When your life needs pizazz, just take flight

Last week my life hit the wall it hits yearly just before Spring Quarter ends. It’s the point when I can’t stand my classes, I can’t stand the bipolar weather, I can’t stand Clarke’s (and that’s saying something) and I realize I can’t stand myself.

OK, not really. I’m still fabulous. But when I look at how I’ve behaved in a number of situations this year, I literally shudder to remember that was me. I know I’ll finish the year decently, but I know I’ve neglected house plants and people and myself like it’s my job. It’s a state of behavior in which stupidity and anxiety rule supreme over logic and caring — and it sucks.

Worse than being in that state is the realization that you’ve been en vacance on its beaches for weeks or months.

We just get too used to life: our daily routines and our daily places, our mean jokes and underhanded jabs. We stop paying attention to what it all does to ourselves and to each other.

I know, not uplifting, not funny — isn’t this girl supposed to be the fluffy one? Yes, but I feel like a lot of us do this: We end unhappy, we close out the year saying, “Get me out!” instead of hugging our friends and being thankful. Not that those brothers from Oasis are the most mentally reliable, but “don’t look back in anger” is excellent advice.

And of course I’m not saying that we all secretly hate each other or that we go stomping on one another’s dreams on a daily, very sarcastic basis. I just think we need to take a minute to stop and admire ourselves, each other and even our house plants every once in a while — before this nastiness takes over and we get to the point of the year when we can’t stand the sight of purple, of Sheridan Road, of our friends or of ourselves.

So I’m on my escape as I write this, a short jaunt to Manhattan. By the time you read this on Monday, I will have missed six different on-campus performances featuring my friends that I otherwise would have packed chaotically into my weekend.

I will have ignored most of my homework (not such a change) in favor of reading the June issue of Vogue, this week’s New Yorker and my “Assassins” Playbill. I will, in short, be refreshed.

And still, having only been out of Evanston for only a matter of hours, I know I’ll be humming “My Kind of Town” when I approach O’Hare on Monday. I always do, because Chicago is.

I just needed to get out for a few days, out of Chicago and Evanston, even out of my little, recently re-painted apartment. It’s not that I don’t love it all — it just sours every spring.

All the different parts of my life boil over onto the sidewalk, and I realize that rather than stepping on it or over it and moving on down the block, I need to salvage it and get it back in the pot at a nice simmer. I did that this weekend.

So take your last three weeks of spring by storm. Read Vogue. Water the plants. Call your crazy mom. Hug your friends. Hell, get a B or two.

It’ll feel good.