I promise that you’ll never find another like me. If you do, just remember that I warned you. (My dog is very jealous. But I don’t think that’s quite the same thing). You are more important to me than I am to myself. I know how you feel, so don’t think I’m taking advantage of you. I’m actually quite lonely and a bit pathetic. I am not your best friend. I am not a child and you are not a parent. I am in my twenties and you are probably a lot younger. I do NOT want to make-out with you or go home with you or be your boyfriend. I do NOT want to be your girlfriend. (I mean, if you are okay with that then…) I do NOT want to have sex with you. But if I did, I’d do it for free. I do NOT want your phone number (or email, or address, or any contact info). I am not a stalker, I’m just a lonely weirdo who needs a friend. I do NOT want you to call me. I do not want you to ask me out. I do not want you to have my phone number. I do not want your friend request. I don’t want to be more than friends. I don’t know how to say no in just the right way. I really do need this kind of friend. I really DO love that kind of friend. If you are reading this, I’m willing to bet you feel a little bit ashamed of yourself for saying no or not saying yes. Please don’t be. I promise that if you treat me with the decency and respect I deserve, it is going to be okay. Thanks for reading my plea. I love you. xox. Oh, and if you have any ideas about how to make this all a little less complicated for the both of us, send them my way. I’m always looking for tips and tricks. When I started graduate school, my friends and I would throw around the phrase, “Ain’t nobody got time for that” when someone asked us about our studies, and we meant it literally. Back then, when we didn’t have to get up at 8:00am to make it to class by 8:30am, or to work until 10 or 11pm. We didn’t have to work at any of these hours every day, or work weekends. Back then, we didn’t have student loans weighing down our wallets, and we hadn’t already developed our careers, or found meaningful work yet. Back then, we didn’t have a mortgage, car payments, or kids. Back then, we were still able to put down the books and the computers and head outside into the fresh air. As I’ve grown older, I have had many phases when I’ve felt like I didn’t have time for anything else besides my homework and a shower. I have spent many evenings just watching television, and many mornings when I haven’t eaten because I was too busy studying. I have spent long days working on homework and essays until 2 or 3 in the morning, because that’s what it took to be the best student that I could be. In those days, getting up at 6am to catch an early morning bus was not my idea of a productive morning. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy my time in school, but sometimes you have to decide when the amount of hours spent on your education is worth it, or if you should be trying to cram for an exam when you’re also working full-time. For me, the time spent at school was worth it. I feel like I’m in a great position to enter a career that I am interested in, and this is the route I have to go to get to where I want to be in my life. School is what I signed up for, and I’ve completed my responsibilities there for now. I was talking with a friend about this a couple of days ago, and she was telling me about how different her experience has been than mine. She asked me a very intriguing question. When she was in school, she was not as passionate about school as I am about school. In high school, she didn’t enjoy her studies as much as I do mine. Instead of finding these hours of study fun, and full of interesting topics to discuss, she found them challenging and stressful. She would work so hard at homework that she hardly had the energy to do anything else. I asked her, “Why did you work so hard? Did you like it?” She said she didn’t like it at the time, but with time and maturity she has found the study process to be fulfilling. With many sleepless nights, crammed assignments, and exams on top of the workload, she realized that her work in school helped her develop some important skills that are still paying off in the present. Now, she enjoys the schoolwork much more, because she understands why it is so important. It’s what got her to where she is today. In my opinion, this is a very mature, intelligent, and admirable way to approach school and it has benefitted my friend in ways that I could never understand at that time. There are some great stories on NPR about being a teacher and one of the things that they talked about in their interviews was that students tend to have these wild expectations for the teachers they will become. Students see how much energy teachers put into their studies, and they tend to expect that they will want to work just as hard as the teacher who took their class. I know I went to school in a way that I thought my professors would be working just as hard as me. Although there are many days that are very challenging, when my professors and I aren’t working, it is because we are taking a break. We work hard for the hours we are in class, but it is work that we do because it is something that we are passionate about. No one wants to do a job that they don’t enjoy, and I believe we should all be looking for that. Just like when it comes to any career, school takes work, and while it is something that you may have to learn to love, you have to give it a chance. So give it a chance. I promise you that in about 30 years or so, you will look back at how you spent those college days. Will you be proud of what you did? So over the weekend, my best friends and I got together for a little brunch. Yes, we did in fact share a brunch. We ordered Eggs Benedict with Proscuitto, and our Bloody Marys. Yes, we all ordered Bloody Marys (but it was too early for alcohol-induced hangovers. We were just joking about that too.) I thought it would be fun to post a picture of us all together, and let you readers know what we were doing. The picture looks a little unprofessional, because it looks like we are all just sitting around playing with our phones, but this isn’t really the case. First of all, in all honesty, my phone looks very unprofessional (or maybe that’s the point?) My phone had a broken camera lens, so it took pictures upside down. So the image in this post is actually a photo of my phone screen (which is still very much in tact), because I couldn’t take a picture of my phone, which is still a little broken. This is a picture of my actual phone screen, and if you are observant enough to read all the “lol”s and the smiley faces, then you can clearly see that it is a screen shot. Our phones may not have been professional, but I did think that the picture was very funny. There was also the fact that the phones kept making noise throughout the picture, which made my pictures even more unprofessional. But don’t worry, none of us dropped our phones (we were all just sitting on our knees). We’ve had a pretty interesting week at school. We have a lot of work going on in a lot of different areas, and I know that a lot of students have found out about the situation, and we’ve even had to put in extra security guards as a precaution. I feel like every day is a little bit more serious than the day before. On Thursday, I got