"Estoy cansado de las gallinas." That's a line from a poem by Pablo Neruda. It is most often translated as "I am weary of chickens." I love that sentiment.

You have to be pretty darn weary to be weary of chickens. As Samuel Johnson famously said, when a man is tired of chickens he is tired of life. Actually, now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure Johnson said that about London. But I think it makes more sense when applied to chickens.

Think of how exhausted, overwhelmed and all-around beat you have to be to sit down and write a poem expressing your weariness of chickens. It speaks to a fatigue that is so great the author can't even begin to think about the other tiring things of life: relationships, old ladies who don't turn right on red, and banks that charge you for bouncing a check even though they know you don't have any money.

It's how I feel at the moment. I am tired. I am weary.

This is not a new experience for me. I wrote this column in a Word file named "tired;" when I moved said file into the folder where I keep my writing, I noticed several articles with similar themes: "overwhelmed," "stress," "crying."

Crying? I wrote a column about crying? Clearly, I am a drama queen. My internal compass is Miss Texas.

I say that only because I am from Texas, not as a slight to current actual Miss Texas Molly Hazlett. I'm sure that young Molly would, in fact, be quite adept at helping me sort myself out.

Having now internet-searched pictures of her, I'm willing to do whatever she asks me to. Please, Molly, call me.

In the meantime, I am left to deal on my own with the frustrations of... well... being an adult. I want to place the blame on my school. I want Cardiff University to shoulder the responsibility for my current physical and emotional frailty.

But that's not really the problem. I like Cardiff University, and the city from which it gets its name. Both are lovely. My problem is not with the places but how I fit in them.

Consequently, I am struggling. Despite my ability to start a sentence with la-dee-da words like "consequently," I feel I'm just not good enough to be here. I am presently creaking past the halfway point in my undergraduate career, but can't shake the terrible feeling that it's all about to go up in flames.

I think one of the reasons university life is so difficult for me is that it is such a grown-up thing to do. It is a definitive step toward becoming a proper adult-type person. Next I'll be expected to stop pestering my dad for money. But, see, I am one month away from being 32 years old. I should have sorted this stuff out a while ago.

And for much of those 32 years, a college education has been the terminus of my life plan. I have never really thought about what I would do after earning a degree. Consistently failing in College Years v.1 meant never having to form post-college ambition.

Now, though, I am halfway through the experience and it seems increasingly likely that I might find myself soon clutching the (admittedly worthless) piece of paper that has for so long been my life ambition. And then what? I will be an adult with no idea of what to do.

All of this weighs on me amid the regular university strains of trying to stay awake in lectures about census figures, and writing papers on 16th century poetry, and Internet-searching swimsuit competition pictures of Miss Texas.

It feels to be too much; I worry that I can't sustain it. I worry that at any moment I will come apart. Immaturity and self doubt and ignorance are the chickens that look at me with dry eyes ("...nos miran con ojos secos..."), and I am weary of them.

Chris Cope lives with his wife in Cardiff, Wales. His column appears every other Tuesday.