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[[Call mom back|ADescription]]
[[Wash work clothes|BDescription]]
ppr twls
[[Call mom back|ADescription]]
[[Wash work clothes|BDescription]]
[[Check email|CDescription]]
[[Clean kitchen mess|DDescription]]
ppr twls
burritos?
trash out thurday
[[Call mom back|ADescription2]]
[[Wash work clothes|BDescription2]]
[[Check email|CDescription2]]
[[Clean kitchen mess|DDescription2]]
[[Get groceries|EDescription]]
[[Change embarassing profile pic|FDescription]]
tell work about special order
ppr twls
burritos?
trash out thurday
[[Call mom back|ADescription3]]
[[Wash work clothes|BDescription3]]
[[Check email|CDescription3]]
[[Clean kitchen mess|DDescription3]]
[[Get groceries|EDescription]]
[[Change embarassing profile pic|FDescription]]
[[Look for new job (at least one application per week!)|GDescription]]
[[Plan vacation|HDescription]]
tell work about special order
ppr twls
burritos?
trash out thurday
680-8
When you woke up this morning you checked your phone. There was a missed call and a voicemail from your mom (she always leaves a voicemail). You were too tired to call her back and you knew you weren’t going to find enough free time to do so.
The amount of things you have to do on a daily basis makes it harder for you to get out of bed in the morning. The only way for you to become less groggy is to play a game on your phone until you gradually become more alert. It’s not a fun game, it’s just an app to help you study Spanish. You pay a monthly subscription fee for the app. You only do this because, for the first time in your academic life, you are realistically failing a class. You are not good at Spanish, but 12 foreign language credits are required for your major, and about seven google searches advised you that it was the easiest of the foreign languages offered at your institution. Either their advice was wrong or you’re just not very bright.
[[BACK|note2]]You have to dress up for your job. You try to make this less painful by buying clothes that fit as comfortably as possible. You used to have a reliable laundry routine. On Tuesdays you would wash a load of work clothes; on Sundays you would wash your regular clothes and another load of work clothes. When you did that, you always had enough outfits to get you through a week.
Nowadays, laundry is an unorganized last-minute affair. It really needs to get done or else you’ll have to wear the uncomfortable pants.
[[BACK|note2]]
Over the last few years, your email has become a digital dumping ground for various impulses, inspirations, interests, and alerts.
For example, when you see something cool on Amazon but you don’t have enough time to comb through the reviews and compare it to the twenty-or-so similar items, you just send yourself a link to the product for when you do have time. If you simply add the product to your cart until returning to the site, you'll just forget about it until you come back to purchase something completely different. Then you’ll be annoyed to find an extra item in your cart that you don’t have time to research.
You have also subscribed to all kinds of websites that send you insightful articles that you think you might find useful someday. Sometimes when you’re on break at work, you skim through them, but you never have enough time to read them attentively, so you never feel compelled to delete them.
[[BACK|note3]] You used to have a monthly schedule for cleaning every major area of your house. Even during less busy times, this schedule was too much to realistically keep up with. It made you realize why rich people were willing to pay strangers to clean their houses.
Lately, cleaning has become an all or nothing affair. In other words, you ignore whatever you can realistically ignore until you can give it your full, undivided attention and do it well. Procrastination or perfectionism? Either way, last night you had to eat your leftover pizza on a folded paper towel because all of the “real plates” were in the sink waiting to be put into the dishwasher while the clean cups and utensils from the last cycle were still in the machine waiting to be taken out and put away.
[[BACK|note3]]When you woke up this morning you checked your phone. There was a missed call and a voicemail from your mom (she always leaves a voicemail). You were too tired to call her back and you knew you weren’t going to find enough free time to do so.
The amount of things you have to do on a daily basis makes it harder for you to get out of bed in the morning. The only way for you to become less groggy is to play a game on your phone until you gradually become more alert. It’s not a fun game, it’s just an app to help you study Spanish. You pay a monthly subscription fee for the app. You only do this because, for the first time in your academic life, you are realistically failing a class. You are not good at Spanish, but 12 foreign language credits are required for your major, and about seven google searches advised you that it was the easiest of the foreign languages offered at your institution. Either their advice was wrong or you’re just not very bright.
[[BACK|note3]]You have to dress up for your job. You try to make this less painful by buying clothes that fit as comfortably as possible. You used to have a reliable laundry routine. On Tuesdays you would wash a load of work clothes; on Sundays you would wash your regular clothes and another load of work clothes. When you did that, you always had enough outfits to get you through a week.
Nowadays, laundry is an unorganized last-minute affair. It really needs to get done or else you’ll have to wear the uncomfortable pants.
[[BACK|note3]]Over the last few years, your email has become a digital dumping ground for various impulses, inspirations, interests, and alerts.
For example, when you see something cool on Amazon but you don’t have enough time to comb through the reviews and compare it to the twenty-or-so similar items, you just send yourself a link to the product for when you do have time. If you simply add the product to your cart until returning to the site, you'll just forget about it until you come back to purchase something completely different. Then you’ll be annoyed to find an extra item in your cart that you don’t have time to research.
You have also subscribed to all kinds of websites that send you insightful articles that you think you might find useful someday. Sometimes when you’re on break at work, you skim through them, but you never have enough time to read them attentively, so you never feel compelled to delete them.
[[BACK|note3]]You used to have a monthly schedule for cleaning every major area of your house. Even during less busy times, this schedule was too much to realistically keep up with. It made you realize why rich people were willing to pay strangers to clean their houses.
Lately, cleaning has become an all or nothing affair. In other words, you ignore whatever you can realistically ignore until you can give it your full, undivided attention and do it well. Procrastination or perfectionism? Either way, last night you had to eat your leftover pizza on a folded paper towel because all of the “real plates” were in the sink waiting to be put into the dishwasher while the clean cups and utensils from the last cycle were still in the machine waiting to be taken out and put away.
[[BACK|note3]]Standing in line at Walmart. You are helplessly trapped in a situation that you don’t have time for. After rushing through the store and nearly colliding with other customers, your efforts are wasted. You begin to feel an overwhelming sense of defeat, and in that defeat – your patience returns and you even halfway forget that you’re standing in line. Commence depressed reconciliation. The universe has precisely concentrated its alignment to prevent you from being happy for some reason, but you’ll survive, you always do. Everyone has bad days, bad weeks, bad months, bad seasons, maybe even bad years. This is just the universe telling you that its your turn. But hasn’t it been your turn for quite a while now? As you gaze at the ceiling your brain unconsciously cycles through a lifetime of memories trying to find an image of happiness. It connects the shape of the Walmart ceiling to an earlier time when you were also at Walmart. It begins to play this memory like a movie.
[[Next|E2ndpassage]]The only way for you to make free time is to stay up way too late. You do this sometimes when you’re feeling overwhelmed. Sometimes you would rather wake up extremely tired than go straight to bed just to wake up less tired and do it all over again. The last time you had one of these late nights, you drank a few too many while scrolling through your phone and watching tv at the same time. You felt so relieved from the stress of your life that you optimistically took some selfies. You made one of them your profile picture.
[[NEXT|F2ndpassage]]<img src="images/walmart ceiling.jpg width="50%"/>
It’s one from your childhood. You’re at the store with your mom. She’s the one with the to-do list, not you. Your concerns, if you have any, are miniscule in comparison to hers as she tries to fit what she needs into the budget she has. You love going to the store, getting out of the house. You can’t wait until she lets you go to the toy aisle to pick out something to buy with your allowance. There’s so much in the world that is new to you. There’s so much to see and do. There’s so much that you’re still willing to take at face value. There’s so much…
[[NEXT|E3rdpassage]]The line begins to move and the movie stops playing. The deep feelings that came with the memory fade away before you can grasp them. It’s like trying to remember a dream you know that you had but your mind has promptly deleted it for some reason. Eventually, you put your items on the belt. You feel like people are secretly judging you for buying so much frozen food. You don’t have time to cook. Actually, you don’t know how to cook. You’ll learn someday when you have time.
[[BACK|note4]]When you woke up this morning you checked your phone. There was a missed call and a voicemail from your mom (she always leaves a voicemail). You were too tired to call her back and you knew you weren’t going to find enough free time to do so.
The amount of things you have to do on a daily basis makes it harder for you to get out of bed in the morning. The only way for you to become less groggy is to play a game on your phone until you gradually become more alert. It’s not a fun game, it’s just an app to help you study Spanish. You pay a monthly subscription fee for the app. You only do this because, for the first time in your academic life, you are realistically failing a class. You are not good at Spanish, but 12 foreign language credits are required for your major, and about seven google searches advised you that it was the easiest of the foreign languages offered at your institution. Either their advice was wrong or you’re just not very bright.
[[BACK|note4]] You have to dress up for your job. You try to make this less painful by buying clothes that fit as comfortably as possible. You used to have a reliable laundry routine. On Tuesdays you would wash a load of work clothes; on Sundays you would wash your regular clothes and another load of work clothes. When you did that, you always had enough outfits to get you through a week.
Nowadays, laundry is an unorganized last-minute affair. It really needs to get done or else you’ll have to wear the uncomfortable pants.
[[BACK|note4]]
Over the last few years, your email has become a digital dumping ground for various impulses, inspirations, interests, and alerts.
For example, when you see something cool on Amazon but you don’t have enough time to comb through the reviews and compare it to the twenty-or-so similar items, you just send yourself a link to the product for when you do have time. If you simply add the product to your cart until returning to the site, you'll just forget about it until you come back to purchase something completely different. Then you’ll be annoyed to find an extra item in your cart that you don’t have time to research.
You have also subscribed to all kinds of websites that send you insightful articles that you think you might find useful someday. Sometimes when you’re on break at work, you skim through them, but you never have enough time to read them attentively, so you never feel compelled to delete them.
[[BACK|note4]] You used to have a monthly schedule for cleaning every major area of your house. Even during less busy times, this schedule was too much to realistically keep up with. It made you realize why rich people were willing to pay strangers to clean their houses.
Lately, cleaning has become an all or nothing affair. In other words, you ignore whatever you can realistically ignore until you can give it your full, undivided attention and do it well. Procrastination or perfectionism? Either way, last night you had to eat your leftover pizza on a folded paper towel because all of the “real plates” were in the sink waiting to be put into the dishwasher while the clean cups and utensils from the last cycle were still in the machine waiting to be taken out and put away.
[[BACK|note4]] When you woke up the next day, you reached over to turn your phone alarm off and saw some notifications. When you reviewed them, they were all in response to your new profile picture which you had forgotten about. The picture was too dark, and the purposefully understated facial expression that you had thought made you look attractive, now seemed to only make you look like a serial killer. You also forgot to crop out the half-eaten pizza crust that was sitting next to you on the counter.
[[BACK|note4]]You’ve worked annoying jobs in retail since you were in high school. You want out. No matter how much you apply and even interview for other jobs, you never get selected. You changed positions at your current job so that you would be able to attend college during daytime hours. This new position has turned out to be a highlighter for all of your deficiencies as an employee and as a human being. Four nights a week you act like you’ve got your act together, you try to project the confident image that is required of a supervisor. You’re not sure if anyone believes this farce, but if anyone does, that number is on a fast decline. When you get to your car at the end of your shifts, you exhale and utter random profanities as soon as your door closes and rescues you from the world’s unflinching scrutiny.
[[BACK|note4]]After what seems like an 11 month stretch of unrewarded exhaustion you finally decide to use up some of your accrued personal days. You will have 2 paid days off which will occur between your standard unpaid days off – a total of five days without the stress of employment. In your mind, you see yourself using this time to not only get ahead on the mountains of homework/studying you need to do, but you also see this time as a chance to rest and finally unplug yourself from the machine long enough to figure out what the hell happened to your life. You see this as a chance to reconnect with the people you haven’t had time for. You see it as a chance to clean the kitchen (or why not the whole house?) and to wash and put away every single piece of laundry.
[[NEXT|H2ndDescription]]
[[Call mom back|ADescription4]]
[[Wash work clothes|BDescription4]]
[[Check email|CDescription4]]
[[Clean kitchen mess|DDescription4]]
[[Get groceries|EDescription2]]
[[Change embarassing profile pic|FDescription2]]
[[Look for new job (at least one application per week!)|GDescription]]
[[Plan Vacation|HDescription]]
[[SOMETHING'S GOT TO GIVE.|IDescription]]
tell work about special order
ppr twls
burritos?
trash out thurday
680-8
get pensThe first day of your “vacation” you attend college and then come home to work on a big assignment that you have been unable to devote any attention to up until this point. The project which is due in 3 days turns out to be much more time consuming than you anticipated. This worries you and immediately shifts the narrative that you’ve envisioned for your sabbatical.
[[NEXT|H3rdDescription]] On day two, you wake up with a fierce determination. You aren’t going to let homework ruin your vacation. You brew a pot of coffee and sit down at the kitchen table with your laptop. You begin to brainstorm into a word document. Document1 becomes littered with idea fragments. You try to stitch these fragments together into something coherent until your growling stomach and full bladder become distracting enough to force you to take a break. You go to the bathroom and then you microwave two El Monterey frozen burritos. While you’re eating, your mom calls and you decide to answer it. Passive-aggressively, she questions why you haven’t called her back. You explain that you’ve been very busy, that you’ve “had it up to here” with work and school. You complain about your life for too long. Then you begin to take it all back when you can tell by her voice that she's worried about you…this will only lead to more phone calls that you don’t have time for. It’s already almost 1pm, you have to go. You don’t tell her that you’re on a semi-vacation.
[[NEXT|H4thDescription]] By day three, you don’t even know how many days you’ve been on “vacation”. Out of muscle memory and misplaced survival instincts, your body drags your tired brain to Spanish class in the morning.
El hombre esta exhausto.
Estoy cansado/a
Estan cansados
Esta cansado/a
Estamos consados/as
La casa esta cansada
Mi zapatos estan cansado
You forgot to study the current lesson. You have no idea what anyone is talking about. The teacher begins to converse with you in Spanish. You tell her that the house and your shoes are tired. She and some of the other students chuckle. Your face gets hot and your heart rate skyrockets, at least your ignorance can provide others with joy. Your Apple Watch congratulates you on your exercise. It confuses your panic attack with a session of cardio. You decide to skip your next class and just go home.
You begin to put the final touches on your homework project. The “final touches” take all day. At 11:58pm, one minute before your assignment is due, you turn it in online.
[[NEXT|H5thDescription]] Day 4 of vacation. You sleep until 1 pm and still feel extremely tired when you wake up. You eat a bowl of cereal and watch Youtube clips. You get sucked into an endless trail of suggested videos. At 3:30 pm, you decide that you have to get out of your chair and make something of the day. The thought of this makes you sleepy. You nod off and wake up at around 5:45 pm. You feel simultaneously anxious and depressed, you’ve wasted a precious day off. You brew some coffee and you begin to work on Spanish and Psychology homework. You stop for a lunch break at 8pm while sifting through a hoard of e-mails. At 9:07 pm, you resume your homework and don’t finish until 10:34 pm. You’re tired again, but tomorrow is your last day of vacation. You need to start doing some things you actually enjoy before it’s too late. You resume a Netflix series that you started watching three months ago. You don’t remember the plot but you’re too far into the series to start it all over again. You fall asleep on the couch in the middle of it. You wake up in the living room at 5am and the tv is asking you if you’re still watching Netflix. You turn off the tv and go to bed, but not before setting your alarm so that you can make it to school on time.
[[NEXT|H6thDescription]]It’s your final day of vacation. You only have to attend your Psychology class from 9am to 10am. You didn’t notice it when you came to school, but now that you’re leaving campus, it’s a beautiful day outside. This is exactly the kind of day where you might take a walk downtown, get some coffee, visit some shops, etc. However, your personality has lost its sense of spontaneity. You don’t want to do anything too rash. You’ve forgotten how to do anything that isn’t on a to-do list. This realization hits you after a nice drive home with the windows down and your favorite songs playing. You feel more alive than you’ve felt in a long time.
[[NEXT|H7thDescription]]
Back home, you’re greeted by your to-do list on the kitchen counter. You notice all the things you didn’t cross off when you were on vacation (and you only wrote down maybe half of what you actually wanted to do).
[[BACK|note5]] At this moment, you hate your to-do list. You throw it away and step outside on the deck to admire the trees lined against a clear blue sky. You feel things. Strong feelings. This is different than the ceiling at Walmart. Your mind begins to rapidly take inventory of your life experiences. It creates algorithmic combinations of your past, present, and future, and compares them to each other. You’ve heard many times that trying to live in the present is healthy. You wonder if that’s true. You come to a conclusion that feels right for you...
[[NEXT|I2ndDescription]]
You can gaze wistfully into the past and cycle through an entire catalog of positive feelings. You can take a mental snapshot of that feeling, and then you can hold it up to your current life and behold the ruthless contrast between the two. You can repeat this cycle until you’ve convinced yourself that the present and future will never be as good as the past.
Or
You can leave your painful experiences in the past. You can try to forget your shortcomings. You can focus your energy on the future. You can do whatever you have to do in order to succeed, even if it causes you and others pain. This pain can be temporary; pain is a memory that can be deleted. You can suppress your present desires and your nostalgic distractions. Your future vision is all that matters.
Or
You can detach yourself from good memories and future dreams. You can exist in the present and focus your energy solely into the task at hand. Live each day. Experience life as it comes to you. It might be an adventure.
[[Or...|I3rdDescription]]
You can still keep your good memories and your dreams. You can exist mostly in the present, but still allow yourself to reflect on the good old days and to project starry-eyed visions of a better world yet to come.
You can divide your energy between what you want to do right now and what you need to do to. You can be democratic about desire and obligation, spontaneity and routine. You’ve learned that it is unhealthy and unrealistic to let any one of these be the sole dictator of your existence.
[[NEXT|I4thDescription]]
It's not too late[[...|I6thDescription]]
When you woke up this morning you checked your phone. There was a missed call and a voicemail from your mom (she always leaves a voicemail). You were too tired to call her back and you knew you weren’t going to find enough free time to do so.
The amount of things you have to do on a daily basis makes it harder for you to get out of bed in the morning. The only way for you to become less groggy is to play a game on your phone until you gradually become more alert. It’s not a fun game, it’s just an app to help you study Spanish. You pay a monthly subscription fee for the app. You only do this because, for the first time in your academic life, you are realistically failing a class. You are not good at Spanish, but 12 foreign language credits are required for your major, and about seven google searches advised you that it was the easiest of the foreign languages offered at your institution. Either their advice was wrong or you’re just not very bright.
[[BACK|note5]] You have to dress up for your job. You try to make this less painful by buying clothes that fit as comfortably as possible. You used to have a reliable laundry routine. On Tuesdays you would wash a load of work clothes; on Sundays you would wash your regular clothes and another load of work clothes. When you did that, you always had enough outfits to get you through a week.
Nowadays, laundry is an unorganized last-minute affair. It really needs to get done or else you’ll have to wear the uncomfortable pants.
[[BACK|note5]]Over the last few years, your email has become a digital dumping ground for various impulses, inspirations, interests, and alerts.
For example, when you see something cool on Amazon but you don’t have enough time to comb through the reviews and compare it to the twenty-or-so similar items, you just send yourself a link to the product for when you do have time. If you simply add the product to your cart until returning to the site, you'll just forget about it until you come back to purchase something completely different. Then you’ll be annoyed to find an extra item in your cart that you don’t have time to research.
You have also subscribed to all kinds of websites that send you insightful articles that you think you might find useful someday. Sometimes when you’re on break at work, you skim through them, but you never have enough time to read them attentively, so you never feel compelled to delete them.
[[BACK|note5]] You used to have a monthly schedule for cleaning every major area of your house. Even during less busy times, this schedule was too much to realistically keep up with. It made you realize why rich people were willing to pay strangers to clean their houses.
Lately, cleaning has become an all or nothing affair. In other words, you ignore whatever you can realistically ignore until you can give it your full, undivided attention and do it well. Procrastination or perfectionism? Either way, last night you had to eat your leftover pizza on a folded paper towel because all of the “real plates” were in the sink waiting to be put into the dishwasher while the clean cups and utensils from the last cycle were still in the machine waiting to be taken out and put away.
[[BACK|note5]] Standing in line at Walmart. You are helplessly trapped in a situation that you don’t have time for. After rushing through the store and nearly colliding with other customers, your efforts are wasted. You begin to feel an overwhelming sense of defeat, and in that defeat – your patience returns and you even halfway forget that you’re standing in line. Commence depressed reconciliation. The universe has precisely concentrated its alignment to prevent you from being happy for some reason, but you’ll survive, you always do. Everyone has bad days, bad weeks, bad months, bad seasons, maybe even bad years. This is just the universe telling you that its your turn. But hasn’t it been your turn for quite a while now? As you gaze at the ceiling your brain unconsciously cycles through a lifetime of memories trying to find an image of happiness. It connects the shape of the Walmart ceiling to an earlier time when you were also at Walmart. It begins to play this memory like a movie.
[[NEXT|EDescription2b]] <img src="images/walmart ceiling.jpg" width="50%"/>
It’s one from your childhood. You’re at the store with your mom. She’s the one with the to-do list, not you. Your concerns, if you have any, are miniscule in comparison to hers as she tries to fit what she needs into the budget she has. You love going to the store, getting out of the house. You can’t wait until she lets you go to the toy aisle to pick out something to buy with your allowance. There’s so much in the world that is new to you. There’s so much to see and do. There’s so much that you’re still willing to take at face value. There’s so much…
[[NEXT|EDescription2c]] The only way for you to make free time is to stay up way too late. You do this sometimes when you’re feeling overwhelmed. Sometimes you would rather wake up extremely tired than go straight to bed just to wake up less tired and do it all over again. The last time you had one of these late nights, you drank a few too many while scrolling through your phone and watching tv at the same time. You felt so relieved from the stress of your life that you optimistically took some selfies. You made one of them your profile picture.
[[NEXT|FDescription2b]] The line begins to move and the movie stops playing. The deep feelings that came with the memory fade away before you can grasp them. It’s like trying to remember a dream you know that you had but your mind has promptly deleted it for some reason. Eventually, you put your items on the belt. You feel like people are secretly judging you for buying so much frozen food. You don’t have time to cook. Actually, you don’t know how to cook. You’ll learn someday when you have time.
[[BACK|note5]] When you woke up the next day, you reached over to turn your phone alarm off and saw some notifications. When you reviewed them, they were all in response to your new profile picture which you had forgotten about. The picture was too dark, and the purposefully understated facial expression that you had thought made you look attractive, now seemed to only make you look like a serial killer. You also forgot to crop out the half-eaten pizza crust that was sitting next to you on the counter.
[[BACK|note5]]You will never be the greatest person the world has ever seen. If you were, there’d be no way to prove it.
You’re okay with that.
You don’t have to graduate life with a 4.0 and a host of mental illnesses and substance dependencies along with it.
Things are going to change[[...|I5thDescription]]
You're not finalized[[.|THE END2]]THE END (the beginning?)
<img src="images/deck.jpg" width="90%"/>