Routine

With the end of the semester comes a complete loss of routine. Add to the fact that the past month and a half not only brought me to the end of my four year university career but also carried me from living with my boyfriend to living on my own, and the change in my daily rituals becomes increasingly dramatic. My weekdays used to go a little something like the following: get up to say good bye to the boyfriend before he goes to work, go back to bed for half an hour, get up at 8:00 so I can watch Rachel Ray while eating breakfast and cleaning the kitchen, head off to two or three classes, go to work, meet the boyfriend at home, go for a work out together, come home and make dinner, watch The Sopranos, then bed. It was a pretty solid routine that had minor variations thrown in throughout the week. And I was very comfortable with it.

For the past couple weeks, my weekdays have been going a little something like this: roll off the couch (currently my bed) at whatever time the sun happens to peek through the curtains, put on a pot of coffee, forget about the coffee for over an hour as I lie back down in my makeshift bed to reply to emails and dreamily browse the Ikea website, remember the coffee and finally get up to make breakfast, eventually make it out of the house for a run, go shower before meeting a friend for a coffee date or a walk, find some lunch once I realize I'm hungry, go to work at whatever random time I've been scheduled for that day, come home and make dinner while I watch The New Adventures of Old Christine on my laptop (currently my TV), find some cheap way for my friends and I to amuse ourselves, then bed.

It's not a very solid routine. I wake up at a different time every morning and go to bed at a different time every night. My work shifts are all over the place. My running routine is inconsistent. Everything is a mess! Without any classes to schedule my day around, everything falls apart. And with nobody at home to keep me on track with eating breakfast at breakfast time and so on, my days are very unstructured. I've never not been a student before! And I've never lived completely alone before! This is way too much freedom for my liking.

There is something to be said for a flexible schedule, but I think there is much more to be said for a routine. That's just my personality - I become a little unhinged when I realize it's 9:00am and I have not yet downed my two cups of coffee and moved on to my first of eight bottles of water for the day. (Okay, maybe that's a little more obsessive than merely valuing a routine. But that's an issue to be explored another day.) Basically, I can only take so many days of this freedom. It's time for a routine again! And I figure the first of the month is the perfect time to get back into the swing of things. It will be a completely different type of routine than I've ever had before - no classes, no study time, no working around my boyfriend's work schedule or training schedule. But that's okay! It's time for a totally new routine. One that is based completely on me, myself, and I.