Day 645 of a Newfound Adult

I am currently writing this at the library at Monmouth College. I sit with three empty chairs and a fairly kind-looking window to the right of me. It's finals week, and what am I not doing right now? You guessed it! I feel better about it with the fact that all of my books and papers are spread about me. To the general passersby, I look like I am being a great student. That's all that matters right?

Anyway, so it's Spring semester finals week of my sophomore year in college. I have just a few days and I can technically call myself a Junior in college...(okay, okay, actually, I'm a mega nerd and I have had enough credits to call myself a college Junior since the beginning of the semester, but that's beside the point). I have taken two out of my five finals so far, and by tomorrow I will only have to do eleven chapter summaries, a take-home exam, and write/revise a five to seven page paper on Wilfred Owen's poem "Anthem for Doomed Youth". Yeah, yeah, I know you probably never heard of it. To sum it up, WWI changed everything about wars and individual honor was not the same. So many people died thinking they would be individually honored but there were just too many dead for that to happen. Owen therefore wrote this poem to show how tons of soldiers died and how there was no way to honor them all by traditional funeral, so he substituted the general traditions of a Christian funeral with various war imagery. Cool right? I thought so.

So what have I been up to you ask? Oh, nothing much, I managed to scrape by and afford the semester at Monmouth, just as I had last year. Once again, I find myself in financial fear, as I have lost the opportunity of my full-time field job that paid me $10.10/hour last summer. How you ask? They owe China lots of money for some bad corn they sold to them, so to make up for it they shut down a bunch of fields, the fields by my house included. So, as a result I have to find jobs to replace the one I now cannot have. I for sure have a job at Meijer again and my old boss is working on getting me rehired for when I come home the 17th. Other than that, I've applied for various places in Bloomington/Normal, and I've had two phone calls about potential interviews. Both interviews did not happen however, as on the phone the companies indicated that they wanted someone who could work year round, not just someone who could work for the summer. Oh well, there's always McDonald's right...? I have my fingers crossed that someone, anyone will take me before I am stuck selling deli meat and then burgers and the like all summer long.

Other than my usual financial struggle that is some twisted lesson to prepare me to be a full-blown adult (who needs that?), I've been studying a lot and learning quite a bit about British and American literature from the 17th century to the 20th century.

More recently, as in this week, I've been having a lot of ups and downs. I've made some poor choices in concerns with relationships and the like. You see, I dated this girl for just a little under a year, and we've been broken up for five months now. Now, I like this guy, he's funny, clever, intelligent, well-read, blah blah blah, etc. The problem is that the girl I had dated wanted to be casually dating until summer, where we could break it off easily with the three months apart but still benefit from the comfort of one another. But I didn't understand that was the plan, and I sped through time and I kicked the casual relationship to the curb and hopped on a date with the guy I mentioned above. I hurt the person I called my best friend and tried to justify it to myself with hopes for this new guy. As a result, she didn't talk to me for over a week, and I found some of the things I had made for her lying by my dorm room door on various nights. So it was rough. With the stress of finals, and the person who had comforted me for the past two years now gone and unwilling to talk to me, I didn't know what to do.

I spent a lot of time in the library as a result, doing what I'm doing now, acting like I'm getting homework done but not really. I struggled every hour not to break down and cry, and often I would lose the battle and hope that no one awkwardly walked past to see me in Poseidon of Sadness mode. I laid in bed one day until 5pm, just this morning I cried before meeting a professor and after calling and being rejected by one of the companies asking me for an interview. However, something also changed today. I messaged my ex, my friend, again and said that I'd like to say goodbye to her before she heads of home for summer break tomorrow. This time she responded. She came upstairs and when I saw her I broke down. To speed through the waterworks, I cried for an hour and apologized and she told me how mad she was and why what I did was wrong.

What changed you ask? Though she left and I was still crying, she indicated a sense of hope that after not talking all summer, she could come back and no longer be mad, that there was a chance to salvage the friendship we had and I so dearly miss. You see, though we both love each other still, neither of us want a romantic relationship with one another, but the friendship, that was something worth way to much to give up. So it is with that hope that I venture forth.

But you're still sitting at the library and not working on any of your stacks and stacks of homework! Yeah, yeah, leave me be, just because I have hope now doesn't mean that I can't procrastinate. Sadness isn't the only cause of procrastination, so is sophmoritis. I can claim to have that right? Now that all of that is off my chest and all of you (*crickets*) are updated on my continual growth into adulthood I think I can try and write academically. Or I'll procrastinate more.

Until next time,


C.K. Fulfer


P.S. If you're the guy I mentioned and you're reading this, I hope my craziness doesn't drive you away. If it doesn't, you're awesome.