I’ve kept in touch with just a select few of my friends from high school.  Some are mere acquaintances to this day, but some are still very close personal friends who I see regularly.  The same thing happened with friends I made in college.  I made quite a few friends and used to hang out with them all the time, some more than others.  And as of now, I am still friends with only one of them.

I made one friendship in college that I saw as lasting forever.  Corny I know, but it’s true.  We were buddies.  Pals.  We had no secrets…or so I thought.  When everything came out in the open, I tried to see if it could work, but it was obvious it couldn’t.  Every time I tried to mend fences, they’d be knocked down again.  Every time I tried to give another chance for honesty, another lie surfaced.  I was yelled at for being suspicious, but is it really suspicious if it turns out to be true?

Like I said though, I’m still in touch with someone else from college.  Someone who I had never really thought of as a close friend, but over the past few months we’ve hung out a couple times a month and we always have a good time.  We usually hang out and just watch TV and talk about work and other random stuff, but it’s nice.  I think on some level, this always made the other friend jealous since we never hang out anymore.

Life is hard.  Growing up and seeing people for who they truly are is difficult.  But you can’t hold onto the past.  For years after high school I’d randomly call up old friends and see if they wanted to hang out.  Usually they didn’t.  Rarely they did, but even then it was just the once and then I’d never hear back.  Same with college but to a lesser degree.  I’d try and stay in touch for a short while, but ultimately I just gave up.

Like now.  I’m done trying.  I’ve always felt responsible for chasing people down and apologizing and begging to be taken back even when I hadn’t done anything wrong.  I’d rather do that and get a “friend” back than to lose that friend.  That was the old James Dean.  No longer.  I’m my own person and I don’t need friends like that anymore.  Nobody does.  When I do something that has negative consequences, I stand up and take them.  I didn’t always, but I do now.  I expect the same of others.  You can’t go around in life expecting others to take the blame for something you did just to make you feel better.  That isn’t how it works.

Times are changing.  Perhaps for the better.  In life, friends come and go.  The position of my “best friend” has recently become available again.  I’m accepting applications.  Don’t forget the $10 processing fee.

The whole point of the class is to find what career path you are best suited for and encourage you to pursue it.  Part of that is accomplished by various personality tests which are then used in comparison to the job you currently occupy to determine whether or not you’re suited to be where you are in life right now.  Most of the time the answer is no.  How convenient.  It all seems so hokey to me.  I don’t like putting myself up on an examination table to be poked and prodded only to be told that I’ve made dumb choices in life and need to take a whole new direction in life.  If that’s really the case, chances are I’ll get to the point where I can make that decision myself without having to sit through a ridiculous 15 week course where I repeat a dumb mantra every class meeting.

I’m all for self-improvement and working to reach your full potential, but I fully believe that I have the ability to do that on my own.  I know what my opinion of my current career choice is, and I know where I want to be in 5 years.  Heck, I know where I want to be in 10 years.  Maybe for some people it’s not that easy.  I just feel incredibly restricted in this course, like I’m being told by someone that doesn’t know me what I should be doing with my life based on a personality test I had to take for the course.  Didn’t she get the memo that I don’t like being told what to do?  I’m pretty sure I’ve faxed it to anyone I come in contact with more than once just to make sure they’re aware.

On top of all that, the class is very much interaction oriented, and every class includes a large amount of discussion and ends in some form of group exercises where you’re lumped in with other people of your “type” and you all discuss things that you supposedly do the same way.  What does this mean to me?  It means she specifically states in her syllabus that no laptops are allowed and cell phones must be turned off.  I will grudgingly abide by the former, but she can pry my blackberry from my cold dead hands before I turn it off and put it away.

I have extreme ADD and do not like having to focus on only one thing at a time.  My mind races and I can’t concentrate and I’ll quickly lose interest and my mind will wander.  However, throughout my years of undergraduate and graduate studies, I’ve found that having my laptop helps me to divide my focus and enable me to actually pay better attention.  I know it sounds strange to say that splitting my focus makes me more attentive, but it’s true.  My mind works much better when it’s chugging away at three or four things at a time (ie, listening to the professor, surfing internet on laptop, texting on blackberry, etc.), and without that my mind races with no real goal in sight.  Suffice it to say, without my laptop in this class I find myself staring at the walls and not being able to focus on the professor for 3 hours as she rambles on and on about how extroverted she is.  I get it – you’re loud and happy about it.  Can I play on my computer now?

I was lazy in high school, plain and simple.  Who wasn’t?  But looking back, I want to jump back in time, kick myself in the shin, and yell at myself to stop being a lazy ass.  I can’t help but wonder what would’ve happened if things had gone differently.  I bounced back and forth between high schools due to my own bad decisions.  I fought with both parents constantly, jumping from one’s house to the other, never realizing the common denominator was me, not them.  I used my “horrible home life” as an excuse to not give a crap about anything else.  I waited until the last minute to do homework (if I did it at all) and never really went the extra mile on projects.  I am no genius by any means, but I also have no problem saying it wasn’t because I didn’t have the ability – it was because I didn’t have the desire.

I’d come home after school every day and sit around watching TV and playing on the computer.  When I lived with my dad for 2 years my afternoons consisted of coming home and making a snack, watching “Jeopardy” and “Card Sharks” on the Game Show channel, sneaking onto the computer when nobody was home, then sitting in my room all night on the phone complaining to my friends about my miserable life.

Life was so easy back then.  Homework was always one or two worksheets with a day or two allotted for completion, and if there was ever a paper to be written it was always just a couple pages long and you usually had a week or two to write it.  What was wrong with me back then that I couldn’t put forth the tiniest effort in order to keep my grades up where they could’ve been?  I used to stress over bad grades, which put me in a bad mode, which made me less willing to work on homework, which resulted in more bad grades; it was a vicious cycle that I refused to acknowledge.

I look back now and see all the things I could’ve done differently and it just irks me that it would’ve been so easy.  A mere matter of dedicating an hour or two a night to something meaningful as opposed to watching rerun after rerun of “Friends” and “Star Trek: Voyager”.  It’s still difficult for me to make the decision to forego plans with friends so I can work on a paper or meet with a study group, but I do it because I know it’s what needs to be done.

Is this what it’s like to be a grown up?