Ever get the feeling that things are just unnecessarily hard? That’s how I feel most of the time these days. Sometimes, like tonight, when I get interested by some magazine that I’m reading or motivated by some people I see I say to myself, “I can be like that, too. I’m going to be like that.” But this happens rarely. Most of time, I just feel like I’m floating from day to day not really sure what I’m doing, how I should be doing it, and where to find inspiration.

So … I guess I shouldn’t say things aren’t working out, but rather that things could be better. Maybe it’s first semester blues. New place, new people, and mostly new people who are more convinced of their abilities than I could ever be. I read an article tonight about women in academia, how the major obstacles for women that steer them away from faculty positions are work-life balance and SELF-ESTEEM. There was some survey where first year MIT students were asked to rate where they thought they fit in with other first year students across the country. About 50% of the men rated themselves top 10%, whereas only about 10% women rated themselves top 10%. Maybe that’s just a fundamental problem between men and women. I already know that guys were unreasonably arrogant, I didn’t need a survey to tell me so. However, maybe that innate arrogance gets men further because they feel like they can do it, even when in actuality they can’t.

Working out or not, I cleaned my room today. It made me feel a lot better. I’m not a messy person by nature; I’m just lazy. I like having things in order, paper categorized, filed away, clothes hung, laundry basket empty … So I did all of that except the last one, and that will be the task for the rest of this long weekend: do laundry.