Today is my sister’s 20th birthday. I wasn’t home this morning to be the first person to wish her the happiest of all her birthdays. On a rare occassion, I do in fact make conscious decisions, and after struggling for the past week to wake up in time to catch the bus in order to make it into lab before 8 am, I decided to sleep over my boyfriend’s house (a 5 min walk to Razran).

For a year and a half now, I have spent the majority of my life on the QC campus, 7am to 9pm, with no breaks, it seems, while the other parts of my life suffered. I live in the same house with my sister but I barely ever see her. Nietehr of us are home for dinner (she is a nursing student at Hunter), the one part of the day that we use to expect to see our family.

In fact, this is something that remains true for others that I once was surrounded by 24/7. Seeing my cousin (also named Zoe), someone I consider an older sister, needs to be a planned event, one that usually requires time in advance to find a workable date. It is crazy how conscious I have learned to become about keeping friends and family around when it was once something that occured so naturally. Within the past two years, sporadically, less-busy days would pop up that allowed me to venture out of my study/work hole,  usually only to find that I havent seen most of those I love in months. Lets take a pair of my oldest friends Gill and Sassy (both go away to school) who I have not been in the habit of calling since they left Queens, and Nik, an architecture student at NYIT, who I haven’t seen in a year.

I suppose the lesson I am in the process of learning is to be careful to not lose those who are most importnat, a mini-lesson within learning to BALANCE. or finding equilibrium? These are skills my father consistantly kept warning me to master; he started young, while I was still in grade school (he is wiser than I could ever have imagined).

Although I am getting much better at “doing it all”, there is definately a whole lot of room for improvement. Checkout my INC filled transcript. Even so, I refuse to believe that a successful education can only happens at the expense of a social life, although that seems to have been the case for me thus far. It is not healthy. Nothing in extremity is healthy.

I can’t wait to start my yoga class again. That is one treat for my mind and body that I understood quickly will help me to find balance. Vrksasana!