Diary of a College Senior

Feb 1 - Pen Pals and More Woes

Thursday, February 1, 2018

I just finished writing a letter to my new pen pal and I feel pretty accomplished. It is five pages long and written with my special Lamy pen on colourful paper. Pretty much last week I watched a You-tuber talk about how to get pen pals. Afterwards, I had a strong urge to get some pen pals myself so I went on a website to find some pen pal potential.

It took a day before the website approved my profile and I was allowed to roam the site. There was a good selection of people from all across the world so I was pretty impressed. I wanted someone who was in a similar age range but lives far far away, so I narrowed the number of people down by location.

Then came the hard part. This whole week, for about ten minutes a day, I emailed my shortlist of interesting people. The first two days, nobody replied to me and I was not impressed. Then on the third day, a girl wrote a nice message back saying she has too many pen pals but we can send emails to each other instead. I didn't want to do that, so I kept looking.

Finally, finally, on the fifth or sixth day, a nice girl from Sri Lanka messaged me back enthusiastically with her address. I was extremely happy because not only did I find someone, it's also a person from Sri Lanka! I've always wanted to visit Sri Lanka since I read Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family so hopefully, she can tell me more about where she lives.

Anyways, moving on to a different topic now. Besides the excitement of getting a pen pal, the last week of January has been rather crappy. I was unmotivated to do work or to leave the house and I blame it on this crappy weather - in the minus 10s to 20s the entire week. I had nowhere to go and nothing much to do besides school work.

Today is Thursday which means I have classes again and I had to do my crazy routine of waking up at 6 followed by three classes and a lab. Today's lab is for my construction class though and we are designing a new hypothetical building for the school. I am in the same lab group as Blair, Toby, and Josef again which I was happy about. There are also two more girls in our group - S. and K.

I don't mind K. so much because she is nice and is a team player. But S. is a different story. She is bossy and controlling which I found hard to work with. The design of our building is pretty much her own design. This is because she shot down everyone's ideas with a firm 'no'.

The first week of the project, I designed a logo for our hypothetical construction company. After seeing it, S. flat out told me it was ugly but I decided to stick with it anyway, as it was just a stupid logo and we are not getting marked on it. The second week, which is this week, I realized S. had changed the logo to something of her own design, something even uglier (hahaha). I didn't even bother confronting her because the whole thing was just so petty and ridiculous I didn't want to waste my precious time arguing about it.

Thankfully, the rest of the group are all pretty laid back like me so we let her have things her way. Besides, if S. wanted to do everything herself, then great. I can spend less time on this stupid project and more time doing the things I actually want to do - like studying, research, and my freelance work.

Today Blair also told me she has been feeling a lot of pressures lately. Pressures from studying, finding a job, choosing a location to move to, and applying to grad school, all in the next two months.

First, she has been talking to some people who have secured a job for after graduation and it made her second guess her own decision of turning down that job in the small town.

"It feels like everybody either has a job lined up or is looking hard for one." She said.

"But I am doing either," I told her. "And I only know one person, Haley, who has a job lined up."

"There's a lot of guys who are going into big companies." She told me, "The guys in we don't really talk to."

"They probably got in through a connection or something."

"I don't know, but it makes me feel like I should have taken that small town job."

Also, Blair is applying to grad school at the University of Toronto as a backup, but she isn't sure if she will find a professor to work for, or if it's even a good idea. It all sounds so stressful I was rather glad I don't have to seriously consider this until the end of this year.