I thought I'd take a moment to let my mind wander, while my printer refuses to print and my brain refuses to think.
How, you may ask, (if you actually care, and that is always questionable), did I, Jeff Deck of considerable fame and status, get caught up in glaring at a printer at one in the morning? How indeed did I get to staring glazedly at my half-finished can of Sprite, noting with some measure of absent wit that the soda's name can be rearranged to "Tripes"?
It's a pattern with which I am sure you're familiar. A weekend of fun, and no work done then, Hades to pay soon after. It's a self-defeating cycle, really: you get behind one night, then you get more work the next day, then you try to catch up on the previous day's work, and pretty soon you're working on an assignment that was due six years ago. I'm sure that's happened to all of you. I'm in one of those cycles right now have been for at least a week now. Every night becomes a marathon homework mad-cap dash, a race against the infernal biological mechanism that says "You are getting veeeery sleepy, Jeff "
What happened? I would say it's due in no small part to the perpetually aerial juggling pins that I have and that you must have; right now mine are cleverly named Classes, Work, PEAC, Pooh, Friends, and, the very latest shiny new pin, which we may call Heart for now. The Classes, Work, PEAC and Pooh pins conspired to make my day eleven hours long today, or rather I should say yesterday. You probably don't know what the Pooh and PEAC pins are, but that's ok -- you don't need to. You've got pins in your own juggling act that would be equally mysterious to me.
My draining schedule is not the sole factor in creating my recurrent role as night owl, though. I've been fortunate enough to begin a relationship recently with a wonderful girl, Lisa, and I admit that I devoted much time to the cause of beginning it. Hence the creation of the Heart pin, and a happy addition to my life. I guess if my column this time really has a point, it begins here.
I think that most of the time at Dartmouth so far, I've been able to set aside enough time for my friends when opportunities for spending time with them arose. And I am definitely willing to spend a lot of time to help Lisa and I have an enjoyable relationship. But I wonder if enough people actually share my belief in holding these things to be important. I was talking to my friend Brian the other day, and happened to mention the new relationship that had come up in my life. He was congratulatory, but then became pessimistic about the state of any relationships that had their beginning at Dartmouth. He said that most of them seemed to come and go fairly quickly, because, he said, "There always seems to be a lot of people stepping on each other here."
I assured Brian that I was not the type to step on people, but it got me to wondering. Is there really a significant number of people here who step on others just to get ahead? It made for a bleak world view: everyone abandoning friends and loves at a whim in the name of success. Rarely is it that dramatic, but I fear that, if you'll pardon my beating of a tired metaphor, people really are forsaking their Friends and Heart pins.
Of course, I know that I am not in a position to give helpful advice to the world at large. Maybe, then, I can offer one tiny, timid suggestion in my vain office as columnist. At least for me, the Friends and Heart pins are the most important in the whole juggling set, even when the High-Paying Job pin or the Ridiculously Extravagant Fame pin is introduced. Don't drop the most important ones. Your successful juggling of these will take a toll on you when you keep them balanced with the others, and you'll lose sleep and maybe even little parts of your mind. Remember, though, that this is the price exacted on you for being able to have human relationships, which to me is worth any price at all.
And now it is two a.m., the time to drink the last of the Tripes and get down to business.
