On Buying your Own Groceries and other Things

By Amy Faulkner 

Today’s confession – I don’t have time to write confessions. I mean geez, college is hard! You have to force yourself to get up in the morning, make your own coffee, make yourself go to class every day, and even though you have a little bit more freedom, you still have to do things. I mean you have to do them. In my case and the case of my siblings, you don’t have a choice.

Let me explain: my siblings and I are all going to very expensive, private colleges hundreds of miles away from home. Our parents are spending thousands of dollars to educate us and even more money sending us to and from college. The distance gives you lots of independence. You have to make your own decisions; when to go to bed, when to wake up, when to do your homework and when to hang out with your friends. But I don’t feel like I have the freedom to choose whether or not I go to class or do my homework because my parents are the ones paying for my education. I owe them too much to get bad grades. That is where I don’t have a choice. It’s kind of paradoxical. I have independence but have to depend on someone – myself, and my independence is bought by my parents so I am still really dependent on them.

I have to buy my own groceries.

I’ve done lots of things to prepare me for college. My mother taught me how to do my laundry so I wouldn’t look like an idiot in college. She taught me how to battle my natural introverted intuition when I need to ask for something. My parents helped me prepare for many things I would have to face on my own. They did not prepare me for buying my own groceries.

It’s scary how much it costs to feed a person. It’s amazing how much it costs to make a really good cup of coffee every day. I eat at the Dining Hall at least two meals a day but my friends and I like to bake, so we buy a lot of flour and eggs and chocolate chips. I also love nutella and cheese sandwiches. Not together, of course. It costs a lot to keep my mouth happy. There’s also the slight problem I have with shaking. I shake when I need food, so I have to keep snacks around. It gets pretty expensive in the end.

Now I’m sure you’ve heard the joke that you can only have two of the following three in college: good grades, enough sleep, or a social life. I can both confirm and deny that. I can confirm that I got a good amount of sleep most nights my first semester, kept a fun social life with my friends, and made decent grades. The only thing I can really complain of is that I know my grades could have been better if I had had a little bit less of a social life. However, I can also confirm that keeping up these three aspects of college life took a serious toll on me.

They always say that the first semester and first year of college is the hardest. I can definitely confirm that. I’ve had problems in the past with depression and I decided not to listen to the urgings of my loved ones to talk to someone about the difficulties I was facing. It ended up exploding in my face, driving me crazy. I didn’t get to finish my first semester. I thought I could have it all with none of the consequences. I must confess, that didn’t work.

My suggestion for you is maintain only two of the three points of college life your first semester or first year. Some people can deal with all three all the time, but if you are like me, if you are an INTJ or an INFJ, you should probably take my advice. Try maintaining just a social life and good grades or just sleep and good grades. I suggest that you always keep up good grades, no matter what you plan on. And if you are having trouble adjusting to college life or finding alone time or making friends, I suggest you talk to a dean or peer at the college; someone you trust. Many colleges have counseling services and can even help you pay for them. I speak from experience.

Okay, that’s enough for the hard stuff. I just have one more confession: I am writing this in class. Yeah, you caught me. The good news is, my teacher never will. This woman is crazy and I don’t know why I took her again. She is, in fact, the same teacher I described in my last blog as looking and acting almost as nice as a dragon. I had her last semester for Honors English 103. We called it Death 103. I don’t know what tempted me to take “Jane Austen and Her Life” for J-term after Death 103, but here I am, learning about Emma and family relationships during the 18^th and 19^th century. Did you know that birth control spread through Europe from France? The first good form, that is. Yeah, every now and then I tune in.

Well, I have nightly study questions, another oral report, a report on every movie we’ve watched, an epistolary essay, a weekly quiz, and a final exam to do and prepare for. J-term is so easy.

Also available from Amy Faulkner

That One A.M Feeling

Hi My Name is Amy

Also available from 10:31 Life Ministries 

A Chosen Generation (1 Peter 2:9): Called Beyond Societies Standards by Angel Edwards

College Commitment: The Toughest Test By David Faulkner

The Truth: Why Love the Word?  by Jonathan Faulkner

To Contact 10:31 Life Ministries like us on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/1031ministries

Or email us at: hi1031.ministries@yahoo.com

That One A.M Feeling

By Amy Joy Faulkner

It’s almost one a.m. I am sitting in the kitchen. I want to make brownies, but my friend is being a jerk and won’t let me borrow her stuff because she wants to sleep. Whatever. I should be working on my English paper, which is due tomorrow (actually, today), but instead I’m writing this. Who knows, maybe it will get my creative juices flowing… My fingers are crossed.

College is no easy feat. I guess I was under the impression that it wasn’t as hard as it had always looked because somehow my sister and brother don’t or didn’t complain about it too much, but I was wrong. I was also told, when my oldest sister Tierzah started looking for a college (6 years ago now), that just because I was going to a Christian college didn’t mean that everyone here would be a Christian or even a good person. Obviously not, since I’m here, but I had still convinced myself that this place would be different. It’s amazing how small I can make my mind sometimes.

Let me start at the beginning, a very good place to start. Orientation was like a summer camp and although the activities were lots of fun and I met a lot of my (then) future friends, I still just wanted to chill and sleep a lot of the time. Now I wish I could go back to that weekend and actually pay attention to all of the people I met and the behavior I saw so that I can look less like an idiot and make a better impression on the people who are now my friends. Oh well, they must love me anyway.

When my brother asked me to write this blog, completely out of the blue, I was baffled. I’d never done anything like it before or even know how to blog, but I never foresaw the biggest issue that I’m having with it: time. Doesn’t the fact that I’m writing this with three minutes left of midnight pretty much sum that up? And I’m not even taking any really hard classes, unlike my roommate.

About my roommate, she is incredible. We emailed a lot over the summer, but obviously since I’m from Ohio and she’s from North Carolina, we didn’t get a chance to meet until move in day. However, it didn’t take us long to figure out that we are perfect for each other. We like quiet, we don’t party, we do our work before the night before it’s due (until now), we’re both neat freaks who clean on the weekend and never leave our clothes lying around, and we both like to sleep. A lot of the other girls have had problems with their roommates, but I couldn’t be happier with mine. I only hope she feels the same way.

I’m trying to get my core subjects out of the way as fast as I possibly can. Obviously, that’s what every college freshman wants to do, especially when they know what they want to major in, because core subjects suck. I’m taking statistics, which is pretty easy, only two days a week, but still stressful before a test. Old Testament which is mostly taking notes, memorizing them all, then spewing it out in one of those accursed little blue books with a few deep thoughts added now and then. Honors English which is taught by a charming lady who looks a little prettier than a dragon and is almost as kind if you get on her bad side, which I have not, and finally seminar. Every freshman has to take a semester of seminar of which there are eight choices. I ended up getting my first choice, The Chronicles of Narnia. The class is a breeze, but it still sucks. It’s busy work that doesn’t challenge any part of the mind. It’s enough to make any self-respecting French-English major want to stick their head in the oven. Yeah, life is rough.

We hardly have any homework though, except in English. Most nights we just have to read a work of literature that she gives us and either answer the questions given to us or make up three of our own and answer them. This is much harder than it sounds, though, and usually only takes up to two hours. Unfortunately for us, she also expected us to read Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd in a couple of days and now we have to write a paper about it, one that I am having immense difficulty with, probably because I’m so used to the journaling style. Like this. We also have a research assignment due in that class on a novel that we have to read, mine being My Antonia, which I have never read and an oral report. Mine is on The Secret Garden which I have also never read all the way through.

Despite all this (which really isn’t that much) I spend a remarkable amount of time developing a social life. My first weekend was insane and I ended up staying up until three am and missing my nine am Old Testament class. My first Monday of class, and I missed it. However, that weekend I met some amazing people who are now my very close friends. I’ve developed a liking for pool as well, often being challenged by some of my new friends from a different group, and discovered that video games are not all bad, as long as it’s MarioKart. Among other crazy, stupid things I’ve done here, I’ve fallen over a couch onto thinly carpeted concrete floor and gave myself a minor concussion, stayed out until 11, drunk with sleep deprivation, playing truth or dare and proposing to a guy, I’ve gotten so sick that I couldn’t leave the room, and tonight I went to a concert near Clempson. I have an English paper due in about 10 hours, a class in 8 hours, I had a math test today, and I went to a concert tonight. But, you see, I had to, because Superchick was playing. Don’t judge me.

Now, if you’ll please excuse me for imparting no new information, my horrible grammatical issues that any decent English major would cry over, and my abrupt ending, I have a paper to write.

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Contact 10:31 Life Ministries at hi1031.ministries@yahoo.com

Hi! My name is Amy!

Although I was born in New York, I was raised in a college town in Ohio. We moved when I was only one year old after my dad was offered a position in a small country church. We lived in a small town fifteen minutes away from the center of a college town. A very liberal college town. A very loud, liberal college town that was recently awarded the position of number one party school in America. Good for them. But all this means for me is that I get to say I was raised in a college town, because Athens is where everything went on. Even though I lived fifteen minutes away, there was never a week that we didn’t foray into the larger town at least once, but usually more, for shopping, recreation, or food. It was the center of social life in that part of Athens County.

                So my life always bumped into or around the college. Most children in the area were enrolled in Kids on Campus, a kind of summer day camp for young kids to walk around campus during a day packed full of exciting and rowdy pursuits. Me and my three siblings were a part of that for a few years each. Then when my dad lost his job as a pastor, a job that had seemed steady enough at first that we felt secure enough to build a home, he enrolled in the college for his PhD in History. After that I spent hours of my childhood in the car with my mom, driving circles around the buildings that he had classes in, so we could pick him up. (My father is legally blind and can’t drive.) Sometimes, if our family schedule was too screwed up, I even got to go to classes with him. I’ve been attending college since I was 9! Off and on, that is.

                When I was a freshman in high school, my sister was a freshman in college. I missed my first two days of high school so I could help her unpack her life into the tiny space that colleges privilege us poor, busy young scholars. College did not appeal to me, and at this point I was still telling my parents that I wouldn’t be going. Of course, my older sister liked it right away. She loved Houghton, a tiny Christian college in a tiny town in north western New York, nine hours from home. As for me, we became closer once she was gone, and she helped me mature.

                When I started my junior year of high school, my brother began his freshman year of college in a different small town, seventeen hours away from home in the center of Kansas at our mother’s alma mater. By this point I was beginning to grow up, was going to college, loved baking and speaking French, and intended to major in business and then take two years of culinary school so that I could cook on a full time basis. I also started visiting colleges myself, including Indiana Wesleyan, my sister’s college Houghton, Colorado Christian University (my first time in a plane) and another tiny college, this time in South Carolina. When I helped mother take Jon to school for his sophomore year, I also got to see a little bit of his school, Sterling, and older sister Tierzah invited me to spend spring break with her in Houghton, which I happily did. Jonathan and I grew apart during this time.

                Finally, it was truly my turn. It was time to pick the right college for me. I turned down Indiana Wesleyan as soon as I left the campus. It was too busy and just a little bit too much for me. I loved Colorado Christian, but it didn’t have my new and improved major, French. Sterling didn’t have French as a major either, and I didn’t like the campus much. I already loved Houghton, probably based on all the time I spent there and how well I got to know my sister’s friends, and I was impressed with Erskine, the college in South Carolina. Both had my major, and Erskine had the added appeal of being closer to a warm part of the ocean, a cool winter, and lots of family close by, including an aunt uncle, and several cousins that I couldn’t remember meeting before. Erskine also had a major turn-off for me, though – the accents. Everyone said ‘y’all’ all the time. ‘y’all’ isn’t even a word! It annoyed me, and I was worried that if I went there I’d come back saying it. Oh, the horror!

                Are you ready to hear about my decision? This is the college that I will be writing about for the next four years, so are you ready? Well, I was leaning heavily towards Houghton, and I knew that the choice was between it and Erskine, but something just didn’t feel right, so I hadn’t announced my choice yet. Christmas came and so did a mailbox full of Christmas letters. One was from my cousin who lives down here and was about her family. I chose Erskine in that moment. Maybe it was impulsive and maybe I chose it for all the wrong reasons, but just then I felt such a huge weight lift from my shoulders. I sit here now in my dorm room and wonder if I would be as happy as I am now if I had chosen Houghton. But that is a story for another day. Today is the Introduction.

                I chose Erskine. I told my parents, my whole family, and the college. A lot of people said that they felt it was the right decision on my part, making me roll my eyes and wonder how they would know something like that. I started the scholarship process and we started financial aid. Then toward the end of my senior year, after I got back from spring break in France, my father told me that Houghton was cheaper and I would probably have to go there anyway. A couple thousand dollars makes all the difference when two children are in college and on is in seminary. (My sister graduated from Houghton with a degree in Psychology and is attending Gordon Conwell seminary, my dad’s seminary, for her master’s.) I stressed for a few days on this, knowing that my mom would want to let me go wherever I wanted and wherever would make me happy, and my dad would choose whichever was cheapest and I’d have no choice. Finally, I got the financial aid packages from both colleges. Erskine’s was better, and made up for the extra cost. I was set, going to Erskine to major in French.

                Here was my plan: get a bachelors in French then go back home to get my masters at OU, the college a few minutes from home, because it was cheaper, and also get a degree in Teaching English to Foreign Students Abroad. I want to teach English to students in France, but now I am looking at a double major in French and English. 0.o

And so I sit here happily in my dorm, full of coffee and ready to thoroughly enjoy a beautiful day. The weather here is gorgeous, if a little more hot than what I’m used to. I’ve made a few friends, though most of them are at home right now for the weekend, everyone but my roommate, who is amazing. I survived the first full week of classes, and learned the true importance of an alarm clock. I’ve said y’all a few times but generally avoid it and haven’t developed an accent. I hope. I have been terrified to move in my super high lofted bed, and gotten used to it. I have done my laundry a few times now, always lucky enough to find an empty washer or dryer. I even wash my dishes and take out the trash sometimes. All of this on top of homework? College can’t be that hard!

….

To be continued…