Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Calm After the Storm

            Thank goodness – things have begun to calm down. It wasn’t exactly a natural process – it involved saying ‘no’ to quite a few things – but ‘insane’ no longer describes my life accurately. Last week I was running myself into the ground: I wasn’t getting enough sleep, I wasn’t getting enough to eat, and I wasn’t getting my work done well. I felt like I was falling apart, and Murphy’s Law* was in effect – everything else was falling apart, too.
            One of the more obvious ways I measure my growth as a person is to look at my stress threshold. I don’t think I could have survived the last couple weeks had I been short a few years or a few experiences. As it was, by the grace of God, I felt tired, I couldn’t think, and I was starting to get sick, but I never once felt overwhelmed or suffocated or defeated – I just kept plodding on, thankfully having an enjoyable, restful summer that energized me before I restarted school.
            However, I’m very glad that’s over; I couldn’t have gone on that way, at least not without my grades suffering significantly. At the moment I’m thinking of instituting a new schedule and seeing how it works. I took a Sabbath this past weekend, and it was wonderful; I understand why God mandated a day of rest. On the other hand, before the Sabbath, we have to take the other six days to “labor and do all [our] work.”** So I’m going to do my best to work diligently and without procrastination for the rest of the week, and hopefully everything will get done.
            Why has the storm calmed so suddenly? Mainly because a cappella auditions are over; we had our final call-backs last Friday, along with deliberation that lasted into the wee hours of the morning. Some people didn’t even go home Friday night; after all, we all met up again at 7:15 Saturday morning to “dorm-storm” our new members, along with all the other a cappella groups. What is dorm-storming? It involves a lot of pounding, a lot of screaming, and occasionally singing, meant to wake up the person being added to the group***. We burst in on all our new members and then brought them all along with us to breakfast, after which the rest of the group went on retreat to Cape Cod, and I went home and went straight back to bed. It was a good decision.
            ROTC, surprisingly, hasn’t been as much of a time drain as I’d expected, although it definitely involves time commitment. I hadn’t realized how much of a community ROTC was until this year. As freshmen we went to the scheduled events and then made our way home as quickly as possible; now that we have more to do and spend more time with the unit, I’m getting to know the upperclassmen better, and as they check up on me and I check up on my freshmen, I realize how much we really do look out for each other. It was a pleasant realization.
            And of course, there’s class to worry about as well. I’m enjoying pretty much all of my classes, although I need more time to appreciate the physics, but one of my favorites, since I don’t have time to mention them all here, is Hebrew. One day a week we watch a movie (in Hebrew, with Hebrew subtitles), and the second day we look at a PowerPoint on a topic of interest and discuss a reading assignment we have looked over and written a short paper on in the past week. It’s a class where I learn, but that doesn’t cause me stress.
            There are a few other things, outside of class, ROTC, and a cappella, that have occupied my time. For one, I went to Harvard’s four-story bookstore yesterday and ended up taking pictures of about 10-20 books that I want to go back and buy – lots of things I really want to study but don’t have time to take classes on. I wanted so many different things, and they all cost so much, that I decided to not buy anything immediately and instead go home and make a schedule/budget to fit them all it. Hopefully I’ll be going back soon to implement my plan.
            Also, my ankle still hasn’t finished healing, so I can’t participate in physical activity for ROTC until I have a doctor signed off on it. The first available appointment was next Monday, so I’ll let you know how it goes. Travel still takes a lot of time, although it provides a sort of ‘free time’ where I can’t really do anything besides muse and listen to the radio on my phone, neither of which I usually have time for outside of short snippets I snatch here and there. It is getting colder, however; I started wearing a jacket outside again yesterday, and today I started doing my studying inside instead of outside because it was cold enough to hurt my concentration. It was 48 degrees Monday morning for ROTC PT.****
PS – Since I wrote this, I have been handed free Frappuccino, apples, cookies, doughnuts, and apple cider. It’s been a good day.
*If anything can go wrong, it will.
**Exodus 20:9
***This hasn’t happened to me; when they came to my door last year, I was already at MIT doing ROTC, so I didn’t find out until that night, when I could look at my phone. So they came to my door and pounded… and shouted… and I wasn’t there. Oh, well.

****Okay, I need to start switching symbols. This is ridiculous. Anyway, PT stands for Physical Training








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