Well as much as I love Reduce Reuse Recycle, they are not the three R's i'm thinking about.
Try: Reflect, Regroup, Restructure
Lets start out with me saying that this might sound like an emo rant but it's not at all. It really is more of a "huh...well that's interesting" and less of a "hand me that razor me wrists need some lovin".
In middle school when hormones started raging and people (including myself) started coupling off I realized that this couple thing was going to be different for me. It was then I started matching people or agreeing to put in the good word with some social connection (social connection? it was 8th grade). I had a couple of relationships myself but I was always more focused on seeing what I could do to get that one girl to muster the courage to ask that special guy to dance to whatever Usher music video was being projected in the multi-purpose room.
My first year of high school I pin pointed why the relationship thing was different for me. I decided that the romantic side of life was just not a possibility for high school and I worked on other couples instead. Over the four years of high school I was a combination of Gossip Girl and Mean Girls without the money, technology, or fashion. There was a hilarious series of scandalous rumors, notes passed, and late night phone conversations. I became sort of a low profile social butterfly who just happened to be friends with a lot of different people and could spread information from group to group.
I continued in the thick of things with relationships and then senior year, with my position as a writer for the newspaper, I turned my attentions to what I could do to diagnose the problems on campus. These habits transferred to college where everything grew to a bigger scale. Scandal was more. Setting of relationships became less about someone to eat lunch with and more about the perfect match for future marriage, the late night phone conversations became later, and the amount of on campus issues to address grew as well.
Today in a professor's office I said that next year I want to relieve myself of my self-appointed duty of saving the world. I want to be more a student and less of a faculty member so that I could focus on preparing myself for post-college life. While I love my degree program and my school, a year from now the nuts and bolts of curriculum and school procedure will no longer pertain to me. It will just be me and my resume, hitting the pavement trying to find work. While discussing this with said professor, I got distracted and ended up dissecting some School of Theatre Arts issue and trying to think of potential solutions. Old habits are effing hard to break.
Anyways I guess I realized that my life would have half the dramatic discussions and my calendar would really open up if I just focused on myself and my list of priorities.
Does this sound arrogant and martyrish? Probably, and I apologize. I think this is a good goal to put into writing and hope that one day I figure out how to execute it. Maybe it's possible to be a good friend and not a solutions manual. Maybe not. I guess we'll see how this all works out.
P.S. Tucson...You're effing hot.
