Coming Up for Air

Hello blogging world. Well it certainly has been a while, has it not? Life works in funny ways, and I can never seem to get it to all line up. Not that my life is a mess, it is just that I can't seem to get it as straight as I would like it to be yet. It is like when you clean your room, you can throw all the mess under your bed, so your life looks straightened up, but you know there is a mess somewhere.Or, you can clean your room and put away all the clean clothes, launder all the dirty clothes, put everything in its proper place and make the bed. Or you can spend the entire day and night sweeping and mopping and windexing and scrubbing so that the room is sparkling. Then you spray a protective coating on everything and you don't touch it again (wouldn't that be nice?). My life, as it pertains to the bedroom metaphor is somewhere around option two. I'm working on organizing and alphabetizing (we all know I'm slightly OCD), I've put away the clean clothes and swept under the bed as much as I could easily reach. The problem is, laundry never stops piling up. And as much as I try to stop it, the corners of the room start filling with dust and my bed gets slept in. The worst part about it is that unlike my bedroom, my life seems to take much longer to get it organized and clean, but much quicker to get in disarray.

Let me take analogy to the literal. Basically I've been swamped. With the beginning of the semester I was determined to de-stress. See, I'm a stress-ball; a knotted, tightly wound, erratic, (albeit cute and colourful) bundle of stress. This has been an identity that has held true from the sleepless worry-filled nights as a child to the current restless nights. Clearly, it isn't as easy to clear up the stress. So here is what I have been doing:

1. No more rushing - As I'm sure my boyfriend will attest to, I get very agitated whenever I am pressed for time. I feel like there are things that need to be done, and if I do not have the time frame to work with, not only do I rush, but in my rushing I get frustrated. As an added bonus, in typical Jones fashion, I am usually late. This rings true for going to and from school. For the past two and a half years, I've been leaving for class at the very last minute, not because I am irresponsible, but because I don't give myself enough time to get myself ready. This issue has become a real problem since moving to Halifax because I have a further distance to walk to school. By the time I normally get to school, I am out of breath and tired and stressed. So, I have started giving myself and planning to leave the house ten minutes earlier than usual. This has allowed me to enjoy my walks to school while avoiding the worry that accompanies lateness.
2. School Work - I have come to realize that once I get behind in school, I can never hope to catch up. I can forget about what I missed and just focus on what is coming up, but I will always be behind. My goal therefore this semester is not to do things as they come, but work preemptively. Last weekend I was a week ahead of myself. Now with a novel and assignments coming up it is not as easy, but I have not missed a reading yet. Instead of sleeping in, going home between and right after classes, I am hanging out in the library as much as possible. With the exception of this blog entry, there are very few distractions and I can easily entice work.
3. Classes - I'm not going to lie, one of the hardest parts of university is ignoring the urge to skip class. It is easy to convince yourself that a coming class isn't going to be overly important and that you won't miss anything that the text doesn't cover. Despite these cunning ideas, every student deep down knows that you have such a greater success rate if you go to class, exams will be easier, and it is less likely that you will fall behind. With the exception of the very first day of classes, I have not missed (or been late) for a class yet. This hasn't been too hard of a transition, last semester I rarely missed a class. The very few I missed were usually because I was writing a paper that seemed so much more important than class. Luckily, my number two change will hopefully solve this issue.

So this is why I have been relatively nonexistent online, not to mention the part time job and the six courses. If this were a perfect world, I would have time to blog and to write personally. I would actually start vlogging again and I would even maybe take some pictures again (Dan has really been pestering me about this, but I don't have as much confidence in my ability as he seems to). As much as school is a big part of my life, so is my artistic side, and I have really neglected that lately. It is crying out for attention, yet I continue to ignore it. Dan put the idea of podcasting into my head, which now seems rather enticing. But the likelihood of this happening is fairly slim.

So, I will pack Mademoiselle Artistique (she prefers if you say that in a French accent) into my trunk and head down to Starbucks to get some more reading done. This novel won't just read itself. If I stay at the library anymore, I fear I might pass out. Really, library is just a fancy name for nap-hall. There was nap-time in preschool and now, it seems necessary once again.

If only cleaning a life could be as quick and fulfilling as cleaning a room. Unfortunately, there seems to be way too much floor underneath the bed, I can't seem to get the broom to reach.