So I'm going back and reading my older posts with the tag "Dear Younger Self". Two thoughts come to mind:
1. The advice I give my you, my younger self (or rather students at certain points in college), are pretty cliched.
2. I guess I listened to myself.
The end of the year is always a time for looking back. There are Top 10 Lists of Things in 2013 everywhere. People are talking about the year that was and their resolutions and stuff. And I guess after another successful semester in the books, you're looking for more advice from me, because that's what a cliched end-of-the-year blog post holds.
I could ramble on about the follies of procrastination and how you've seemed to have figured out that you can't NOT procrastinate, that it's in your blood. I can always speak about how very quickly time seems to fly, and how you're nearing the end, so you'd better make it awesome. Or how valuable good friends are. I can give you a heads-up and say things like "can you learn to cook already?", "practice defensive eating during Field Methods", "don't give up on Dynamic Fields because you can make the greatest comeback in the history of ever or something". I could tell my sophomore self that "it gets better; Junior year won't kill you." I could blather about the lessons outside the classroom: about wise time investment, overcoming over-analyzation and over-reaction, learning to have fun by yourself, and letting go of the past (wow, the cliches are killing me).
I could ramble. Because the cliches would all be true, interestingly enough.
But you gotta figure it out without my cliched advice and live it on your own. And maybe, just maybe, after five action-packed semesters, you have figured it out. But most likely there are some curveballs headed your way (gotta throw in a baseball cliche). Still, I hope that Future Self will be writing about the good times that Spring 2014 and Field Session held. Or the crazy things that happened the summer between Junior and Senior Year and the first semester of Senior Year.
So yeah. [Insert cliche phrase that expresses an attitude that one holds when about to embark on a new year and adventures and the such like, that when the phrase is uttered it sends a chill of fear into the heart of the bad guys. Play heroic and inspiring music. Fade out.]
It's supposed to be hard. If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. The hard... is what makes it great. ~ A League of Their OwnP.S. For real though, it doesn't get easier. As far as material goes, it gets more impossible. Yet more doable.
