I Get By With a Little Help From My Friends

If someone asked me to describe myself one of the things that I might bring up is that I am an introvert, and if you've spent any amount of time with me recently, you might find this hard to believe.  These days my social calendar is a lot fuller than it used to be.  I would say as recently as a year ago, I would go out or spend time with friends maybe once a month.  There were a few close friends from time to time that broke this norm, but it seemed like they were usually very busy themselves, and in one instance, the friend moved away to go to college.  Admirable of course, but it really cut down on the amount of social activities I engaged in for awhile.

Now it seems like I'm doing something almost every week, and with a much wider variety of people.  I go to plays and see movies, I host game nights; the photo above is legit, we played Scrabble and those were the first two words set on the board.  This summer I will be performing in a local musical production at our playhouse, and the rehearsals in the evenings are so much fun I'm bubbly and energetic when I get home from them.  This is very different from the days when I could expect to get through an entire season of a T.V. series in any given week!

Big changes like this don't happen overnight of course.  I've been working on being less introverted ever since I started college roughly five years ago, because I recognized that the key to success in almost any job market is networking.  You can't make contacts if you never talk to anyone, but talking to work colleagues and going to watch a friend perform a album release are two very different things.  

Once you start it's hard to stop too.  Where I used to find myself stressed out by going to events, I now find that if I go a couple of weeks without something to do, I get bored and lethargic.  Not to say that I don't still enjoy some alone time, few things can beat reading a book on a rainy afternoon, but now I'm just as likely to enjoy an evening playing the ever demoralizing yet hilarious Cards Against Humanity, or trying to figure out how to beat a certain friend at Zombie Flux (you know who you are!).

I really appreciate this new change in my life, and all the new friends that I have that make it possible.  This post is dedicated to you.  Thank you!

You Can Sleep When Your Dead

Finally the Spring 2014 semester is over and I get...less than three weeks of a break before Summer 2014 starts.  On the agenda for the eight-week summer semester:  The Novel, Art Appreciation, and American History II from 1877 on.  All of them online which I'm not terribly excited about, but my scholarship expires in August of this year so I had to finish up the nine credits I needed for my second associates degree before then.

In an effort to get a jump on the short, crammed summer semester, I've started reading the books require d for my class The Novel, which I think is going to be an interesting experience.  Instead of using CampusWeb and Blackboard which are sites and forums set up by the college, we will be using Wikispaces as our assignment upload location and Twitter as our chat forum.  I'm interested to see how this goes and if using twitter makes the discussions more conversational since we can only use 140 characters per tweet.  I've started reading the first of the three books required for the class Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon, and apparently there is a movie based on the novel, which I'm hoping to get and watch after I finish the book.  The other two titles are Moo by Jane Smiley, and  Straight Man by Richard Russo.  The theme of all three books is colleges, students, professors, and intrigue.  Not what I would pick for myself, but certainly more interesting and entertaining than many things I've  had to read for school in the past.

Now in addition to my usual shifts at the library and the intense eight-week summer semester, I have also picked up a second temporary part time job for the summer cleaning dorm rooms, because obviously I enjoy having little to no free time.  My mantra for the last five years has been "Oh I'll take it easy after this next semester".  Yeah right.