap of trouble on top of everything else.

So I guess what I’m saying is…any tips? Stress is hard, and I feel like it’s one of those things that we dismiss or try to minimize, like it’s such a little problem to have that we almost feel guilty admitting that we have it. But it’s big and weighty and it affects how you act and treat people.

Lastly, I don’t think I can stick behind Kocktails with Khloe any longer. I’ve made it through fifteen minutes of episode two, and it’s so painful that I’m jabbing fingers into my eyes because even that’s less awful.

Maybe I should start snapping pencils as a way of release. Somehow that seems like the most depressing option, even more than binge-eating Oreos, which is what I’m on the road to doing.