Wait

...all human wisdom is summed up in these two words, - `Wait and hope.' ~Alexander Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

This has been my anthem since last Monday. (Love it. "Who I'd Be," from the same soundtrack, is also terrific.) Instead of counting the days until a prince rescues me, though, I've been counting the days until Columbia bestows upon me a "vomit-colored envelope" in the mail. But now, two weeks into my decline into admissions-induced OCD, which consisted mainly of constantly refreshing forum pages to see if other people had gotten word from Columbia yet, I've resolved to just sit back and relax. If I'm in, I'm in. If I'm not, I'm not. It's time to try this Zen thing again. I've also returned to practicing yoga; maybe that has something to do with my new attitude.

It doesn't make a difference whether other people are getting theirs or if rejection letters have started appearing. Nothing I do anymore is going to make that envelope come faster, if at all. So what's the point in obsessing? Hopefully, it'll be like they say: when you finally stop waiting for something, it'll happen. (For instance, you think I was still pestering my parents for a sibling past middle school? No.)

In any case, I have been spending a lot of my free time at work reading about Penn, and the more I learn about the school, the more I am really, really excited about it. (Plus, I've already got a Penn shirt, thanks to Jeff! I find it amusing that my university t-shirt collection has grown to three, but not one is a Penn State shirt. One that just says "Penn State," I mean, so I'm not counting the plethora of White Building and Res Life shirts crowding my drawers. I will certainly remedy this before graduation.) Columbia - and/or, of course, Stanford, to which I know I would gain admission only through a small glut of miracles and thus, on which I haven't bothered fixating nearly as much - would just be icing on the cake.

Speaking of cake... happy 7th birthday to Flip! I found a sweet Darth Vader gift bag yesterday at Toys "R" Us that was the perfect size for the game I got him. It made me very happy - and I'm sure it'll make him very happy as well. I also got to work ridiculously early today so that I could leave early and beat the snow home for his birthday weekend. I hate snow... though I grudgingly admit that the bare-branched trees that line my drive to work looked quite picturesque after the couple inches we got earlier this week. I guess I should just be thankful I don't live in D.C., where there's supposed to be a "snowpocalypse" this weekend.