Snapshots of a Modest Life

Procrastination has its merits and its problems. Its merits usually deal with more time at the present, the ability to laugh it off and pretend that there really is no homework that I should be doing. Its problems however, run much deeper and have greater consequences. The biggest problem, I'm up at 1:00 in the morning and I haven't started on my paper, I have no idea what I'm doing with it, and I really am starting to get tired. Another sever consequence is the big fat F that usually appears when I get the paper back because it sucked due to the fact that it was written in the wee hours of the morning. In addition to all of this, I have no idea what I did with the corrections I made on my essay that is also due tomorrow. Oh well. I suppose I will have to get over it.

On a totally different matter. I was reading my brother's blog about his relationships with my parents and all of the stuff that he went through during his senior year, and I realized how totally different we are, but at the same time, how much we feel the same stuff, and even more frightening thing, how much I am like my mother. I haven't gotten involved in a lot of the stuff that he did, and I'm generally a "good kid," especially in comparison to his last year at home, but many of the stuff he expressed in his blog I can identify with. He talked about how my mom always finds a loophole in almost anything you say, and there is always something wrong with it somewhere. There is aways a fear that she won't approve of something you say or do, and that disapproval will make your life suck, and it will lead to confrontations that are awkward and all around sucky. But then I realized that a lot of times I do the same thing. I in thinking about it I remember a relationship that I totally destroyed with my judgemental nature, and my overly opinionated tendencies. Here's the story....

I went to a very small, very private school called Trace Academy. It was my first experience in any education other than homeschooling. The school was almost entirely composed of Campus Crusade for Christ Staff families. Every student but one in my 6th Grade class was the son or daughter of a CCC staffer. Most of these people also went to my church. Every school day for the next 3 years I was within 20 feet of a small group of people. As you can imagine the group became very tightly knit, like brothers and sisters, half the class was brothers and sisters anyway. Most of us continued on to University High School, the home of the Cougars. This was where the rift began. I, along with my current best friend and her brother were enrolled in the Pre-International Baccalaureate Programme, which meant that we would spend the next 4 years in mostly the same classes, with all the same teachers, and we would spend little to no time with anyone outside of IB, unless they happened to be in the same general elective class. I became increasingly involved with my "IB people" as I call them, and my relationships outside of my highly selctive classes began to wane. I would still eat lunch with them, but most of the time I had nothing to talk about. Desiree and I talked together, occasionally including someone else, but the subjects would generally be limited to topics such as "It's really freaking hot out here" or "I hate Florida weather." During this time, one of my friends from Trace, Ruth, began to get close to a senior who had just moved here named Jon Cruzen. I didn't like him much...at all. I personally found him to be an imbicile who skipped classes to spend lunchtime with a girl, and who dropped out of a sport (which he was very good at, by the way) because it was a little difficult and he didn't like the coach. Basically in my mind he was a slacker. I don't really like slackers. I find them to be annoying, and I hate how they generally are down the fast path to throwing their life away. I didn't seem right that I (and many other students at the school) was daily facing challenges and doing my best to overcome them, while the slackers skipped classes and fled from them. I didn't approve of Jon, and more importantly, I didn't approve of Ruth and Jon as a couple, which they had become by the end of the year. I thought Ruth could do better then that, and I thought she deserved someone who was going somewhere in life, other than Valencia Community College, and then after that a long career in Garbage collection. It didn't make sense to me. My greatest blunder in this situation however was not my dislike for the entity that would be know as Ruth and Jon, but the vocalization of this dislike, for I still maintain that Jon is an idiot that is going nowhere in life, and that Ruth can do better (than him or her current shadow). In voicing my dislike for Jon, I got on Ruth's bad side, and rightfully so, she was happy (I hope), why couldn't I be satisfied with her happiness, and on top of that, where did I get off acting like her mother? Or more accurately, my mother? To this day my realtionship with Ruth is not what it once was. I still voice my opinions like an imbecile, wreck perfectly good friendships in the process and act like my mother. C'est la vie. I wish I could change, and I have worked hard on curbing judgemental tendencies, but I still utterly fail from time to time.