Buddhist Marketer

Priority check, one-two one-two

When I was nine (-teen), back-to-school time meant puttering down to the basement in the house I grew up in and sitting Indian style criss-cross-applesauce with my new school supplies splayed out in front of me. In my head, my crayons were about to attend an elaborate summer camp, and I organized them into color groups. (How this correlates to my ethnic background and standardized forms’ relationship to it is outside the scope of this post.) Oh, how I loved the cool air of that full basement, the scratchy industrial carpeting under my thighs, and those perfect brand new crayons, with tips as-yet unadulterated by circling answers, drawing parallelograms, or crafting dioramas of Tribes Of Northern Indiana (TM).

Now I am twenty-nine (plus two) and feeling that need to organize crayons goals. I’ve been inspired by a few data points, including fellow Academite Nate’s blog post re: shaking things up a bit in August:

So about the middle of August every year, I start to do an upheaval of my life from the bottom up.

and the following, from Paul Sutherland’s “6 steps to financial flow” in the May-June 2008 ish of Spirituality & Health:

Budget your time and resources to support your life and your goals in a way that is consistent with your reality and budget.

As someone who might have an addiction to activity, it’s good for me to receive this message in stereo sound (see: yesterday’s horoscope). But having recently mapped out my autumn priorities, here’s what I’ve got so far as my top three:

1. Maintain balance between incoming and outgoing funds. I have a roommate for a month, a woman from the U.K., and have turned my living room into a pseudo studio made more comfortable by gripping my twin bed back from my little sister and fashioning an ersatz daybed. And I’ve given myself permission to work only on projects that deeply engage me, as it’s increasingly impossible to motor-vate me to execute on that which does not exploit my comparative advantagii. When I throw my passions behind something, I become The Unstoppable A.N.P., and this only bodes well on the incoming-loot tip.
2. Find my home within academia. The other day I drafted a prioritized list of no less than 76 PhD programs that pique my interest (#1 Harvard Econ! #36 Stanford Learning Sciences & Technology Design! #74 Minnesota Consumer Behavior & Household Economics!). Clearly I have neither the time nor the funds to actually apply to all 76. So I’m planning informational interviews and a late-September road trip to try and find the professor(s) for whom, starting next September, I’d be a grad student grunt. The informationals, the research, the GRE, and the applying all take time, and since this is the second most important thing in my life this fall, I need to make sure I allocate my finite temporal resources accordingly, yo.
3. Own statistics. Now, the linear algebra refresher course I so naively got myself into turned out to include students that were Math ABDs and PhDs, making the experience as refreshing as Samantha’s chemical peel before Carrie’s book release party. But unlike linear algebra, my stats class meets three hours a week, not three hours a day, so I’ve got plenty of time to sharpen some pencils and work hard on this stuff (never resisting sleep when tired).

Those are the top three. As givens, I want to continue keeping technology in its place and maintaining a healthy sleeping schedule (by turning off the computer at 9 p.m.), eating healthfully (by being a nutrient-junkie pseudo-vegan most of the month and then having a buffalo-kill, so to speak, via a monthly carnivore carnival), running regularly (thrice weekly) and being compassionate & loving to myself and those close to me.

Ugh, not sure where blogging and bill paying and laundering and yoga’ing and pro-bono’ing fall in all of this. Dagnab, even when I try and prioritize and pare down I still have yards of things to do.

Though, as Carrie narrated in the aforementioned SATC episode:

That’s the key to having it all: stop expecting it to look like what you thought it was going to look like.

Maybe. Or maybe I should stop trying to have it all.

Or maybe I just want more life.