I’ve fallen victim to a corollary of Parkinson’s Law. Indeed, as work expands to fill the time it’s been allotted, use of that time becomes less efficient. This has described much of my summer: I have accomplished very few of the things I set aside for “when I have more time”. I, embarrassingly, feel as though I haven’t done much at all. While some of that might be due to quirks in memory, I certainly haven’t been terribly productive. In some sense, that’s okay. There’s a value in having almost more time than you know what to do with — and that’s not a luxury I’ll have for much longer.
With just over a week to go before my break is over, I’m experiencing the inevitably familiar emotions of school: frustration, boredom, a shortness of time. It’s difficult for me to say outright that I dislike school, and it’s hardly a brave or original thing to say. There are definitely things I like and things I don’t — it’s mostly a waste of time, but that’s the price to pay for the benefits, which, in my judgement, are the handful of life-changing teachers and the opportunity to socialize. I’m planning a “Retrospective on High School” post1 at the end of the year, so I’ll keep it brief here.
I’d say I have a couple goals for this school year: one being to finish diploma requirements (e.g., essay, CAS, other busywork), and another being to socialize more with friends new and old. People say to “take risks”, whatever that means. I guess it’s because general advice is so difficult to give that we end up with lines — ambiguities — like these. I think, though, it’d be fair to say I haven’t taken many.
This summer, I
- made friends and spent more time with those I already had.
- Introvert vs extrovert sometimes seems like a false binary. But I suppose I’m clearly an introvert.
- managed to get fired from a second job after two days of work.
- It was, ostensibly, without cause, and the restaurant is exceptionally poorly managed, (e.g., they were well acquainted with the health department as well as the federal government, among others) so maybe it’s for the best.
- pulled money out of thin air by cancelling a bunch of subscriptions I wasn’t using nearly enough, one of those being GeForce Now (which I’ve mentioned before).
- Interestingly, my least used subscriptions were the most expensive — I cancelled multiple for $20/month each.
- I downgraded my plan on the subscription service that hosts this site because I wasn’t using a single one of the features of the Premium plan.
- recycled my Halo products. (This one is clearly out of place, but the products were the subject of my most recent post here.)
- didn’t accomplish much of anything I set out to at the beginning.
I often cite to myself summer breaks in between years of school as some of the more transformative times. It seems these breaks — at least for me — force a sort of introspection and living with oneself. It’s something that sometimes threatens to drive me crazy.
Maybe, though, I’m misattributing changes that happen during the rest of the year, while school is in session, to the almost artificial breaks between them: if some internal change happened at at some point during the year, I might cite the break separating that year from the previous, rather than the year itself.
Anyway, maybe I’ll finally attend a sportsball2 game this year.
I find this might actually be useful because I find that I blank completely when people ask me what I did over the summer. Maybe I could pull out this webpage. 😉
1We’ll see whether or not that actually happens.
2I’m not sure how widespread this term is, so here’s the dictionary.
This is quite incomplete, but it represents what I could remember when I wrote it.
I’ve backdated this post by about a month and a half because that’s when I wrote most of it, and it’ll be more accurate as of then.