Several blogs that I follow do something similar to this every week, and I think I might adopt it. This is my round up of the week in list form...although it's a little early because I'll be gone all day tomorrow. Oh well.
1) Graduate school is taking over my LIFE, and I haven't even started my senior year of college yet. This stems partially from the fact that I'll hardly have any time to visit programs once I get back to school and partially from the fact that I come from a family of perfectionists who have forgotten how to do absolutely nothing. Between my sister's applications to Physician Assistant programs and my own fact-finding mission for MA and PhD programs, we might not come out alive. My poor brain can only handle so much stress at one time, you know?
2) Yesterday felt like the first real day of summer so far. I know, I know: pathetic. Especially because summer break is actually winding down; only a little over three weeks til I'm back on campus for RA stuff. Something about being on the lake with good friends and lots of family, getting tossed off of tubes like a rag doll, and having really odd sunburns and a bunch of pictures really made me feel like I was nine or ten again. Or maybe it was just the fact that we were away from home without much cell phone service and no computers. No connection to the outside world and no time to worry about grad schools or my senior thesis is a really rare thing this summer. If only that would happen more often.
3) Today's only hour long excursion culminated in a visit to the Dollar Tree for the first time in years. The reason? 3/5 of my family were craving vanilla tootsie rolls. I contented myself with the 4 for $1 giant Blowpops that were once a staple of summers with my cousins. No one's opened any of the candy yet; I think the real appeal was the nostalgia that the candy brought with it. Like tangled curly hair and no phone service, those enormous lollypops remind me of being a little kid. Maybe I'll have to find a way to incorporate them into my school life more often; a little taste of summer is good for the soul, even if it's a little bit random.
4) On a completely unrelated note, BP may have actually stopped the oil leak in the Gulf. Normally, I would preface this with "Kudos to BP for..." but something about this taking 80+ days and likely having repercussions for the next decade or longer--not to mention the fact that they aren't sure they've definitely stopped it for good--makes me hesitant. I probably won't boycott BP stations for good, but the whole situation is too tragic to ignore. Unless you're in the Marine Biology or Environmental Engineering field, in which case I suppose you're experiencing a career windfall. The whole fiasco smacks of corporate greed and mismanagement. Yes, this has cost BP millions or even billions of dollars, but the people of the Gulf are the ones who are really suffering and will continue to suffer. No amount of money will ever bring back everything they've lost.
5) I stumbled upon this anecdote earlier in the week while reading something for a writing class and haven't been able to get it out of my head since. Hopefully it'll strike you the same way that it struck me. I think everyone has that person or thing that they just can't let go for whatever reason. Seeing this story and the moral in print, however, gave me a new perspective on what I was holding onto. I'm definitely still too uptight, but hopefully I'll master this idea at some point...Anyway, without further ado:
"My Al-Anon friend told me about the frazzled, defeated wife of an alcoholic man who kept passing out on the front lawn in the middle of the night. The wife kept dragging him in before dawn so that the neighbors wouldn't see him, until finally an old black woman from the South came up to her one day after a meeting and said, 'Honey? Leave him law where Jesus flang him.' "
Have a great weekend, everyone!! :)
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