It's hard to find time to blog when you have to make sure your spinning plates don't fall to the ground.
That being said, it's a bad excuse to say the reason I haven't been blogging for the past three months is because I've been too busy. But one thing leads to another -- you get caught up in one thing, and then another and another and pretty soon time goes by just like that. After not blogging for so long, it's hard to get back into the habit. It's a shame because there's so much that's happened so long ago, I can't possibly remember every detail that's happened, every moment that's impacted me. Even during the times I was busy, stressed, or going through some dilemma I should have been using this blog to get my thoughts and feelings out, not just for the sole purpose of updating this thing, but more for myself.
I sometimes wonder if I've taken on much more than I can chew this semester. I haven't been able to take a break since the semester began. Thankfully, this weekend I had the chance to sit down and write but it only feels like I'm passing through the eye of the storm. I know once this weekend pasts I'm going to have to rev it up in high gear again, like it has been up till now. Once Thursday, the date of my last midterm, ended I felt a huge surge of relief and passed out on my bed. Do you know the feeling you get when you hold your breathe underwater for the longest time, and make it out into fresh air just as your lungs feel like their going to explode? Yeah, it felt that good.
This semester I've had to juggle responsibilities and manage my time more than I ever thought I would. If you were from the future and told me in freshman year that my semester now would be like this, I would have laughed right in your face. In short, I've been dealing with school and classes, a part-time job, being a pledgemaster for Beta Alpha Psi (but we have to call ourselves "candidatemasters"), networking and recruiting for upcoming summer internships, and managing my friendships.
With school and classes, I know everyone has them, but I've been putting a lot of pressure on myself to do well in order to boost my GPA for internship applications in the spring. It's been stressing me out because I have to do ridiculously well in order to raise my GPA a decimal point -- as in near 4.0 status -- after which I'll feel a lot more stable in getting interview offers in the coming spring. At the moment I feel like if I don't make this level my chances in getting an internship -- and by extension a job -- are going to slim down a lot.
A good friend of mine who worked over the summer at the company I'm at now recommended me for the position. I'm very grateful to him, but damn it takes a lot of energy out of me. It's 16 hours a week, and for those of you who have had a part-time job during the semester I hope you can appreciate that number. I just never realized how long 16 hours a week is and how valuable that time is. What makes it worse is the fact that my times are every Monday through Thursday afternoons, and with classes every morning before lunch, lunchtime events with Beta Alpha Psi (basically everyday), and work all I want to do at the end of the day is go to sleep and wind down. But then there's homework, and studying, and all that extra after school work that you have to do just to keep up with everyone else.
Being a leader of Beta Alpha Psi as a pledgemaster is a huge time commitment, but it's not just the meetings or the straight work you put into it. When you have classes at 8:00 AM, pulled an all-nighter to study for a midterm, and have work in the afternoon, the only thing you want to do is crawl into a hole and go to sleep. To be honest, being social and putting myself out there outside of my close-knit group of friends takes a lot of energy for me. It's why after corporate presentations and networking events I always feel exhausted. It's not to say I don't enjoy talking to my pledges -- I love it and they're such good kids! It's just in between everything else that's been going on, some days can get really rough but I still have to force a smile on my face.
It doesn't help that in the back of my mind I wonder when the apartment we're living in is going to get sold. We don't have an official lease contract. We're living there on a month-by-month basis with an addendum that if she sells the place then we have three months to find a new apartment, which isn't bad. However, depending on when the apartment gets sold things could be really hard for me and my two roommates to look for places, because it's just one thing after another. Finals are in December, internship applications and interview preparations are in January, and interviews run all the way from February through early March.
It's the combination of all these things that makes me feel exhausted most of the time. I feel overworked a lot. Coffee runs through my blood and sustains me. I must drink at least 4-5 cups during the weekdays if not more on bad days. Sometimes I feel like I'm being pulled on by all these obligations and responsibilities. The worst part in all this is because I've been getting slammed every week, I've been neglecting my old freshman year floormates. I haven't seen them in weeks and I miss the good times we used to have when I could just hop over a couple of doors to just hang out with them. But now, they live in Chinatown while I'm all the up either in my apartment in 32nd street or at school, working or studying. There are other relationships I haven't been giving my fullest attention to as well, and the only thing I can say now is I'm sorry.
Each of these paragraphs in themselves could have been a blog post and unfortunately I've had to cram all of them in one. Hopefully I can get around to writing more often and go into more detail on all these things. It felt good to write something -- it's been too long.
-Emoinacloset
