Getting ready for school

The first day of school is next week, and you know what that means: getting up early to make sure my hair is cute, laying out my outfit & packing my bag the night before, mom making me a special breakfast and knowing that there will be a note written in my sack lunch that mom’s also made. OK, maybe that was the case 20 years ago. Now things are just a little different. I will be getting up late because it’s a Monday and a biological fact that it’s harder for humans to get up on Monday mornings. We are genetically programmed to struggle on Mondays. Now you don’t have to feel so bad about hitting the snooze 12 times like yours truly. My hair will be the same way I do it every day when I make that all-important decision around 7:25 each morning: curlers or curling iron? I can guarantee you the outfit will NOT be laid out but I can also guarantee my bag will be packed the night before. Mom will not be available to make fun-shaped pancakes but instead I will enjoy a lovely spread of Egg Beaters, toast with cinnamon and Dannon’s Lite & Fit peach yogurt. And for the record, that’s just about the best breakfast any amateur chef could make at home. It gets even better on the weekends when you add 2 cups of coffee WITH Hazelnut coffee creamer. Oh, and it probably a safe bet that I won’t be riding a yellow bus.

Some things will be the same though. We’ll have to state our name in class, the degree we’re pursuing and probably some “fun fact” about ourselves. I always panic trying to think of something fun to say about myself. You don’t want to come off as arrogant, “I spent the summer being a raft guide at my uncle’s resort in Bali.” You don’t want to seem pretentious, “After getting my BS at Cornell and MBA at Warton. . .” You don’t want to seem boring, “Um, I can’t think of anything.” And you certainly don’t want to appear like everyone else, “I want to go into PCC’s nursing program.” So let’s have a brainstorming session, what is something cool about me that the rest of my 59 classmates would enjoy? Perhaps that I have access to all things Nike at half price. That I have climbed the real life Mt. Doom. That my eyebrows are totally funky and I have to cut them every other day. That I am so unsuccessful at being a greenthumb that I have actually killed a cactus – a feat Mother Nature herself has probably never accomplished. Or perhaps that my right foot is half a size larger than my left foot – again defying biological odds since I’m left-handed.

Today I’ve learned that I am a creature of habit. . .and that I like it!