School

Being a highly introverted, mildly insecure, and also a bit of an oddball makes for an interesting experience when going back to work on your undergrad at almost 30. (Translation: it can be rough.) Overall it has been a fantastic thing on a dozen different levels. But that is a post for another time. Today we are going to talk about the oh-so-incredibly-valuable life skill of winging something. Not just the scraping by sort of winging it that I did occasionally (ALL THE TIME) the first time in was in school (at a more normal age for pursuing an undergrad degree). Examples:

 No, this particular method of flying by the seat of your pants that I use now is a much more sophisticated version. Now it involves a certain degree of panache mixed with generally attempting to genuinely stay on top of things while knowing that it is inevitable that something will fall through the cracks and be forgotten until it is due. Example: the presentation my group was supposed to give in my lit class today. As a rule I despise having to work in groups and find it more prohibitive than helpful in learning since it is a generally accepted truth that you will get screwed over in every possible way when doing group work. This class has been the exception to that experience, there aren't any slackers or jerks in the group. Yet we still have CONSTANT issues...why? Because none of us are decisive. It can take the 4 of us a truly ridiculous amount of time to split tasks up because no one ever seems to want to be the Big Boss and tell everyone else to do. This leads to me getting annoyed about inefficiency and doing it anyway. No big, seems to work well for us. Until today. Today when our class started we had 20 minutes to compile all of the stuff we were supposed to work on individually, 10 minutes in C and I realized that the other two girls weren't coming to class. Neither one of them is prone to skipping so we assumed that they had their reasons and moved on. Turns out that L dropped the class this morning and I haven't heard from D, but I assume something important came up. The really unfortunate bit was that L was in charge of the PowerPoint and D was in charge of most of the writing...so nothing to hand in to the teacher and not a whole lot to go on visually for the presentation. C and I discussed it calmly, told the teacher what was going on, and decided to present today anyway. Thanks to the additional years experience in BS-ing we both came off as informed and confident and I can honestly say that we did not have the worst presentation in class even though all of the other groups had all of their members and resources present. One of the highlights of being 10 years older than your peers: not freaking out when things look grim and managing to pull things off anyway.