Reih7’s Weblog

My hair looks beautiful. Curly-haired girls of the world, listen up: Frizz-ease shampoo and conditioner, final rinse in ice cold water and finish with Aussie mousse + leave-in conditioner. I walked around town for 2 hours on this windy 60+ degree day and my hair STILL looks awesome.

I love halloween. Which is why it’s so unusual for me to 1) spend it at home and 2) not really care. On past halloweens I’ve trick or treated (of course), gone to parties (of course) and gotten very drunk. This halloween, given my current pathetic social state, I’m staying in. I thought about going to the big med school party thing with a few people buuuuuuuut…the thought of surviving a night of drunken rowdiness with people who are really just shy of strangers to me was…not appealing. Plus, I have no outfit.

I guess I could think of it the other way; that my pathetic social situation is exactly the reason that I *should* be going out. I guess. Regardless, I still have no one to go out with and…AND, most importantly, I just. don’t. want. to.

I’m happy right now. I had a good day: worked out, did weights, hiked around and took pictures with my camera, went to borders, found a new book at the library, shopped for stationary and watched little kids in costumes run around main street…Basically, I spent the day being quiet, thinking, doing all the things I told myself I would make time for over the last year. When I get hard on myself about being anti-social I think I walk a fine line. On one hand I need to make myself be proactive so I don’t completly wither away and die, and on the other I have to give myself a break. I’ve said it all before: tough few years, need to figure myself out, blah, blah blah. So that’s exactly what I should be doing.

…I almost feel like it’s an entire lifetime that I’m trying to sort out here; not just a few years. It feels like I never really did grow up and now I’m trying to organize it and characterize it so I can put a quarter century behind me and move on. I only know one way to do this, and that’s to write, make lists and diagrams and just…BE. Just think. Sort it all out into categories of “Likes”, “Dislikes”, “Issues I have”, etc. so I can map out Who I Am and file it away.

Not that this is so unusual. I think that most people, especially in a long, drawn out education program such as myself, end up going through this. We spend 8 years in college and grad school and it’s really 8 years of craziness. The first 4 (or maybe 3.5) are spent trying to get into grad school, and then the next 4 (3.5 again…) are spent learning and trying to score a good future job. At the end of it all you need to dcompress, return to your roots, try to find the YOU in all of this. Or at least I need to.

But I see it in others. How at a certain age people start looking up their old high school friends again, just to see where they are. There’s a need to reconnect, to try to reconcile the Me from yesterday with the Me from today. It’s a necessary step to moving on with that next phase of your life.

That’s what I told myself, this entire time, that I would finally have a BREAK right now and I would use it to get myself together. And that’s what I’m going to do. Slowwwwly, but I will get myself together.

Whatever. Ravioli time.