Auf Wiedersehen.

The semester is coming to a close. Teachers are preparing for finals and assigning final projects. I have been thinking what a chore it will be to pack everything up and head home. Clothes, sheets, shoes, coats, towels, not to mention personal items, printers, boxes upon boxes will be filed out of the dorms in a few short weeks. In a way, leaving here is similar to graduating high school. We will be leaving the friends that we made here and travelling to different places. We will have no more classes here at ISU until the fall.

However, this also means no more late night study sessions. No more stress over tests and finals. No more papers. No more blogs. I feel a twinge of nostalgia as I think that this is the last blog. However, I do not think I will miss it that much. This blog was fun while it lasted, but the constant deadlines and regulations were annoying. While it was nice to be able to record all my thoughts and grievances of the week, it was frustrating to have rules.

One other thing that I will not miss is all the commenting. Two comments on everyone’s blog did not seem like that much until I started doing it. No offense to anyone out there, you guys all had great blogs, but I hated going through and finding things to comment on. I would rather have just read them. I would suggest that next year, the comments are not mandatory. If I had to plan it, I would just pick one blog to read on Mondays, then alternate which blogs were read. This would let everyone hear other people’s blogs, but without the mind numbing process of the forty plus comments.

I hope anyone who has read this blog has gotten something out of it, even if it was just a good laugh. I encourage those incoming freshmen to not be discouraged. The second semester is tough, but it only lasts a couple months. Work hard, and blog if you need to express yourself. Don’t go paint the stairwells, though, because it costs everybody a dollar each. Most of all, have fun. You only get one try at your freshman year.

So, you are coming to Normal?

When I moved to college, I didn’t know there would be so much walking. I do not have my own car, so if I can’t get a ride from someone, I have to walk. There are buses, but if you don’t have time to wait around on their schedule, you might be out of luck. I never realized how big the world was until I came here. When your world is limited to where you can walk to, your world becomes incredibly small.
We have been asked to write a blog on what we would suggest visitors to Normal should do. However, I don’t really get around much in Normal. My roommate and I sometimes take the bus out to Wal-Mart, and sometimes we can con her boyfriend into letting us take his car shopping, but I realized that I don’t really know what there is to do in Normal.
Every once in a while, a friend from back home comes up to visit. Since Decatur is not exactly a booming city, Normal has a lot of things to do that we don’t have available in Decatur. However, I am pretty sure that only people from back home would find them interesting in Normal. For instance, the mall in Normal is probably three times as big as Decatur’s. When my friends come up, often the first thing we do is head to the mall. Plus, did you know the mall has that glow in the dark put putting? How awesome is that?
Also, our movie theaters back home are pretty small. They might be able to hold a hundred people, but those hundred wouldn’t be too comfortable. There is a movie theater here that is huge. I think it is actually in Bloomington, but it is probably the biggest theater I have ever seen (except for the one in Walt Disney World). The armrests go up and down. Genius invention.
Campus events are pretty cool, too, but you have to plan trips around ISU’s scheduling. If you want to be spontaneous, there is a rock wall place called Upper Limits. I haven’t been there yet, but my boyfriend loves it. He swears that it is the place to go for rock climbers in Illinois.
In all honesty, I don’t really know a lot of things to do in Normal that you couldn’t probably do in your own hometown. But my friends and I like it, and at least you will never truly get bored.

Rockin' the Flu Bug

Lately, I have had the flu. I had full blown body aches, fever, throwing up…the whole deal.
Let me back up. Prior to getting sick this past week, I was pretty healthy. I rarely got sick, and I made sure to take Vitamin C every day in order to keep up my good record. My roommate and I are trying to get in shape, so I eat well, and we exercise each night. We do cardio exercises (running and biking) in addition to yoga and crunches. We had a strict regimen, and it was working for us.
I am one of those people that does their homework ahead of time. I am paranoid about forgetting to do something, so I always write everything down on post-its that I stick on my light above my desk. I try to stay pretty on top of things.
However, getting sick threw a wrench into my well-oiled life. I was too tired to do anything more strenuous than walking down to the dining center. I was constantly sleeping, and when I was awake, I was running fevers of 100 to 102. I was miserable. I kept watching my post-it collection grow, but I never had the energy (or the presence of mind…I was on a lot of medications) to get my work done. It was incredibly frustrating to me to not be able to do everything.
I laid in bed mostly, and I read when I wasn’t sleeping. However, after a few days in bed, I realized that I should not be depressed. Sure, I was sick, but it gave me a chance to rest. Granted, I wasn’t exactly feeling wonderful, but I still got some much needed sleep in. I also had time to think.
I had been scheduling my life down to the minute before, and I needed to learn to allow myself some down time. Our lives can’t be filled with all work and no play. We need to take time to relax and, pardon the cliché, smell the roses. Even if you can’t smell them through all the congestion in your head.