Present Appreciation

I read this blog post this morning during my ritual blog post readings, and I realized something:

I should enjoy my current unemployment.

For the last four years, I have simultaneously worked and gone to school, except for that wonderful semester in Jerusalem. I worked as much as they let me at BYU while being a full-time student (and sometimes more than I was supposed to), and I always took more credits than most people thought manageable. To be completely honest, the last two years were so overbooked that while I accomplished everything, I did it on very low energy and with at least one total emotional breakdown. I could routinely expect to get sick once a semester (yes, I did succumb to the swine flu epidemic last fall), and about once a semester I pulled a true all-nighter: ones where I stayed up from 6:30 a.m. one day through 11:00 p.m. the next, not what people try to claim as an all-nighter where they take naps in the day. (They are wimps.)

I need a lot of things going on; it helps me to structure my time more efficiently, it helps me to avoid overthinking personal problems, and it helps me to stay interested in my life. So this whole free time thing I have going on in Boston has been really frustrating for the last several weeks.

However, because I am only taking two classes and I still don't have a job, I actually have time to

• sleep for eight hours every night,
• eat breakfast (when I choose to),
• play the piano,
• work through my homework slowly instead of flying through it,
• read for pleasure for hours at a time,
• clean the house regularly,
• explore Boston,
• research various linguistic phenomena that intrigue me,
• sit and think (or listen to music) on the T without feeling guilty.

It's nice, this slower pace. I never thought I'd like that, but there are things about it that I actually do. Like the fact that I spent today finishing my Book Publishing assignments so that tomorrow I can explore Cambridge before class.

It won't last forever (and I'm grateful for that), but I think I'll enjoy it while it does.