You woke the morning

15 September 2009

My body is trying to turn me into a nocturnal creature. 

I've pulled two unintentional, unnecessary all-nighters. I would look up from what I was reading or watching and realize that it was 6:30 and the room really was getting lighter. 

I've been setting my alarm for 7:30 (and actually rolling out of bed at 8:30) in hopes that I can trick myself into going to bed at a decent hour. So far, whatever gland it is that controls serotonin is being very stubborn; I didn't go to bed until 4 last night. 

I've always been a night owl but this is ridiculous. What doesn't help is that all of my classes are from 6-8:40, and I have not yet procured myself a job, so there is no real reason that I couldn't be nocturnal. If I can't work this out within the next week, I'm just going to go for it. If it's good enough for owls, it's good enough for me. 

Most importantly,  there are always free washing machines and dryers at 4 a.m.

The only steps that matter

14 September 2009

So, while I have already lived here for five weeks, and while it's the start of my fourth week of grad school, I feel like I should start some resolutions for myself. (Completely stolen from Angela)

In a way, it's better to do this a little later, as I've had a chance to see what my bad habits are and can resolve to break them. Such as the bad habit of procrastination, which I'm doing right now. 

It's a fresh start for me, the beginning of my life as an adult (?) in a town where no one has any preconceived notions about me (other than what my facebook has to say).

 

Top Ten (only ten) Resolutions for my life as an all-grown-up person:

1. Complete all class assignments the day before I have the class.

I only have each class once a week, so I'm aware of all assignments well before they're due, and have plenty of time to complete them. As is, however, I've been doing each class's assignments in the few hours before the class. Hey, at least they're fresh on my mind for discussions! 

2. Take advantage of opportunities in the COM department and the graduate school (e.g. student groups, conferences, free lectures). 

I'm doing good with this. I went to the mixer before the start of the year all by myself and was the only one to do so. It was horrible and awkward and I left early, but I also met the girl who is the closest thing I have to a friend here. I also went to the GRADCOMM meeting and had my closest-thing-to-a-friend-I-have nominate me as a first-year officer. Voting is this Wednesday. Keep 'em crossed, folks. 

3. Budget time well enough to be able to walk/ride bike to class.

Campus is only like a mile away. The weather has been pretty great. Because of reasons related to Resolution #1, however, I've ended up driving to class and paying ridiculous amounts of money to park because I would be late if I didn't, and lateness is not okay. Plus, let's be real, I could use any bonus physical activity I can get. 

4. Work out 5 times a week. 

One of my dad's best friends from childhood to present is kind of a hot-shot M.D. at Harvard who's basically the go-to guy on ADD and has written all sorts of books on the brain (bestsellers, no less). His latest book is Spark, which is all about how exercise makes you smarter. I trust him. He works out and he's probably the smartest person I've met in real life (other than my mom).  On top of that, I'm the heaviest I've ever been in my entire life, almost entirely because I just had the worst year of my entire life, and that led to non-veganism, comfort eating, and not doing much moving and shaking. 

5. Create a budget and stick to it. 

I plan to use the system used by some random housewife who was on one of Oprah's weekly recession episodes. Basically, have an envelope for each expense (grocery, gas, rent, spending money, etc) and put cash in each month. When the money is gone, it's gone, and you can't overspend. 

6. Re-veganize. 

It all started when I got back from Ireland to a mom in a coma and new digs in hospital  apartments in downtown Detroit. Not a Meijer in sight! The food we had was food that people brought us, which included such dishes as green bean casserole, homemade mac and cheese, and so many baked goods. Once my mom was moved back to the Lansing area, I was living with my cheese-eating dad and sister. I'll admit it--when there is cheese in the fridge, there is NO telling what I might do. Now that I'm living alone and the only food in the fridge is that which I have purchased, I have no excuses. But I'll miss you, deli macaroni salad. I've put some cruelty-free literature on my fridge to remind me why I do this. Poor little creatures. Poor millions of starving people in third-world countries who could be fed by the vegetation it takes to feed like 3 cows. 

7. Clean my apartment (like, for REAL clean) once a week (including laundry!)

Some people that have lived with me may tell you I'm the messiest person ever (i.e. my family). When I lived with roommates, however, I always kept the common areas clean and was probably the one who actually CLEANED the most. But my bedroom was pretty much always trashed. I just had too much STUFF, and too many clothes, and that allowed me to wait months before having to do any laundry. My apartment is tidy, as I finally have the room for all my stuff, but I just want to make sure it stays fresh. 

8. Talk to someone on the phone once a day. 

I am so not a phone person. But since all of my relationships are now long-distance, I think I need to put the effort in. I also worry what will happen to me if I continue to be so void of human interaction. I have journal entries from when I was at GVSU and I was in a very, very dark place by the end of the year. 

9. Remember that I'm only here for 2 years, which is pretty brief. So, I should soak up as much of the good stuff as I can while I can and keep perspective on the bad stuff; this, too, shall pass. 

10. Keep up with my blog!

Because clearly, it's baggo. 

Will I keep any of these? Only time will tell. 

Most importantly, I took the first step. 

All the lonely people, where do they all come from?

13 September 2009

One of my first memories is playing with building blocks under my mother's desk while she worked. Another is laying sprawled out on my mom's bed drawing with invisible-ink markers while my mom folded laundry in the gold chair next to her bed. Wherever she was, I was. 

I didn't like being alone. I tortured my teenage sisters by continuously going into their rooms and literally being thrown out of them. I just wanted to be in the same room as someone. I needed company. I didn't need to talk or play with someone, I just needed company. 

When I went to GVSU for my freshman year and found myself a bit of a pariah with no friends, I would take the bus to downtown Grand Rapids and walk around, just to be in the presence of other people. I would study in the lounge of my dorm instead of my room, just so I wouldn't be alone. 

I'm alone again. It's like being in solitary confinement, and for 2 hours on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, I'm allowed to socialize with others. Apart from that, I don't talk to anyone other than the cashier at Road Ranger. I can literally go an entire day without speaking aloud and not even realize it. It doesn't help that I'm not much a phone person and am very rarely the one to make the call, or that when I do, I talk to more voice mailboxes than people because everyone I know seems to actually have a life. I don't even have anything to say when I talk to people because...well, there's nothing to share. No news.

 I just wonder what this is doing to me. Part of me doesn't think about it and relishes in the independence; I have no one to answer to, no obligations to anyone but myself. Part of me is just jealous and angry at everyone who has a social life, interesting stories and exciting new things happening to them. Part of me is wondering if I'll ever be happy here, or if I just need to tough it out the next 2 years. Because it's not that I'm unhappy here, I'm just not happy. 

There's this theory of satisfaction/dissatisfaction that's used in OrgCom a lot. It basically says that dissatisfaction is a result of your basic needs not being met. Satisfaction, however, has nothing to do with your basic needs being met; it's the needs that are higher on the pyramid that matter. They're not really two sides of the same coin.

So it's not that I'm dissatisfied. I'm just not satisfied. 

Anyway, 

I'm taking three classes this semester. I like 1.5 of them.

1. Classical Traditional Rhetorical Theory. I read the works of ancient rhetoricians. I read what scholars have written about the ancient rhetoricians. I write about the ancient rhetoricians. It's boring. 

2. Seminar in External Organizational Communication: taught by a professor who is so self-important and basically thinks that he and the way he teaches are sooooo unique and awesome and revolutionary and I seem to be the only person in the classroom that doesn't buy into it, or that realizes the '60s were almost 50 years ago and he's not doing anything new or revolutionary. There's no grades because they're just based on an "antiquated, crude yardstick" and worrying about them will "interfere with your creativity and hinder your full engagement in class activities. " When you have a question about an assignment, he just tells you to "do whatever you want." So basically, he doesn't teach anything. And to top it all off, the MSU guy he knows (because everyone here seems to know one) is the one MSU Comm professor I personally loathe because of his personality alone (but unfortunately really respect for his work). They used to share an office. I don't know how two egos that huge could ever fit into one office.

3. Research Methods and Theory: easily my favorite class. My professor is the one faculty member I had head of before coming here and I love him. Everything I learn is practical; we read the theses of former MA students and critique them based on the reading we've done. The most exciting thing is that the big final paper (study) is something that he's going to help us get published and able to add to our vitas! This is also the class that I have with the one girl here who I might be able to call a friend...eventually. 

Most importantly, I made a cake using only the mix from the box and a can of diet coke and it's delicious and cruelty free and totally cheap.

...and she's coming out tonight

8 September 2009

I went to high school with a girl named Angela (well, many girls named Angela) with whom I was never friends, even though we were involved in the same activities and knew all of the same people. Over the past few years, however, thanks to the social networking revolution, I have developed this internet friendship with her. It started with the ill-fated diary-x website, on which we and all of those mutual friends had blogs. I found hers, which detailed her escapades as a student at St. Mary's (the sister school to Notre Dame), endlessly fascinating. To me, it read like a young adult soap opera, akin to those fake blogs that networks put on their websites for popular TV characters. I was hooked on the drama, wondering what would happen next with Boy X, and the gossip of this all-girls college. Diary-x went bust, to the heartache of many, and all entries are now in some cyber black hole.  

Angela is now somewhat of a blog afficianado-addict, with like 5 blogs dedicated to different pursuits (the personal one, the one for websites she likes, a never-finished novel, and so on). One blog is dedicated specifically to documenting her journey through grad school, e.g. synopses of her classes, details of her program. As someone who recently started grad school, it started me thinking...

I've had journals since elementary school; in high school I let ALL of my angst go public with teenopendiary.com and in college kept in touch with friends from home through diary-x; I was one of the first hundreds of people to join facebook and even have a MySpace. So, letting the personal go public is not a new concept to me, but in this new day of "blogging," of assuming that "readers" will visit your site habitually or even subscribe to it through those RSS feeds that I still haven't worked out, I can't get over the (no offense to my blogger friends) self-righteousness of having a blog, of assuming that what I have to say demands an audience so much that I can no longer keep these thoughts private and deny the world my words.

Or maybe I'm just afraid to admit that's a little bit true...

Really, my goals, my inspirations, my purposes for starting this blog (and hoping to keep with it) are:

1. To document this part of my life.  It's no exaggeration to say that I'm at a crossroads.

My mom just died in April at the age of 62. Yes, it was sudden and completely unexpected. No, she was not healthy. About nine months prior, an aneurysm in her brain burst and she was in a coma for about a month. When she woke, she couldn't speak or understand language to any recognizable extent. The right side of her body was completely paralyzed. She needed a tracheotomy to breathe and was fed through tubes. The fact that she was alive at all was against all odds, but after weeks of teetering over the edge between life and death, she was finally resting on the side of life. She went through the stages of rehabilitation; her brain slowly healed and by September, for her last birthday, she was eating solid foods and could smile and say a few real words and many nonsense ones. She underwent rigorous therapies to gain movement in her right side and learn to walk again, slowly and unsteadily. We read her children's books, my sister brushed her teeth, we sang carols at Christmas and we taught her to play Uno and Go Fish. 

Though my mother had become, in so many ways, my child, the maternal drive inside her remained. She would stroke my hair and call me "Honey-Baby." She was still my MOM; she teased me and laughed with me; she loved to play cards and watch MSU sports on TV. Then, one day, when she was using her walker to walk down the hall of her nursing home to the dining room for dinner, she suffered from cardiac arrest and died, unable to communicate with my sisters or the techs what was wrong. 

Losing a mom is unbearable. It isn't something that can be explained to, or understood by, anyone who hasn't gone through it. It still hasn't sunk in, but I cry every single day. And it changes a person. It's changed me, at least. 

I just started grad school, and my mom will never know it. I've moved to a city where I don't know a single person, living alone for the first time. Therapists and grief counselors discourage making big changes while you're grieving, and I've made every change. I left my job, my friends, my Dad, my hometown, my cats, and everything that felt familiar or safe. I know it sounds melodramatic, but...well, it is dramatic! I will also never be going through again what I'm going through now, and years from now I would love to be able to remember what it was like to be 24. So, a blog. 

2. Free therapy.

If that last section didn't give you any indication, I have some stuff to work out. Writing has always been my catharsis. To put that writing online and susceptible to comments, and to allow people, even strangers, to criticize me or comfort me will be very helpful. I think. I hope. I'm totally up for someone telling me that I'm feeling too sorry for myself or that I need to look at something from a different point of view. There are very few people in anyone's life who are close enough and love you enough to tell you when you're wrong. So I'll let strangers do it too. 

3. It's something to do!

I'm a little bored here. I'm new to this small, Midwestern, cornfield-surrounded town. I don't have a job yet, I don't have any friends yet, I don't have cable yet. I say "yet" because these are all things that I hope will come with time. I need something to do other than write papers about Isocrates and evaluate journal articles about message composition with the Elaboration Likelihood Model. While having time to focus on my studies is just fabulous, I'm too lazy of a person to do it all the time, and I've already watched every DVD I own (and all of their special features).

So, here I go! Welcome to the thoughts and ramblings of a 24-year-old Communication master's student at a mid-sized Midwestern university. I'm a little self-centered, a little neurotic, a total hippie and feeling pretty lost. I guess I hope it makes for interesting reading.

Most importantly, my 40-year-old self is going to LOVE this shit.