Lucky.

I've started to question- not just raise my hand in class when I don't understand what the professor is lecturing at me, but to really question who I am, what I am a part of, what I know, and how I want to live my life.  I've started to gain a bit more awareness of how my decisions weave into a complicated network of actions and choices and people and lives and futures and truths.  I've begun to see many things differently.  My values, words, activities, and thoughts are very different from what they have been in the past, and will probably continue to shift as I learn and question more in my life.

I'm learning what the phrase ESSE QUAM VIDERI really means (the Latin phrase I first encountered as a member of the Archons at Kenyon College).  It's become very different for me to just wear the phrase on an American Apparel shirt as opposed to actually living it.

I've started to really think about what I value and why I value it and how I incorporate (or fail to incorporate) my values into my day-to-day life.  Maybe I'm up in my head too much, or developing a debilitating guilt complex, or isolating myself, or acting like a crazy liberal college kid out of touch with the “real world,” or beginning to live in a way that doesn't mesh well with other lifestyles and choices.  Maybe I'm doing all of those things, but additionally taking steps to figure out who I am.

I made a list yesterday in the back of my Spanish class notebook titled “Things I Can Do.”  I wrote it mostly to identify things I can do that I am proud of as opposed to things I can do that I either don’t care about or am not proud of.  I made it very quickly.

Things I Can Do

-          boil an egg

-          identify sassafras

-          smile

-          use a spade

-          calm a crying baby

-          do laundry using washing and drying machines

-          sing all the words to Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream”

-          question

-          manipulate SPSS

-          fix a small issue with a toilet

-          buy a Mountain Dew from a vending machine

-          clean a bathroom

-          navigate the internet

-          break a sweat while sweeping

-          use a Phillips screwdriver

-          read newspapers, street signs, academic journal articles, books…

-          write papers for classes

-          recognize that I am very, very lucky