Meetings

As a youngster, I was obsessed with meetings. My Barbies had meetings. My doll house people had meetings. Even the matchbox cars would get lined up in meeting form--I didn't play with the cars as cars, but as vehicles with imaginary people inside them, whose life stories I would make up. And they would have town meetings and everyone would sit on their cars, like at a drive-in movie theater. Nothing was ever discussed at these meetings, because, at the age of 6, I suppose I didn't know what one DID at a meeting. But I distinctly remember setting up my Barbies in rows, prepared to meet.

And then, 10ish years later, I was in high school, a robe mistress in the choir and on a pastoral call committee, and it finally sunk in that meetings are not fun. College and grad school have helped reinforce this idea. Meetings are things that happen when I would rather be doing something else. I became one of those people who would rather just deal with group work by myself rather than have to coordinate with other people. I feel less this way now than I did in high school and parts of college, because I now trust my sister students to actually pull their own weight, so that is nice. Meetings are a bummer, though. We all know this. They are either much longer than they need to be, or you make an effort to go and they are only a few minutes long. People go on tangents and you want to smack them (or at least I do). I am not an overly impatient person, but if I feel like people are wasting my time, I get fairly grumpy, and I don't like feeling like that.

What brought on this post is that I just filled in my calendar for March and it's a little unfortunate. Our department is hosting a conference in two weeks, which is grad student run. I haven't had to do anything yet, but now I will, and this week I have at least two meetings (professorial, committee, study groups) and two guest lectures/faculty talks every day. Interesting, often, but sometimes not so much. The semester is hitting that pre-spring break crunch point, so that pressing down too. The thing is, I can't force myself to get too worked up about schoolwork. If I don't finish my readings, no one will die, least of all me. Which is a healthy outlook, I think, but as a scholar, I'm not sure how great it is.

However, one cure for meetings and general school malaise is turning out to be the...gym? Yes, the gym. I have, for many years, abhorred going to the gym (dislike of sweating, dislike of sit ups, my refusal to wear shorts in public, etc). But I've been going with some friends and it's actually making me feel a lot better. We went tonight and had to use those exercise balls (which I fell off of, AGAIN) and high step run around the room, and it just got really hilarious and we kept dissolving into giggles (this always happens to me, laughing when you're not supposed to. It's worse in church). It's helping with general winter blahhs and is a nice antidote to neck ache from too much computer usage. I still prefer walking around outside, but for now this is working nicely. I don't know if I've lost any weight (and if I have it's from the chest-area, alas), but my arms feel more toned, and I feel less sluggish of late. Take that, meetings!

I'm not sure what the point of this post was, if there was one at all. More walking and less meetings? More silly friend time and less solitary computer time? Works for me.