#49 Things My Friends Are Doing: Amanda

Amanda is no stranger to my blog by any means. She was involved in my ACL post, a feature in the Lord of the Rings post, and always answers my questions, but more than that, something you don't know about her is that she is one of my most loyal supporters. I can always count on her to have read my latest post within twenty minutes of its appearance on the World Wide Web and she's one of the few I feel comfortable consulting about my writing before it goes up! Not only is she a loyal to my blog, she's loyal to me in general. In fact it's one of the qualities I admire most about her, other than her quick wit and penchant for sarcasm (and you'll know exactly what I'm talking about when you read what she has to say!). She'll do anything for the people who are important to her. She'll share her Raisinets with you, she'll sit through an entire trilogy of movies with you, she'll be the most consistent pen pal on the planet, she'll do anything--except maybe go see a scary movie but I can't exactly blame her for that--and I greatly admire that in a person. The reason I asked Amanda to write, other than the fact that I knew she would be entertaining, is because she's such a talented writer. I don't think I ever told her this, but when we were in an American Cultures class our senior year, I sat behind her and would read what she was typing as she was writing her college essays. Really creepy and inappropriate, but yeah, I did it. Sue me, she's talented! She can deny it all she wants to, but I really do think that she and my other guest bloggers are putting me to shame! So without further ado, here's Amanda, one of the smartest, most loyal, and generally hilarious people I know.

When Morgan first asked me to be a guest blogger on Things I’m Doing, I was skeptical. When she popped the question I was lying in bed, reading Tina Fey’s Bossypants and eating cottage cheese straight out of the carton. What am I doing? Can I really write an entire blog post about the first three seasons of Lost? Does re-reading The Notebook for the fourth time count as doing something? Probably not. So I put it on the back-burner, making a mental note to keep an eye out for something to guest-blog about. Then one morning, as I was waking up before the crack of dawn for an advising meeting, it hit me. What I’ve been doing is trying to figure out what I’m gonna do for the rest of my life. Heavy, right? This semester I’m enrolled in a “Career & Self-Exploration” class where you basically take a bunch of personality quizzes that tell you things you already knew about yourself, and use that information to decide how you’re going to spend the next 30+ years of your life. So much fun. 

The results of these quizzes have really been a mixed bag. I’ve received a plethora of information about myself in such a small amount of time, I’m not even sure how to process it all.  Some of the tests offer up these really specific descriptions of my character, like “You prefer to learn through lectures and books,” and “You may dislike taking risks.” It’s like, what am I supposed to be getting from that? Is this supposed to inspire one of those “aha moments” Oprah’s always talking about??? Because it doesn’t. Then there are the tests that measure your level of interest in various fields and what careers you’d be good at. For some perspective, let me just say that one of these tests told the girl at the end of my row the thing she would really enjoy doing is bartending, and the boy that sits in front of me is apparently destined for life on the farm. Let’s just take a second to imagine their parents’ faces when they hear that this is what they’re paying $45,000+ a year for. For their son to drop out of school, buy some land, and start raising alpacas or something. Ha. Ha. Okay, moving on. 

Now a lot of people I’ve talked to who’ve taken this class say they really benefited from it, and that it really helped them in choosing a career. I hope that’s the case for me. The thing is, I just really hate making decisions. Seriously, ask any of my friends and they’ll tell you that even something as simple and unimportant as picking a restaurant gives me major anxiety. So if little decisions like where to get lunch are next to impossible for me, how on Earth am I supposed to make a decision of this caliber?! Sometimes I wish someone would just tell me like, “Hey Amanda, you need to be doing this with your life, pick this major, it’ll all work out.” But that pretty much defeats the purpose of free will, and like, life in general. Life’s supposed to be this constant juxtaposition of failures and successes. You’re supposed to make mistakes and learn from them, and then little by little you become the person you’re meant to be. Then when you look back on your life you can pinpoint those experiences, good and bad, that made you who you are. That’s what life is all about. 

I feel like this is becoming more of a weird, rambling short-story and less of a blog post...I’ll leave you with this. When I was little I used to play a lot of GameCube (nerd alert), but I was never very good at it. In fact, I was always pretty terrible at video games. Whenever I would get stuck on a level I would beg my brother Alec, the king of all video games, to help me. Sometimes he did, but after a while he got sick of playing the game for me. So in lieu of my big brother’s help, I would look up the walkthroughs online. These basically told you step-by-step what you had to do next, completely defeating the purpose of playing the game yourself. I was a cheater in every aspect of the word. I guess what I’m trying to say is, there’s no walkthrough for real life. When you get stuck, you can’t beg your big brother to figure things out for you or look up what your next move is on the internet. You just have to do it. If college has taught me anything, it’s that being an adult means making your own decisions. As much as I wish someone would, no one is going to tell me which major to pick, or which career path to follow. These are things I’m going to have to figure out on my own. And even if I end up being wrong, even if I end up failing in a colossal way, it’s all just part of the journey. So anyway, that’s what I’ve been doing in a nutshell. That and watching endless amounts of Netflix of course. Everyone knows you’re not a real college student unless you spend at least 2/3 of your time avoiding responsibilities on the internet. 

Told you she was funny!

Morgan