Avoiding the Chicken

Let me begin by saying I think the movies and popular culture have college wrong. In the movies, the college student is incredibly cultured, intellectual, and somehow manages to balance their classes, a job, their student orgs, a social life without getting fat off of booze, and pursuing the future career of their dreams. I’m calling bull shit. Forget being mad at the media for creating unattainable body ideals for men and women, I am more upset at the creation of unattainable goals for college students. It is incredibly difficult to stay on top of all these things, not to mention keeping your sanity in the process. Even now as I write this, I am avoiding doing something that most certainly should be taking priority. But as always, I digress. Writing is an incredibly comfortable and familiar feeling and when someone is stressed, we always turn to what is comfortable and familiar. And so here I am yet again, putting thoughts onto paper in what is an attempt at an organized manner. I hope that for any of you reading this who are in college and are currently having one of those stressed out moments I like to affectionately refer to as running around like a chicken with its head cut off, know that you are not alone. I too have these ridiculous moments whether they last for a day or for a week. Take a deep breath, you can get through it. Now tell me that I can as well, dear reader, because it seems as though I am the chicken right now.

Now that we have acknowledged that I do not have it together as it may appear from the outside, let’s continue on. Usually I spend a fair bit of time mulling over my thoughts before I put fingers to keyboard from my posts. I like to organize my ideas to fit into a certain theme which I focus my writing on. This time however, I am hiding in the back of my history class, looking very studious typing away on this post and in fact not taking notes on the Islamic Empire. But honestly, can one man really manage to go on as many tangents as my professor does? It must be wearing off on me however, because I too am off on a tangent. My apologizes dear reader.

Life for me has had some changes since I last posted. I have been so busy I have lost sight of some of my priorities. One that I find to be particularly high in my regard is always finding time for yourself and remembering to have fun. I believe these two things are vastly important in both avoiding becoming “the chicken” as well as the mentality of not letting life pass you by. So often we look forward to the next thing: graduating school, finding a job, starting a family. Not to dismiss the excitement that comes along with those things, but we often imagine our lives within the mentality of the “someday,” well that someday is today and your life is happening right now. My life is happening right now. And so this post serves to remind myself, and you too dear reader if you need reminding, enjoy your life right now. Spend an hour and do something because you enjoy it, not because it is a requirement. Don’t be the chicken. You do not want to look back on your life once you have reached that someday with regrets that you can no longer change.

-T

Happiness

Let me begin with my apologies for the rather large gap between my last post and this one. With my junior year now in full swing, life has been incredibly hectic, in the best sort of way. My classes have already challenged my ideas and beliefs as well as pushed me past my usual comfort zone. Okay you’ve got me, my French class is just shitty. I hide in the back of the room praying my professor will call on one of the very enthusiastic freshmen instead, while I count down the days until I have finished the unfortunate requirement needed for graduation. Luckily, I can assure you my other classes are much more enjoyable. I’ve also started a new job, continued with my student org, and began my role as a team leader for Badger Volunteers. Needless to say, I hope this explains my rather lengthy absence from these posts. But as I have said in previous entries, I digress. You did not come to this page to hear about my schedule and if you did, I’m sorry to disappoint. No, I wanted to make this post about me and my happiness. I promise you it isn’t as selfish and vain as you are currently judging me for, well at least I hope not.

Take a second and reflect, what do you like to do? If you’re like me, you answer this question with your intended audience in mind. For instance, if I am talking to a classmate, I might mention a recent documentary I’ve watched (I love social and nature documentaries) or what I did last weekend, depending on what type of person I think they are. In fact, I’m sure you do it too. It’s not to say you and I pretend to be someone we’re not, but rather, provided you have some type of social graces, we want to come across as interesting as well as engaging in activities we think they will like. This brings me to my first point about my happiness. How many times have you wanted to begin a hobby or activity for the fact that it would make you more interesting, cooler, or well-rounded, not because you enjoyed it? I can promise you that I have. I have attempted to play guitar, I’ve bought Grapes of Wrath, which is currently collecting dust on my shelf, I’ve attempted to genuinely enjoy running (okay so this activity I still do, but it is done begrudgingly with a sense of duty to my health). On the reverse side of the spectrum, you shy away from certain things you enjoy because others don’t or they are perceived to be unworthy. I’m guilty of this and I know that others are as well. Why do we deny ourselves our own personal happiness in order to placate those around us? Believe me, for anyone that knows me extremely well, I’m practically the queen of compromise and staying quiet about what I want in order to make others happy. I’ve been doing it for so long, I honestly had stopped realizing I was even doing it and it was affecting my happiness. Why on Earth would I want to go through life with the sole purpose of pleasing others? And so this post, dear reader, serves to act as the beginning of my own pursuit of happiness (no I’m not Will Smith) without feeling the need impress those around me. My life will no longer be spent wasted on activities that do not bring me happiness. I came across a quote today: “And so she decided to start living the life she had imagined.” Here is to starting that imagined. 

-T

One Step Forward, Three Steps Back

                In this exact moment, I am sitting in a coffee shop in Madison, Wisconsin. It’s the end of August and I am wearing flannel and glasses that I’ve probably owned since middle school, or at the very least, early high school. Not to mention I am typing this on the most archaic, behemoth excuse for a laptop. To the curious outsider, I fit the bill of a stereotypical hipster. Did I also mention I’m listening to The Fray? Okay, okay, maybe that last part doesn’t help the image! To even witness myself in this moment seems laughably molded into the ideal of what a college-aged female trying to find herself looks like. Now internet friends let’s all take a moment to laugh at me, because my life in this exact moment is predictably hilarious. Now that we have acknowledged that fact, dear reader, let us continue on.

In the past week since I had posted, I’ve moved back to Madison to begin my fall semester (please send me positive energy as I have to take French 203 this semester and it will most likely result in my endless tears). Since moving back, I’ve found the week to be filled with the most curiously contradicting variety of ups and downs. An up, a cat is living in my apartment. A down, I’m living on Greek row and the days have been filled with endless cult-like chanting of sorority girls. An up, my apartment has a beautiful view of Lake Mendota. A down, the realization that it is literally an entirely new beginning for me. Which is incredibly weird and frightening to me as this is my third year of college. Your third year of college is supposed to have the sense of routine and familiarity to it and yet I haven’t felt so similar to my freshman year self since I first moved into the dorms two years ago. I think that it is easy to allude yourself into thinking that after a breakup, or really for any change in your life, that the transition is only going to be measured through the successes of moving on. You see it in movies all the time, the girl is incredibly despaired at her newfound singleness. She pouts for a few weeks, and then she forgets her sadness and life is carried on. What the movies don’t show and what people in life tend to gloss over is that change continues on and you will experience your good days and your bad days. In my week moved back to Madison, I have experienced every emotional shade in the spectrum of good and bad. Yet it will all still be marked down as my progress through change, because the change within my life is happening regardless of if I mope to my friends, get a tarot card reading (yes I actually did this and it actually made me cry and you are all actually judging me in this moment for having gotten one), drink one too many and lose my glasses (I told you I was stuck wearing the shitty middle school ones!), feel empowered and strong, or mild and meek. In the span of this one week, I have experienced all of these and I know that is only the beginning. Change, progress is what I should really be referring to it as, continues to march on within my life, and it does in yours as well, regardless of if you are measuring it through the form of a breakup, or perhaps just a different one of life’s hardships. My point, if you have managed to bear through my excessive ramblings, is that we need to be measuring the changes in our lives not only through the positives but through the negatives as well. Because, oftentimes, the negatives have just as many lessons in store for us to learn as the positives do. And that, dear reader, is part of what I think makes us so terrified to leap into the unknown, but regardless, sometimes we are compelled to make the leap anyways.

-T