How to Lose Your Mind in 30 Days

Who takes double the usual university credit load, holds down a job, and plays on a sports team practicing twice daily?

Who works an eight hour cafe shift followed by an eight hour bar shift every day for an entire summer?

Who covers year-long foreign travel  itineraries in 10 weeks?

Over-achieving freak-a-zoids, that’s who.  OCD control freaks who can’t turn back one they’ve set their mind  to a plan, obvious ridiculousness be damned.

Life in Pictures

Rather than a long, tedious entry (that I don’t want to write and you don’t want to read) listing all the things we crammed into September, I made you a picture:

The Best is Yet to Come

Ah, but September was just the warm up.

October we really got down to business, cramming visits to 33 friends into 37 days, spread out across a mere 6,000 km.  It looked like this:

To (insignificantly?) reduce my chances of winning the First-World-Problems Biggest Whiner Award, I will say that not for a minute do I regret getting to spend time with my family, see my fourth nephew come into the world, share my childhood home with my partner, and bask in the glow of so many of my amazing friends.  I was just in an emotional coma for most of it.

Squeezing so much in is kind of like experiencing the world through selfies… you’re there, but the quality of your connection to what’s going on around you is compromised.  I spent half my time with each friend on the phone or email making plans with upcoming friends.  And taking on an ill-advised schedule with another person certainly elevates tensions and greatly increases opportunities to disagree… all of which adds additional emotional exhaustion to inevitable physical exhaustion.

Would I do it all again?  Hell no.

Do I regret it?  Nah.

Should I have established and maintained  healthy, sane  boundaries?  Uh, probably.  Clearly, the latter is not my strong suit.  â™£

Related photos  for  your eyeballs:

• Things people see when they go to Yellowstone National Park.

• Birthdays and a birth. Plus guns, family, spelunking, and sightseeing.
  

• Two people being outside at the same time as frost, Wyoming’s top scenery.
  

• American Autumnal Activities + Outback Steakhouse.  Really.
  

• Alumni football, earnest consumption of adult beverages.
  

• What Cali’s  Trinity Mountains are like when snow keeps [most] people away.
  

• Bubblegum walls, rainbow crosswalks, Hunger Games Halloween.