Moar Because...

I wrote about returning and I can't do that. It's officially my first real week back from college, which is scary, off-putting and exciting. After working until 11 p.m. (long into the night at least in Chicago time), last night, I finally stopped hitting snooze on my cell phone at 8:30 a.m. to finish up the grade checking I was doing. I didn't like it, but it got me up. More to the point, it introduced, politely, the idea that I can't just do what I want anymore and plan my work or studying around it, like I used to at Allegheny. I miss the people, not the institution. After four years of being in Meadville, there are little rituals that feel strange not to be continuing.

It's those little things that make the big difference. Not wearing my keys around my neck, not bringing a card whenever I leave the house, not going to a centralized place for lunch, not putting on a backpack to leave the house (I've been doing that for 12+ years), not walking the 45 seconds to the post office, not chilling in GFC for two or three hours after class are all the things that are interesting, different experiences, that I never would have had if I didn't push myself a lot.

I'm in danger of not pushing myself now. It's very easy for me to sit back and just sit at the computer, refreshing my email every so often and keeping current on whatever subject I'm looking at from afar (economic meltdown, suicide terrorism, future plans of the Wu-Tang Clan). Every fifteen minutes I spend looking at things to stay current is another fifteen minutes I could spend looking at grad schools or filling out job applications or finding driving schools in Chicago.

Scott Kurtz (of PvP) recently announced he was trying to change his habits now that he was working from home so that he actually got work done, getting up earlier to get that "quiet home in the dark" time, better to get up at 5 a.m. and get to it. Getting to it, then.

On the right side of this tab, there are four tabs that all have something to do with driving schools in Chicago. On the left, six others. Two of them CDs. One of them a well-reviewed, but not much purchased PS2 game, one Twitter, one Blogger and another one for Windy's one or two shot campaign. I originally wrote time to choose, but I don't think it's quite that simple. I have to focus and remember, I'm not planning my work around my free time anymore. I'm planning my free time around my work.

Sometimes, the work will be fun. I need to call up my friend anyway and talk to her for a while about how much money she's going to want designing my webpage and what I want out of it, including twitter integration and whatever else I feel like ought to be done with it. If I am going to set something up seriously to be a writer/blogger (for which a personal webpage is needed) about music/videogames/politics/whatever, than that means maybe buying a PS3 makes sense from an economic standpoint. I need to cover these things, right?

Most of the other time, it's not going to be fun. It's going to be depressing, bleak and tedious. But it's a down payment on getting to a place where I can keep growing and have fun while I earn money. But before I can get to the point where it's fun, or I enjoy what I do, I need a plan. That plan involves a lot of honest thinking and questioning what I want to do with my life in the future. I never seriously entertained the idea that I was going to be alive through college when I was in junior or high school.

Now that the future I never expected has come to pass, it means my habits are changing and now...to figure out what, exactly, I want. Once that figures out, the details can be chewed on.

And, because it's me, probably here. More than that, it's tough to stay positive when you don't do that much or few exciting things happen, or as I learned this semester, if I don't go out. And by go out I don't mean party so much as just leave the house and do something. Run or walk or just get out of whatever comfortable space I'm in.

Therefore, while I'm not committed to somewhere, I'm committing myself to these ideas: Get out of that comfort zone. Just keep moving. Keep doing different things, not just to keep busy, but to keep pushing myself. Keep growing.

So then, what do I do with the two boxes of videogames in my home? I'm hopefully not going to do what I did last year, which was park in front of my TV after searching for jobs for a couple months and playing Persona 3 until three in the morning, going to bed and doing it all over again.

A schedule that I can keep. It just needs to be coherent. Even if it goes something along the lines of:

Immediate Future: 9-2.
Future Future: 2-5
Chilling Out That Happens Before Dinner: 5-7
Videogames: 8-10
Daily Show Then Bed: 10-10:45

It's not anything...detailed, but it's something that will give substance to my day, around which I can plan whatever my next big move is on the chessboard of my lifetime. There are two questions left, then, can I get to a point where I see the board, and once there, how do I analyze the information?

I don't have the answer currently, but I think I'm on the right track now and whatever happens along the way, well, you'll see it here, first, as close to firsthand as these instruments on the end of my arms will allow me.