Imperfect

Well, I guess all the pressure is off this year. Regular readers of the blog might know that I have a tradition in August (the month I got sober) of trying to post something on the blog every day of the month. In 2011 I did it – 33 posts in 31 days. Last year, I only actually got something up on the blog 28 of the days. Since I completely spaced on yesterday being August 1, I blew it right from the get-go. But one of the biggest differences in me today from six years ago is that I no longer am willing to let the inability to be perfect stop me from making an effort. So, I’m going to give it a go and see if I can do better than last year and hit 30 of the 31 days this month.


I will cop to being a little bit apprehensive about it. I haven’t really had a lot of ideas for blog posts burning through my brain the last few months. School has me focused and distracted all at the same time. I’m not going to lie and say that school takes so much of my time each week that I don’t have time to think about anything else. That notion, if anyone is trying to sell it to you, is about the biggest crock of shit I’ve ever heard. I’m a full-time grad student. Full-time. Do you know what that means? It means that in the spring and fall, I’m in school 12 hours a week; in the summer, full-time is eight hours a week. Add in another 12 to 16 hours a week for an internship in July and August and I’m burning up about 20-22 hours a week right now. Exhausting.

I don’t want to completely undersell it. There is homework, which has at times taken another eight hours out of my week. I could also tell you that I have hundreds of pages of reading to do every week. That would be absolutely true. However, we are almost 11 weeks into this semester and I haven’t read a hundred pages total yet (and as far as I can tell, neither have ¾ of my classmates). You learn about two weeks into your first semester in grad school that there is no way you could ever read everything that every teacher assigns. Some people create some sort of algorithm and decide which things they should read and which they can skip. I came up with a different system. I looked at all the reading that I was supposed to do that first week, decided there was no way I could finish it and concluded that even starting would be a total waste of time. 

So, in theory, writing every day should be no problem. I was working a full-time job last year and I almost managed to do it. But here’s the thing. I’m completely neurotic about school. So while I may not be doing every single thing that is assigned, I feel like any time I spend thinking about anything else is going to cause me to fail and not get my degree. So, even when, in the past couple months, I have thought, “I should write something for my blog”, my mind freezes and I can’t come up with a single idea about what to write. The next 29 days should be fun. I have no idea what to tell you to expect because I have no idea what I’m even going to write about tomorrow, let alone the rest of the month. But I’m going to try my best to entertain you for the rest of the month, so stay tuned.