It is going to be a long semester...

I've enjoyed having the last few weeks off from school. It's been good to be able to sleep a regular (and sometimes more than natural) amount of sleep every night. It's been nice not to have to hang out with school friends that I wouldn't necessarily consider my friends. It's been nice to breathe a little bit.

On the other hand, though I am truly excited about helping my professor with this project, I think I signed up for more than I bargained. I have a hard time saying no to people, so I am always busy. This semester I'll have twelve hours of school (on Tuesdays and Thursdays only), I'll be working 37 hours in the evenings at the outreach center and 3 hours in the daytime on a relatively new program that my supervisor is overseeing, and I'll be helping out with this program through my professor. That doesn't include time I will spend on homework or being stressed out (I still haven't mastered the "leave your work at work" objective).

I've decided that I need to do a little inventory this year. You see, I was thinking recently about how many "friends" I have. There are a whole lot of people in this world, and in this town, that I absolutely love and would love to be friends with. The deal is, though, I don't have time. And I am okay with not having time to have 800 friends. I would much rather just have a few good friends, but I'm bad at making this reality. See, I meet someone new that is cool and immediately say "Oh, we need to hang out!" So, we have lunch or coffee or something once and then we are "friends." Then my schedule gets the best of me and I don't see that person again for a long time. Eventually I get a text message saying "I never see you! I miss you! Let's hang out!" And the cycle repeats itself.

One of my actual friends calls me a relationship whore. I agree. I need to stop putting myself into this cycle because when I get those texts or calls saying someone feels neglected, I feel guilty and I do everything I can to hang out with them--knowing that I probably won't do this again for six months. Now, I think it's fine to get to know people and share your stories and whatever, but I just don't enjoy that guilty feeling and the fact that it stresses me out so much. And on top of that, those people that I do really consider my friends are definitely neglected because I'm spending so much time trying to reconnect with people that I don't have time for.

This blog is pretty depressing and, if you are reading it, it is most likely that you are not in the non-friend category, but I have just been thinking about this a lot lately. You could say it's a new year's resolution. I'm just calling it reality.