Ivy's non dilemma dilemma

Let's get our hands dirty, shall we?

I have been thinking a lot lately about Next Year. In my anxiousness, I have also been contacted/contacted many of my friends and peers who have already been there. Here's the dilemma: do I take the job with the big consulting firm or not? I know, boo hoo, but it's a pretty big life decision. Do I make money for two years, take all of my vacation, work until all hours of the night, learn BS 101 like the back of my hand? Or, do I hold out for something better? Can I find something better? This is two years of my twenties. When else will I be young and fresh? never!

I am truly torn. So torn, in fact, that I cannot even bring myself to look at the blank sheet of paper that I hope will magically turn into a 15-page reaseach proposal which will result in my final grade for a course. I find all of this is severely pressurized and depressing. I have decided that I should just move somewhere fabulous and work it out. Paris? London? I have a great school to back me up, a good GPA (before tomorrow), and some great experience. I try to tell myself that I can take the job or leave it, but I'm not so sure. It's difficult when everyone I know is off to New York to do ibanking or consulting and make $70,000 off the bat. The Ivy League makes us so confident and unsure at the same time. It's also hard when your parents are cutting you off next year, so I'll need that money to survive....

Anyway, I may as well go out with a bang. Having procrastinated the day away by shopping, the gym, painting my nails, going to dinner with my roommate, and you name it, it is time for me to write this paper. Maybe long nights at the office will not be a problem for me.

Just Because You're All in Your PJs Doesn't Mean This Is Your Bedroom. Gold Moans.

I am guilty: I've left my room in spandex and not headed straight for the gym. Nope, not at all: I went and got some tea, said hello to my boyfriend at work, and settled into a big, square desk I had all to myself at the library.

All to myself, that is, until another girl in spandex decided to spread herself and all her crap all over the table: notebooks, a huge crinkly bag of chocolates she reaches into every 5 seconds, a water bottle that makes strange sucking sounds when she drinks from it and snaps back loudly as soon as she is finished, large tomes I should have read for long-passed classes but never quite got around to... But this is college, and it is her prerogative to work, hydrate, and keep up her sugar levels while at the library.

What is not her prerogative, however, is to breathe like a drowning, anxious, asthmatic giraffe. Periodically-- and not quite regularly enough to ignore-- she sucks air in like she has just come across one of the last remaining vestigial pockets of the Earth's atmosphere, and her only chance at survival. How sad, poor thing, you think-- but no, I say, the rest of the time she breaths normally. Her respiratory system seems to be just fine. No reason for pity. I am here in the library on a FRIDAY (this has not happened for years) because I have so much work to do, and she is so distracting that she has DRIVEN ME TO BLOG. Oh, the unimaginable horrors.

On an at best minimally related note, I am currently mired in a great philosophical quandary: does the legging trend make it OK to go through life in spandex, or make it worse? You see, before the trend, it was athletic wear worn outside of its intended context: not the best choice, but at least referential to some fabulously active life you might have outside of the brick walls of the library; however, now, is it assumed to be an attempt at a fashion statement? A misinterpretation-- or worse, bastardisation-- of a rampant trend?

Fashion pariah or so-athletic-I've-forgotten-non-stretching-clothes-exist, I'm comfortable. If only she'd stop with the breathing...