In which Grace chronicles her constant attempts to be a better person by obsessively reading every single article on Lifehacker, thoroughly convinced that she will learn all of the skills.
My Secret to Reading a Lot of Books
I like books. I don't read books a lot, though. Blah blah blah busy blah blah blah. But over summer, everything will change! I will have time! Will be great, will be so cultured!
And then Grace failed half her exams. So I get to spend my summer reading theology tomes that I should have read during the year, but no. I guess the keeping notes section of the article still applies, though...
So once I manage to actually pass my course and graduate and all that shizz, I'm supposed to validate how my knowledge of Descartes and camera angles makes me qualified to do...anything? Very funny, we all know I'll become an author or an ~actor or something fabulous. Or I could get into business, like this theology student did.
Get back to me on that.
1. Think About Where You'll Be in Five Years. Hopefully feeling like I'm twenty-two, not twenty-four. Hopefully living in not-Dublin. Hopefully working in something creative, not a call centre. Hopefully will have bought new clothes.
2. Write Your Personal Manifesto.
Dear Grace,
Looking forward, to twenty-four year-old you, there are a number of things that need to happen. For one, you need to balance your love of pizza with being a relatively healthy human being. Just like you need to balance your wine drinking with not being a wreck of a person who decides to share all her emotions with ex-boyfriends. You need to start actually paying attention to college, along with keeping your job so you can continue to pay rent. You need to spend both more and less time on the internet. More time learning things and writing and figuring just what it is that interests you. Less time stalking ex-boyfriend's social media. At some point you will be able to explain your vegetarianism and what exactly you think of Jack Kerourac and how awful it is to grow up in a religious country without religion and why you will never think of Katy Perry as a guilty pleasure. This will be around the time you actually become successful with something creative, as opposed to sitting in your room summoning the energy to write blog posts and attend acting courses as you wonder whether you should have just done fecking Business. This will also neatly coincide with you not ruining relationships, sorting out your hair, buying an actual camera so you can stop using the Instagram app on your awful smartphone, and being able to talk to people without pretending to be modest.
xoxo,
Grace
