College

Posts from my rediscovery of this blog during college. Oh, the early-twenties wisdom I will share…

A Day Off

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I’ve been thinking a lot about intentionality lately, about how much control I have over the way my life is going right now, when it’s a good thing to hold onto those decisions and when my grip is getting a little too white-knuckled. For the past few semesters I’ve had plenty of say in how my schedule and general way of life is set up, but sometimes that level of ostensible control results in high hopes that are inevitably dashed when circumstances arise in which I can’t control what happens.

The flip side of this is that I tend to be far more intentional about the new tasks and opportunities I take on, rather than making conscious decisions to give myself a break, so I accelerate the pace at which I hurtle through life when I should probably be putting on the brakes.

For instance, when a Three Day Weekend such as this one rolls around, and I’m a little under the weather, I still can’t help but spend the day making a list of all the things I need to get done. I may be curled up on the couch under a comfy blanket with Scrubs playing on Hulu, but I’m also scribbling down every single tiny chore/assignment/personal goal for the weekend in 15-minute increments and religiously checking all three of my email accounts and color coding my schedule for the next week and…

I can’t seem to give myself permission to slow down, even for one day. I feel like I have to make up for the fact that I slept in this morning so my afternoon and evening had better set world records for productivity – even though I have Monday off and this was only the first week of classes so I don’t actually have insane amounts of work to do (yet).

Part of this discomfort with taking time off is probably linked to the similar discomfort I feel whenever I spend much time off-screen. You know what I mean; even when I don’t have anything pressing to do, my go-to entertainment is usually mindlessly scrolling through Tumblr or checking web series Twitter updates on my phone, and trying to step away from the screen once in a while is surprisingly difficult.

I’ve made small steps. I used to turn on my laptop to go on Pandora while I was getting ready in the morning, but I kept checking emails or opening other new tabs between putting on jeans and putting on a shirt, and then again between eyeshadow and mascara. Now when I feel like listening to music, I turn on my iPod and find that I’m ready a lot sooner and feel less scattered in the morning.

Of course, then I go out to the kitchen and check my email (all three of them) over breakfast. But hey, baby steps, right?

For now, I’m going over to a friend’s house and giving myself the evening off. The To Do List of Doom can wait.

Emphasis

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Emphasis: special stress laid upon, or importance attached to, anything

I like to overthink single words sometimes, particularly when one keeps following me around in my everyday life. As the new semester gets underway and I introduce myself over and over in all my new classes, I find myself confronting the word “emphasis.” It crops up as professors describe what we will emphasize this semester in our coursework, in the rules they would like to emphasize most, in my own descriptions of myself as I say I am an English major with an emphasis in creative writing.

I’ve often wondered why there is no Creative Writing major, why it must remain a subset of English. We can’t simply major in English; the university requires us to eventually choose one of four emphases. For all intents and purposes, when choosing classes or giving someone the short answer to what we study, we are in fact Creative Writing, Rhetoric, English Education, or Literary Studies Majors. But the language we use (and of course language is vital to us English Emphases Majors) divides us based on which part of English studies we choose as our focus. The language surrounding these courses of study is actually a bit of a mouthful (just imagine capitalizing all that on my diploma: English With an Emphasis in Creative Writing) but they’ve never bothered to change it.

My professors, for their part, have “just wanted to emphasize” so many stipulations and contexts and phrasings that they undermine the weight they desire to lend those things. Not everything can actually be that important; emphasizing every other thing, particularly when three other professors are doing the same thing in all my other introductory lectures, actually ends up losing meaning.

The word even keeps popping up in conversations with my friends about grad school and all the importance placed on the prestige of what we do after graduation. With all this Capital-Letters-Implied EMPHASIS on Advanced Degrees and Networking and Impressive Job Offers and Financial Success, anything less than that is dramatically disappointing…but the funny thing is, I get the feeling that actually attaining All! The! Things! would simply be meeting expectations. We’re expected to excel. We’re expected to outshine. So when we do, these accomplishments that had so much “emphasis” are suddenly just par for the course. Rather like the word itself, they have lost their original weight.

Like many overused words, then, I suppose I should be more intentional about using emphasis in my own life.  As the definition states, emphasis should be special, particular, discerning – not just tossed about willy-nilly.

On Ordering Books for Next Semester

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I despise ordering books.

I have requested that my password for my campus bookstore account be reset no less than five times, but has the email shown up yet? Nope. So here I sit, with a cart full of books that will probably be gone by the time I can finally sign in to pay for them.

Now, I realize that compared to my engineering and accounting friends, I, the English major, have it pretty easy (read, cheap). My textbooks, which tend to run along the lines of writing handbooks, are more like guidelines than actual requirements, not to mention most of the novels I read for class can be found at Half Price Books even cheaper than renting from the campus bookstore.

However.

It never seems to fail that I forget to order books until only a few days before the new semester, and that means that the rental and used book options are more limited, increasing the price and causing me extra stress when something inevitably goes wrong with the website. The whole process is just annoying, and I would so much rather spend money on the books I truly want to read.

How do you cope with ordering required materials, whether for school or work?

New Year – Now What?

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Have you ever noticed how the end of an old year seems like the perfect excuse to let good habits slide, because in a week or so you’re going to start new ones anyway? Maybe that’s just me. So I’ve been thinking about past resolutions I’ve managed to keep and new ones I’d like to try, and I’ve got it divvied up by a few different areas of my life:

1. This blog!

My posts here have been…irregular to say the least.  I’ll have to see what my work and class schedule is like, but my general goal will be to post at least twice during the week and once a weekend.  Fingers crossed I’ll be able to make this blog into a real thing!

2. Health!

The Southern Belle and I were pretty good about keeping up a workout routine this semester…until Dead Week rolled around.  Then we tended to go for Starbucks over the gym.  But I’d like to resurrect that workout routine with both cardio and strength training, as well as continuing to avoid packaged dinners.  I should probably also take my boyfriend’s advice and drink more water.  And eat more veggies.  You know.  General healthy eating.  But also not beating myself up over occasional slip-ups.

3. Communicating!

I seriously need to keep in better touch with my family.  And friends from high school.  I’m also filing more consistent journal writing under this, because I need to be better about communicating with myself and articulating what I’m feeling.  Along this same vein, I want to be better about keeping myself informed on what’s going on in the world, because for most of 2014 I seriously had no idea.

4. School!

This is my job right now, but I need to keep it balanced and give schoolwork the value it deserves, no more and no less.  Part of this is my resolution not to do homework at home.  Instead I’ll be utilizing the office I get a key to because I’m a managing intern for my school’s online journal (yay, power!).  I’ll also try not to rely on my tutoring shifts as time to get homework done – as nice as it is to get paid to do homework, it’s not a good habit to rely on that opportunity and then get annoyed with my students when I have to, y’know, actually do my job.

5. Fun!

I want to try new things.  I actually promised my boyfriend I would even *gulp* go skiing with him.  This semester I’ve realized that I got into a habit of writing off certain activities or aspects of life just because it’s easier to define myself that way.  For example, I tend to laugh about the idea of me going skiing because I’ve just automatically said that I hated it for so long.  I know that if I were to agree to try it, people would make a big deal out of it, so I don’t admit that actually I might be willing to try it again.

What are you trying to improve on in 2015 (or are you just staying your wonderful self)?

It’s Beginning to Sound a Lot Like Christmas

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I sat in Starbucks yesterday working on an essay and found myself grinning like an idiot when John Denver and the Muppets came on singing “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” Singing along under my breath to Miss Piggy’s “BA DUM BUM BUM” earned some alarmed looks from the students around me, but I didn’t really care. Christmas music makes me so happy. Even when I’m stuck at school until only a week before Christmas (yay finals!) and it feels like I’m missing out on all the anticipation at home that makes the season so wonderful, I can dance around in my kitchen to Dan Fogelburg and sing along to Idina Menzel in my room and it feels something like the magical season I remember from being a kid. We only haul out these CDs once a year, but I never fail to remember every single word. They’re carved deep into my memory, an accessible form of time travel as this thing called growing up slowly seems to steal some of the magic left over from childhood.

Through the Looking-Glass of Weird Insecurities

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As I leaned at an awkward angle over the bathroom counter, peering into the magnifying mirror (a torturous invention, why do we even have those?) and yanking out rogue eyebrow hairs with a pointy metal tool (hint: tweezers), I wondered why. Why was I bothering? Even I hadn’t noticed the extra hairs between my actual brows until I glanced into the magnifying mirror. Just to confirm this, I looked at myself in the wall-mounted mirror, the one that didn’t show every blemish in horrifyingly high definition.

Nope. No unibrow.

And yet I couldn’t help trapping yet another hair between the tweezers’ points and pulling it out. Now that I looked closer, I also needed to slap one of those blackhead strip thingies on my nose. Except…oh great, I had blackheads around my lips too. A pore strip there would only pull out the (also unsightly) little fuzzy hairs around my mouth, not to mention exacerbate my winter chapped lips. (I only know this because I’ve tried to purify those blackheads before. And it hurt.)

The truth is, I’ve had a weird thing about plucking my eyebrows ever since sixth grade. That was the year the boy in front of me, who I may or may not have had a mild crush on, turned around and said, “Do you tweeze your eyebrows? Because you’ve got a unibrow goin’ on there.”

As a result, that weekend I endured the painful ministrations of a friend and her tweezers. It just so happened that this cosmetically gifted friend had also gifted me with another random insecurity – when I wore my hair in a ponytail to school one day, she commented, “No wonder you wear your hair down all the time. Your ears are filthy!”

Who says those kinds of things to a 12-year-old? But more importantly, how is it that these off-hand remarks to the 12-year-old I once was still affect my view of myself to this day? Psychologists say we remember seven negative things for every positive comment about ourselves; to me, this ratio is unsurprising. I always used to journal or somehow record the compliments I got so they wouldn’t slip away, but I’ve never had trouble remembering the times people have asked me why I never tried lightening my freckles.

Now that I’m in college, you’d think the opinions of a few sixth-graders from way back when wouldn’t affect me so much. But if I’m being honest, it’s not even their voices I still hear anymore. I see stray eyebrow hairs and yes, I think of that boy twisting around in his desk to make a blunt observation, but it’s my own internal criticism saying, “Better get rid of that unibrow. We don’t want a repeat of Fred’s comment.” I put my hair into a ponytail and it says, “Shouldn’t you clean your ears, just in case? Remember what Sally said.” The fact is that although I am older and at least a smidgen wiser, I have so deeply internalized these critiques of my appearance that I no longer even need the memories to bolster them. They are standalone insecurities. I have made them my own.

I have learned from experience not to pin all my self-worth on others’ opinions. I am still learning, slowly, to accept my body and the self inside it. First, though, I’ll have to put the tweezers down.

Making a List and Checking It a Lot

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This couldn’t be happening. It was always right here. I put it in my backpack every single morning – how could I possibly have forgotten?

But my beautiful, organized, color-coded, checklist-sporting planner was conspicuously absent from the set of binders and notebooks in my backpack. An empty pocket where my life should be.

This may sound a bit overdramatic, but it wasn’t until I had to spend the day without my planner that I realized how much I use it. It’s not so much the actual planning – I can remember assignments pretty well, and there’s always the syllabus if something slips my mind – but the security blanket part of it. You see, I love to make lists. Lists of chores, lists of assignments, lists of miscellaneous emails that need to be sent, lists of time slots in which to accomplish each of these separate, color-coded sets of things. It has become my habit to rewrite, reorganize, and otherwise revamp any and all of these lists whenever I’m bored, nervous, stressed, or overwhelmed (oh look, there’s two lists in this sentence alone!) or at intervals throughout the day. It’s how I convince myself that I have my life together. My planner gives me the proverbial handle on things. When I flip through and see the scribbled beauty of its check marks and highlights, it both soothes and empowers me, like the montage of Elle Woods buckling down and kicking ass at school while “Watch Me Shine” plays in the background. (I may or may not also watch that montage whenever I need some quick motivation.)

So at first, I felt adrift without my planner there to guide me. I reached for it at all the usual times. When Spanish class got boring, I made do with scribbling funny nicknames on my boyfriend’s practice test, to which he retaliated by adding “Her Majesty” to my own name. When I had to go last for a presentation, I made mental notes and adjustments to my prepared talk and asked a few questions of the two people who had gone before me. Now, as I sit at work waiting for people to walk in (I’m on receptionist duty this hour), I’m working on another post for this poor, neglected blog.

Generally, when life is a bit too much, seeing it all written down and prioritized helps me stave off anxiety and further stress – as I said before, a security blanket. But maybe, just maybe, I need to put the planner down every once in a while. I did survive a whole day without it and I didn’t go too crazy. Besides, what good is there in being organized if I’m not really present?

Mysterious Water Leaks Don’t Care About Feminism

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I came home last night to a squishy floor. My roomie informed me that water had been pooling in our hallway (really more of a smallish space between doorways, but we call it a hallway) ever since she got home, and it was starting to soak through the carpet. As the evening went on, we put down more and more towels, the water spreading until our floor looked like laundry day dumped out on the rug.

In one respect, I was glad we were both girls, because my boyfriend would never have had enough towels to deal with this. (I once had to explain to him what a linen closet was.) Not to stereotype, but girls just tend to accumulate more fabric goods, if only because our relatives don’t know what else to give us for graduation and Christmas.

But toweling needs aside, when we realized we didn’t want to wake up to an entirely flooded apartment, we called – you guessed it – a male friend to come over and look at what was wrong. Our neighbor, who is a friend of ours, stopped by and showed us how to turn off the heating part of the water heater, but he couldn’t turn the valve to stop the water flow to the tank.

After he left, we started thinking of who we knew who might have the tools we needed. I actually ended up calling my boyfriend’s roommate, because I knew my boyfriend was already asleep and turns his phone off at night. So BF’s Roomie graciously came over, even though he had almost been asleep himself, and figured out a way to bust through the corrosion on the valve and cease the water flow. I rejoiced!

Except we could still hear dripping.

Turns out it was a pipe behind the water heater, which BF’s Roomie found with the help of my little ladybug mirror from B&BW (three cheers for sparkly impulse buys!). I called maintenance at precisely 8:00 this morning, and a very nice man is now draining our hot water tank and explaining to me how these older apartments have this super awesome design where a drain is placed behind the water heater where only house-elves could possibly reach it to keep it clear and clean. So that’s clogged, obviously, but he says we’ll have it fixed by the end of the day.

But once again, as with my car, I found myself succumbing to an instinct that told me I had to justify my decision-making in a home maintenance problem. Even as BF’s Roomie was working away at the shutoff valve, I was rambling about the evidence that suggested it was the water heater, or something in that area, and how shutting off the power and the water made sense. BF’s Roomie patiently listened and agreed with everything I said, but he gave me a few funny looks, so at one point I stopped myself.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but as a girl I’ve sort of been raised with this societal instinct that whatever I decide to do about home maintenance stuff is probably wrong.”

“Yay stereotyping,” he answered dryly.

I was able to recognize, identify, and control the ingrained tendency to second-guess myself this time, so I suppose my experience with my car breaking down has made some inroads into my mental definition of Me As Female Dealing With Problems of Male Expertise. And even though it turned out it wasn’t the water heater leaking, we would never have found the real problem without the logical decisions my roommate and I made.

A Book About College

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I want to write a book about college. There’s a startling lack of fiction set during these years; it’s like everything skips straight from high school to office life and marriage. But, to paraphrase a friend, we naturally seek out representations of ourselves. And it’s hard enough going through college and all the adjustments therein without having the up-to-now comforting world of fiction to back you up. It’s just a gap I’d like to fill.

But I don’t really know how to begin.

The Many Layers of Lizzie Bennet

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Yesterday I received my very own copy of The Secret Diary of Lizzie Bennet. And today I finished reading it. All 377 pages of it.

I have loved the Lizzie Bennet Diaries ever since my freshman year of college (NOTE: If you have not watched them, stop reading right now, go to YouTube, and watch them. All of them. Right now.), and have only grown to love them more as I rewatched them over and over again (occasionally I find myself just binge-watching all 100 episodes plus the related secondary arcs in a matter of 48 hours. Much like reading the book. But I digress). At first I simply enjoyed watching the creativity of updating Jane Austen’s classic novel and translating it into modern media. Then, on the second or third go-round, I started to think about the online community Lizzie was creating. So I started scrolling through the comments section below the videos, reading the conversations people were having, the reactions. I even commented a few times.

I was absurdly proud when my comment became the top one on Episode 18.

Then came the watch-through at the beginning of my junior year of college, right when all the undergrad stuff starts to give way to the “better plan something for after graduation in two years” pressure. Even though Lizzie’s story takes place in grad school, the connection between her fear of departing the Bubble of Academia and mine had strengthened. I was staring down similar questions of what I wanted to do with my life, battling similar tendencies toward prejudice, struggling with a similar workload.

Reading the book has added another layer to my experience of the LBD as a whole. Besides adding new twists to the plotlines and revealing specific details in settings we never saw on camera, the book even better translated Lizzie’s inner turmoil, not only over her sister’s love life, but over what to put online, what content she wanted to generate, what she wanted to contribute to the world.

And damn. As much as she procrastinated some of those decisions, girl got stuff done.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been…stuck.  I might elaborate a bit in future posts, but for now suffice it to say that I was sorely lacking in motivation to even go to class, let alone answer my professors’ questions about whether or not I’m considering grad school or what internships I’m pursuing for this summer.  All I ever wanted to say to them was, “I don’t even have a complete resume right now.  Leave me alone.”

As sappy as it might sound, reading about Lizzie Bennet’s success in pursuing what she loved, both familial and career-wise, helped jolt me at least a few inches back toward reality.  I’m going to make the most of this vicariously earned productivity – and not just by making blog posts.  Hopefully.

Honestly, that’s what amazes me about multimedia storytelling these days.  I adore books; they were the background to my childhood, and will always hold a special place in my heart.  But there’s a big difference between reading something and sitting down a week later around a cheese plate in someone’s family room to talk for a few hours, and being able to contribute to an immediate and growing shared forum. It’s fascinating to watch the communities that spring up around projects like LBD and Vlogbrothers.  Even SnarkSquad, the blog that got me re-interested in blogging and online content, has its own little band of followers.

Membership in such communities around multimedia projects extends well past mere Internet fame; because the narrative originates in a platform that allows immediate sharing of reactions to the content, a viewer also becomes a contributor in real time.  Passivity becomes a choice rather than a fact of the medium.

And discussion of the content is no longer confined to whoever else is in the living room while you control the remote.  Worldwide critical discussions take place every day around every type of narrative possible.  It’s beautiful and intriguing to watch as the swirling conversations on Tumblr connect with the YouTube comments which intertwine with the Facebook and Twitter threads.  We get to watch and read and listen to these amazing creative things – and then we get to join in.

Over here in my own little narratively nerdy corner of the Internet, I’ll be trying not to take that for granted.