With graduation in sight now, don’t panic

The fall semester flew by, and I'm 14 credit hours smarter, 148 down — 17 more to go.

As I check my list of classes off there is most certainly a sense of accomplishment but there is also a looming doom that I feel creeping up on me … it's impossible to now ignore. This cloud of death, as I will forevermore refer to it as, is what happens when you get a degree and actually join the … dare I utter the word … workforce. (Please interject scary music here.)

I wasn't planning on this part. I didn't really think I would graduate. I thought (think) an asteroid would (will) hit the earth three days before my last final or global warming would have caused our low-lying peninsula to be underwater by now. Because I'm a Florida native I couldn't attend a university outside of the Atlantic Ocean, as I would have to pay those prohibitive out of state fees.

I don't think it's the "working for a living" part that scares me. I've always daydreamed about contributing to society, as opposed to leeching it, and in my dreams it seems really fun.

I think it's just the impending change in my routine and surroundings that makes me feel like the grim reaper is standing just behind me, wearing a white collar and holding a Starbucks venti quad-shot skinny cappuccino (macchiato style), tapping me on the shoulder because he wants to show me his shiny new metal business card holder.

Change is not something I'm comfortable with; I was painfully reminded of this over the summer when my car decided to turn off in the middle of Alafaya Trail.

Sure, it needed a lot repaired and I knew I needed to get a new one, but I think I would have actually preferred to just cut a hole in the bottom of mine and power it with my feet like Fred Flintstone as opposed to facing the change involved in buying a new car.

Not to mention that mine was my friend, and I never betray friends! But I had no choice; I had to get a new one, so I (as I so effectively do when forced) justified my betrayal.

Last semester my classmates and I read a bestseller on how one should deal with change, "Who moved my cheese?"

This is a story about two mice and two shrunken people, or maybe they were born that way, who knows, they didn't go into the details of why or how two 3-inch humans were inside of a mini-labyrinth competing against rodents.

That sounds like the more interesting story to me, but hey, I'm not the author.

The mice in the maze immediately adapted when their cheese was moved, one tiny person hesitated, and the other...well...they implied that it died. I think they refrained from saying it directly for the sake of the children that were reading it, because I'm sure more than one grandmother mistaking thought it to be a book for 7 to 11-year-olds.

This morbid implication was made after portraying it throughout the entire book in a negative light—something that I never like to every fault there is a virtue equally intertwined. The "bad guy," in reality, is never all bad. There are benefits of being reluctant in the face of change, actually more benefits than not.

Not only is it the momentum that keeps you on your chosen path but it's this stick-to-it-iveness that shows you are convicted in your initial decisions.

If one completely and without hesitation embraced all change he would not be the human equivalent of a proficient mouse in search of new found cheese, but of a lifeless sewer rat that's fallen into a storm drain and is now being washed out into the ocean, going where ever the current should feel inclined to take him, stagnant though always moving, directionless though appearing to be on it's way, seemingly free though desiring resistance.

Even if it did resemble the primordial talents of a mouse, they can't fool me into thinking that behaving like a food deprived lab animal is, under any circumstances, a good or  admirable thing. I'm much too much of a lady for such a metaphor.