Wednesday 18 March 2009

Change You Can Probably Believe In

So one of the weird quirks about my college is that you can turn in your keys over the break and not pay rent, which means that it's actually pretty cost-effective for me to go back to Fargo and live with my parents for six weeks over the break, and that I pretty much break even when I spend the breaks visiting friends and sleeping on their floors. You can justify a lot of discretionary spending when the alternative is spending twelve pounds a night to sleep in your bed.

Except this break I'm going to Greece in a week and then working on my thesis and preparing for exams during April, and kind of want to just spend time with people in Oxford. Since that mainly involves David, we moved in together for the break. Yay!

I'm aware that the ugliest parts of being a control freak resurface when I'm living in close proximity with somebody and start to get stressed about work, and this is why Lee and Cole totally have permission to think this is a terrible idea. The summer we lived together in DC was easily the closest I've come to being an objectively awful person, to the point where even I hated myself. (The problem is that I get work done by setting arbitrary goals for myself, goals which are just barely possible to meet if I work exactly according to schedule without any unexpected interruptions. Then life intervenes and I don't meet them and I just become psychotic. You can see where this creates tension while cohabitating.) So I'm trying to set reasonable goals for the next couple weeks and be a better person. I've abandoned my plan to read three books a day, I'm not going to tweak out about missing a few days at my gym, and I left my keys at my college so I can move back into my room whenever David feels tempted to smother me in my sleep. It helps that I've been trying to be more self-aware and comfortable with change this year, and that makes me optimistic.

(That said, I was called a kitchen fascist yesterday. I'm not off to a stellar start.)

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