What To Do?

I've got about a half an hour to kill. The Daily Show has already been watched. I've checked Facebook and Cracked. I've checked my e-mail (both personal and school) and have even resorted to checking Twitter.

And yet, here I am.

In Colombia I would occasionally run into this problem. Breakfast was at seven, and most people had to be out the door by eight, but I never had to leave until nine. I would find myself in an empty apartment with no one but Rosa to talk to (my Spanish was so basic, at the time, that our conversations could really only go as far as "Buenos dias, como esta? Esta jugo de mora?") Occasionally, I'd have another volunteer going with me to blind school, and we'd hang around trying to figure out what we were going to do that day. During the period when I was teaching at the school without the woman who ran the program, I spent a number of mornings pacing back and force across the living room while Jay, a friend of mine who had agreed to come with me, watched a Korean drama and told me to either calm down or go to hell. When I wasn't fretting, I usually read or listened to music.

But that was South America. That was me when I wasn't considered a "student." You become an entirely different person the second you step onto a campus - and to be honest, I'm not entirely sure why. It's true that, as a student, you are suddenly burdened with all the responsibilities of studenthood, the severity of which can be quite overwhelming. But when you're on your own, you have just as much to worry about. You may not have to think about when your next paper is due, but you do have to consider where you're going to live, how much money you have for rent, what you're going to eat, how you're going to teach three classes of Spanish-speaking blind children when you can only speak a smattering of Spanish.

And yet, with all that to worry about, I still found myself with an enormous amount of time to devote to reading, writing, painting, and any other hobby I felt like pursuing. I read more books during my six months abroad than I had read in years. Originally, I thought it was because I had shaken off my internet addiction (among other things). Despite the impressive list at the top of this entry, my internet usage is nowhere near where it used to be. I get tired spending hours on end online, and I mostly use it for Google Docs and Facebook. Having recently re-learned how to function without it, I returned to what I actually enjoyed doing.

But, for some reason, despite keeping it up through the trip, and through two months at my parent's house, the second I returned to a college environment, I became too stressed out and tired to do anything but sit around watching Bob's Burgers on Netflix again. How did that happen? I have no idea. My workload isn't even that bad. It's been relatively easy to keep up with, and I'm generally finished with it all pretty early. How is simply being in a college environment inherently more stressful than the outside world? And, why?

You always hear that college, for all it's stresses, is a cakewalk compared to the "real world". You're supposed to "enjoy it while you can" because as soon as you graduate and are faced with the pressures of actual adulthood, everything goes to shit. And you know, maybe it does. Adult life is probably a lot harder than I think it is - having only spent a few brief months experiencing it. But from my naive observation, at least as an adult, outside the "high school in dorms" atmosphere of college, you can be slightly closer yourself. You have less to prove.

But of course, everyone is different. Certainly everyone's adulthood is different. Nothing is ever as easy as it seems when you're outside it. And if it's one thing I learned while not being a student, it's that I am very, very young.