30 Days to Love

Day 3: Losing Control

Shauna puts the finishing touches on her paper. She feels pretty good about it even though she wrote it in less than a day. She always has good intentions of working on an assignment weeks in advance. And each time, the good intentions fly out the window as soon as life's responsibilities pull her in multiple directions.

In this case, it helped that she spent the last two months gathering data and research for the paper and pretty much knew what she wanted to say. It doesn't excuse the procrastination, but it certainly helps to justify it. She promises herself that she will begin new assignments as soon as they are given to her from now on.

She saves the paper as a PDF and emails it off to her professor. Relief floods over her until she remembers she never studied for the philosophy quiz that she has to take in an hour. Crap!

It will take a half hour just to drive to school. That leaves her with about a minute to get ready – she throws on a clean T-shirt and jeans and puts her hair up. She'll shower after class.

She whips open her philosophy notebook and starts cramming. As it is, this course is kicking her butt. She's never been a strong writer and certainly not a great philosophizer. Life has been and will always be a mystery to her. As she reads over her notes, she realizes that the confusion she felt in class is still there. Ugh. She has a sinking feeling this course may be the end of her Summa Cum Laude dreams.

She signed up for the course to fulfill her general studies requirements. She thought it would be an interesting and easy counterbalance to all of her engineering courses. Instead, it's been even more challenging.

Her brain likes scientific facts. If an equation works, you'll get the right answer. In philosophy, how do you know if your answer is right? It's so vague. Just the philosophical idea that we may not know anything confuses the hell out of her. How is that even possible? If you know it, you know it, in her humble opinion.

At this point, all she can do is try. She's not used to just trying. She's used to knowing.

A half-hour later, Shauna packs up her books and dashes to her car. On the drive to school, she runs through everything she has studied in her philosophy class to date. Amidst the wrestling of the mystifying material, her cell phone buzzes and she notices it's James calling. If she picks it up, is she exercising free will or would her action be considered predetermined? Hmm.

She ignores the call and spends the rest of the drive formulating what that action really means in an attempt to apply a real life scenario to her bewilderment.

Once in class, she takes a deep breath and decides, it is what it is. For better or worse. Her professor passes out composition books and tells them they have the whole class period at their disposal. It's up to them if they want to use the entire time.

Two hours later, she walks outside squinting in the sunlight. She was the second to last person to hand in her quiz. Her hand aches from writing so fast and so long. Looking back, she's not even sure what she said anymore. She just hopes the composition book she filled is coherent. She fears it's just a bunch of rambling. But honestly, can anyone really define what is truth?

She feels her handbag vibrate. She reaches inside the bag and pulls out her cell phone. Two missed calls from James. No voice mail. Who doesn't leave a voice mail? As she walks to her car, she calls him back.

"Hi, it's Shauna."

"I know."

"You know my voice already?"

"I would recognize it anywhere."

She smiles, "And you have caller ID."

"You caught me."