"If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire, then you've got a problem. Everything else is inconvenience." --Robert FulghumThis quote is a pretty accurate description of my life since August, when I moved to New York and started grad school. Everybody always asks me, "How are you? How is school? Do you like it?" and I can never think of anything more clever or succinct than "Good. Life is good."
Life is not perfect, though. If you followed my status updates on Facebook from January to early March, or if you called me on the phone a month and a half ago, I probably would not have described my life as "good." I just barely survived the insane winter up here in the continental United States' fourth-snowiest city. As if the 150 inches of snow weren't bad enough, they brought all kinds of fun complications like:
- Squirrels in the attic
- Ice damming
- Endless shoveling of an endlessly long driveway
- Absolutely un-driveable scary white-out conditions
- Wearing three shirts and three pairs of socks every day
- Killer icicles on my house (and my neighbors' houses) that looked like this:
(This is actually my next-door neighbor's house, but mine was just as bad.)I'm still alive, though. And content even! I don't know if it's age, maturity, or what, but I have somehow learned to compartmentalize events into the controllable and the uncontrollable, and I have been adjusting my level of anxiety accordingly.
It also helps that I really do like my classes. I mean, come on, if I hated my classes, there is no way I would have put up with the kind of extreme weather that we got this winter. Even by local standards, this winter was really, really, REALLY bad. Also, if I hated my classes, there is no way I would be paying astronomical sums of money for this degree.
For one of the first times in my life, I believe in what I am doing. It's not that I didn't believe in getting a college education or working for a living, but the college and the job that I picked were not right for me. I spent a lot of time being miserable. I spent even more time making myself even more miserable because I couldn't figure out why I was unhappier than everybody else.
I don't know exactly where I'm headed, but I like the direction that I'm heading in much better than the path I was following before. (Also, it doesn't hurt that our basketball team is kicking major butt in the tournament this year.)
I'm sorry that I haven't been posting more, but I need time to myself. I need to keep living in the moment and learning more about what makes me happy. I hope that you have already found what makes you happy and that you are savoring it to the fullest.
Until later,
Kay
