Week 11 + 12: Coming of Age

                                         
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Just kidding, however I am feeling reflective at the time of writing this so I'm just gonna go with it.  But first, let get some of the fun stuff out of the way.  For starters, there were three new St. Peters Alumni in Chicago this weekend!  Caleb's sisters, Cara and Corrine, along with our day-one PAL Noah all made it up for visits, though not at the same time.  Caleb's family came up last weekend for a nice family trip and Noah was up this weekend to see his girlfriend (and us I guess).  It was great to catch up and hear Noah's *tremendos* Trump impersonation.

One thing I was finally able to try last week was the rental bikes.  See Chicago has these bike racks scattered around the city where you can swipe your credit card and ride the bike along the bike trail that runs along the lake.  It's a $10 flat rate but requires that you check-in at a station every half hour.  If you don't, you get charged an increasingly steep fee per interval of time.  I went to the nearest bike station two blocks away and went on my way towards the South side.  It took about five minutes to get past through the stretch of road  I was familiar with but after that it was beautiful.  I slowly found myself away from the city lost underneath some trees, surrounded by foliage overlooking the lake.  The trail slowly eases you into it, before I knew it I was away from the city and feeling like I was up near my cottage in Lexington.  The city really does a great job of keeping it up.  I wish I would'v gone sooner.

I started reading this business/psychology book my friend Dom lent me called Give and Take by Adam Grant.  I'm only a few chapters in, but it claims that in their professional career those who give more often as in helping others and doing favors tend to be at the bottom of the ladder.  However they are also extremely present at the top of the ladder.  More so than the "Takers" and "Matchers" as the book likes to call them.  It goes on to provide arguments and evidence supporting the claim including a very interesting story about an important writer of the Simpsons, George Meyer.  I think some of the arguments are weak at times, but it's an interesting read so far and will be fun to experiment with some of the ideas in the rest of the time I have at Fulcrum and back in group projects back at school.

My phone finally broke from sweat damage or something on Friday.  I ordered a used Google pixel off of ebay which came today, however they literally announced a 27 percent price drop this morning.  Just my luck.  Speaking of sweat, I've been trying to get in the habit of waking up early to go for runs.  My efforts are hit in miss, but here's a pretty cool picture I got by the lake last week.




The LoLlaPaLooZa music festival was this weekend and one of my favorite bands, The Shins were playing.  I really wanted to get a ticket but they were just so frikin' expensive.  By the time I started looking they were already $160 just for a Sunday pass.  Come Sunday around noon I started asking some of the scalpers how much they were selling for and the lowest I heard was $80.  I decided I was going to go look for tickets around 5:00, an hour and a half before anybody I wanted to see was playing but then I remembered I had to finish some work on our project I was having trouble with on Friday, so I started doing that.  I worked on it for half an hour which turned into an hour that turned into two hours and finally turned into me not going at all.  Which brings me to the title of this post.  See this happening brought to light an issue I've been wrestling with for quite some time: wanting others approval.

You might be wondering how not going to a concert ties into wanting someone's approval, but I can explain.  See I didn't want to upset my team so I stayed at home a little longer to get stuff done.  In my head I was thinking that if I didn't get this done, they'd get upset knowing that I went to a concert and see me as irresponsible.  In reality they would not have cared at all knowing that I'd just stay late and get everything done the next day.  This may not seem like a big deal, and it wasn't because I ended up watching the concert live on the internet and got the work done, but small things like this can add up and leave me feeling inhibited and unable to express myself.   Even in day to day interactions I sometimes won't do or say certain things in fear of losing someone's approval.  Part of the reason I wanted to write about this was to serve as somewhat of an exercise in saying what I have to say and realizing that nobody is gonna care either way so I might as well just say it.  And so that the next time The Shins are in town I can go scream my heart out to all my favorite songs.  I'm just gonna have to work on it.

Well that's about all I have for this post.  I may end up waiting another two weeks before I make another post because this week is gonna be filled with work and packing getting ready for ILTACON LAS VEGAS BABY!  Ahaha until next time, thanks for reading