So tonight I performed extreme bobbination.. okay maybe that isn't a real phrase. The point is that I keep telling myself I hate winding bobbins, yet somehow end up doing it anyway. Also, I have been thinking about using the floss bar codes with the brand names and color numbers in some sort of multimedia art piece. As our lovely first year architecture professors so thoroughly drilled into our brains that a (basswood) bar code will NEVER look good on a model and can't be hidden, I understand how dangerous this endeavor will be. However, my stash is inevitably expanding (hopefully not much more any time soon @_@ :thud:) and I'm going to neglect here to mention how many of these floss labels I have saved. Not sure how this idea for a project will proceed. Maybe some sort of sculpture with a wire frame or a montage of the things with other paper and maybe pastels/pencils to complete the composition. I may get more ideas when I'm rooming with my last-day-of-the-quarter-having-a-delirious-all-nighter-with buddy Lilly. We will have a giant sketchbook as a guestbook for our apartment. I'm interested to see what kind of things will end up in that thing, and I am excited as well for my major classes, Fall Rush, seeing people when summer is over, and to see what progress I will have made on crafts and things. On another note, lately I've been thinking about what kinds of things I want to do in my life and how things have changed in the past year especially, and sort of going back to senior year. Growing up I had this sense of 'Sure thing'. I hope I can explain this well enough to be understood, but when I was younger my concerns were a. school b. swimming c. food d. sleep e. family, friends, crafts, travel. So getting into high school the same things applied up through sophomore year, really. That was my best year of swimming in high school, and I can understand why. My dedication was there, and my time was not spent with other obligations except some minor volunteering. Getting into Junior year I had discovered that my closest friends and what felt like more of a family for me was in band, and how my interest in music had rekindled in a big way after more or less losing interest when I got to high school. So that was the insane time, Junior year. My life was hectic then, when my days were fully packed from about 6 A.M. to 3 A.M. on a few nights a week basis.. swimming to school to swimming to band rehearsal to home, dinner somewhere around 10 pm and a few hours of calc, physics, spanish every night. I fell asleep with the light on pretty much every day with books kinda just scattered on my bed. Some days I went to sleep at like midnight and set alarms for 3 A.M. to get up and finish my homework. I was pretty hard-pressed to make it through swim practice a lot of the time, and the season ended with my times slower than the previous year. The next part of the year I don't have a clear "good" or "bad" description for. I was very involved with so many different groups and clubs like Science Olympiad, National Honor Society/continuing in Rotary, varsity water polo, Legends indoor brass and percussion, symphonic band, guesting in the orchestra again, playing flute and piccolo in Thoroughly Modern Millie. Somewhere in there up through summer I was in a relationship with my first boyfriend. Things can go on like that in crazy mode when health is not an issue, but I remember that one polo game I sat out because I was feeling sick but wanted to watch.. after that I never really returned to practice. Later on after likesay 7 or 8 months of feeling gross and fatigued I felt better and the next year I had blood tests the doctor said "oh nothing's wrong now, but you had mono before" great to know, doc. Getting through school being sick all the time was pretty rough. I ended up going home and sleeping at 3 every day and sometimes making it to rehearsals a few hours later. Grades that semester somehow ended up being excellent, but I failed in something I truly did love to do which was water polo. I feel like I've always gotten along with coaches in the past, and it was the same for my 4 coaches in high school. My dedication was wavering, though. I'm not sure what I'm afraid of. When I was not fully on my game or not going to be there on time for some reason I psyched myself out of going at all to practice. This is a problem I still face, but not only with swimming. I'm diverting now from the story, but the point kind of in the first place was that there is something missing in my life this year that I can't fill how I currently am going about things. When I went to college I did something I never in this world thought I would, and that was to join a fraternity. I went into the Rush events because I saw the 'clubs' presentation in a big intro lecture class I was in, and walking out the door I asked for a flyer out of curiosity. Somehow I ended up on an email list and was getting sent information about events to go to. So me never having interest in fraternities, or sororities for that matter, knew nothing and a half about them and what I was really getting myself into. It wasn't that the fact that it was a fraternity was not made clear, but I had no precedent to look to - all the other social fraternity people can't reveal specific information, and the process we go through is a completely different one I assume than any others. Pledging ended up being lots of confusion, fun, time, money, hard work, and in the end I became a brother. When I considered starting the whole process, the words once a brother, always a brother were ones I lingered on. I realized that this meant a lot of things, like commitment that I will always be tied to the fraternity and what I'm getting into is a long term sort of thing and the decision was a serious one to make. The other thing I got from this was the idea that these people I have just met are going to be SO close to me, and I will love them. Hopefully I will be loved too and find my place. I would probably not have considered any of those if it weren't for the professional aspects, and connections with people in similar majors. I'm just going to throw in here that when I every step of the process has made me consider what type of person I am and should be. How is brotherhood created and how should I conduct my life to be the best brother I can be? Anyway, somewhere along the way this year I felt like I did and didn't quite fit in. Maybe I put in too little effort to spend time with people and help at events. Yet maybe, still, I spent too much time worrying about that kind of stuff and not enough on the reason why I am at school - to develop professional skills in my field, get good grades, pay for school?, be healthy and happy. For me I think I need all those things to feel satisfied. But I was taught to never be satisfied or you're not achieving enough. Satisfied swimmers never get faster. And I love swimming. I want to play water polo, that was my new found joy in high school. Other things led me away from that my senior year.. that was the crying, quilting, and college applications year, to be short and blunt. Barely getting by. I don't do that. I strive to be the best and fall a little short. I feel like I want to do so many things, that I have so many passions and interests. The problem is that sacrifices must be made. To completely excel at something, other things must fail. There are obvious levels to this.. ranging from say someone who is constantly in lab or in the library studying, but has no social interactions to someone who has stellar time management skills and always gets their work done early, exercises daily, calls home, gets to bed early. Something is bound to fail, even if it is just something so simple as letting laundry pile up for too long or having a cluttered room. The time that would be spend obsessing over being organized they were instead using to study or keep with social contracts. Would it do me well to go back to being a simple soul, concerned with more simple things such as sports, school, eating, and sleeping? Or is that endeavor impossible with my new life as an adult, with more things to be concerned with like banking, making resumes, making professional contacts, and for me crafting is also important. There are those moments where the fraternity makes me question myself as a person, and sometimes I come to a good conclusion, sometimes I feel that I have lots of improvements to make. One question I have right now, is this how I should be spending my time in college? What balance do I need to have between studying, relaxing, socializing? What happened to swimming and band? These are things I have an enormous passion for, but I don't know how to feasibly fit them into my life. I could go inactive in the fraternity in the winter, and join club water polo. I wanted to do polo last year, but studio and fraternity made that an impossible mission. I guess I really have to ask myself how much I would gain from doing each thing and would my dedication to water polo be enough to make it worthwhile? Would putting in less time to the fraternity diminish my experience more than I gain elsewhere? Well that's all just a thought. A very long and windy thought, but something to ponder nonetheless.
