I Need to Get My Act Together

I need to stop sleeping until 1:00 in the afternoon every day. I also need to stop reading magazines and junk on the internet and actually start working on the things I wanted to do before I left here for the summer, like organizing my closet and labeling pictures and putting them into albums.

In a lot of ways I feel like this is the last summer vacation I'll ever have with nothing to do, since I think from this point on the whole research thing becomes sort of non-stop. But that doesn't mean I have to be as slacktastic as I have been.

On the bright side, I'm doing a few things right. I have been working out often, and working out hard, in a way that doesn't just involve walking the dog,which is what I count as a workout much of the time when I'm living by myself. It's just that when I'm living in an apartment, the dog needs a daily walk and I need daily exercise, and while it's hard to justify walking at my dog's pace as true exercise, I figure it's better than nothing and it's even harder to justify taking another 30-40 minutes out of a busy day to do another form of working out. I also do some strength training at home by myself. But this summer, I've been doing long workouts pretty much every day, lots of cardio and strength and core training, and I'm noticing a definite difference in my body. I haven't lost weight, per se, and I wouldn't even say that I needed to in the first place, but the weight has just redistributed itself into better places. I wish some of it would redistribute itself to my chest, though. Why are my boobs, already the smallest damn thing on my body, always the first things to shrink when I start getting in better shape?!

The other thing I'm doing well is making money. I've been working more often than I thought I would, about five shifts a week. And so I've managed to save up a decent amount of money. I actually reached my Summer Savings Goal last week, and I still have two more full weeks of work to earn more money. Of course, every time I realize I'm making more money than I thought I would, I also realize how it's going to be even more of a struggle to make ends meet than I thought it would be. It's going to be forty dollars a month to get cable internet, for example (don't even tell me I could go back to dial up; with as much as I use my computer for research, I think the frustration of dealing with a slow connection wouldn't be worth the money saved). It costs way more money to get your car inspected there than it does here. I have to pay $200 for a parking sticker, etc., etc. I keep trying really hard not to worry about it, because logically I know that I can certainly get through this first year and even have money leftover to do fun things, and I also logically know that after this year, I'll probably be able to figure out some way to make more money somehow. I also know that I have parents and grandparents who are not going to let me starve, or actually live in the 'hood. Not that I want to start relying on my parents again, but I know I could if I needed to for a little while. So I'm trying to just be happy that I'm saving money right now and not worry too much about the future where I could run out of it.

So yeah. I need to start setting some goals every day or something, because since I'm going on vacation at the end of the month, I really only have about two weeks to get stuff done around here.