A Frappuccino-Free Fortnight

Two small updates:

1. About three posts back, I promised I would write about my 3rd adventure of the summer. That's still coming. I've just decided to wait a little longer and expand it. You'll see.

2. I'm going to try to blog more often, likely about pseudo-significant things, in an effort to commit to the activities that matter to me (like telling the entire universe about my thoughts, apparently). It comes with a series of small changes this semester -- including eating right, exercising, and sleeping enough.

Which brings us to the topic of this post -- my life for the past two weeks without coffee.

I know, it seems like a bigger deal than it actually is. It's coffee, but sometimes it feels like it's my blood. I associate coffee with getting stuff done, with being successful, with not offending my professors with incessant yawns... etc.

Really, my coffee habits reveal a much more maladaptive thought process... one where I am defined by my productivity. It sounds like a formula that works: If a person does a lot, it must mean they care a lot. And if they care a lot, they are a good person. Obviously.

Then I realized that I cried almost every Monday because I had too many meetings and too much homework and too little time. And I realized that my budget could not afford any more Vitamin C/DayQuill/jasmine green tea from getting sick over and over. And I realized that no one likes being around grouchy, stressed Angela. And perhaps most crucial to this post, I realized that I actually was accomplishing very little.

Now that I've made some changes, the premise of accomplishing tasks at all costs is just plain annoying to me. I am not defined by my resume. We've been talking in statistics about the difference between a model and a real-world event or object. My resume is a model of me, not the real deal. In psychology, the model is often a sample of the population. The sample must be representative of the population in order to generalize the results. I only have a narrow sliver of my life on that resume -- not even close to a representative sample of sorts. Rather than drawing conclusions, I should be working to improve the model... to broaden my experiences and explore all the potential aspects of myself. (Luckily, informed consent won't be a problem). Furthermore, If I am basing my experiences on what others want rather than who I (think) I am/might be, I am making a model that actually doesn't represent me -- and that's just counterproductive.

So, I stopped drinking coffee, meaning I also make myself go to bed by a decent hour. I manage my time better and I choose to engage in activities that represent who I want to be, not just activities that I feel obligated to participate in. I take up an entire hour for dinner with my friends, because they might never be on my resume, but they are still a meaningful part of my life. And sometimes, I snuggle up in my electric blanket and write a blog post, slowly sipping lovely Russian tea from Paris.

Life is sweet.

Expect to see more blog posts more often... but feel free to forgo the coffee while you read. Or maybe just drink decaf. You define how much you do -- it doesn't define you.