I have always been told that giving up is a bad thing…unless, of course, it happens to fall in between late February and early April.
That's right- with this past Wednesday, the season of lent has begun. One of a variety related to new beginnings, lent has always been one of my favorite markers of progress. It, like New Years Eve, is a time to asses where you are in relation to where you want to be.
There are a lot of rules about Lent of which I am not exactly sure…having not attended CCD since i was 15 or 16, the details are fuzzy. I know you aren't supposed to eat meat on Ash Wednesday (or the Friday after, which I'm pretty sure also has a name). You aren't supposed to have sex on Good Friday. And my CCD teachers always used to tell us to wear a cross all through until Easter, so that we would feel more guilty if we broke whatever it was we had promised.
The one thing I am sure of though, is that Lent is about giving something up.
After a few failed attempts to give up the same thing in high school, I started going with a slightly less conventional approach. For the past 5 or 6 years, I've started giving up more than one thing, mainly because long ago, I gave up on the fact that I could be very sure in February of what I would or wouldn't need to get me through March. Yes, I am a woman of many vices.
Making a mental list, each Ash Wednesday of four or five things I wanted to rid myself of, by the time I got to Easter Sunday, I could be sure to have at least one that I had successfully exiled from my bank of bad habits, so to speak.
The hardest for me is usually diet pepsi. Followed by doritoes and cream cheese (yes, American through and through). But my junior and senior years of high school, those were easy…minus the caffeine headaches (which I now could have easily put to rest with a few cups of coffee)
My favorite (or most effective, really) part of lent, though, is usually to give up something emotional. My freshman year, my boyfriends late night phone calls on weekends only made me feel horrible, so I gave up answering the phone after midnight. In high school, I gave up the internet after 1am, because the conversations i had at that hour were never anything good for me.
Drinking is something I've always thought of giving up- effectively giving up bad judgement- but the problem there is that Spring Break always happens to fall in March, and even my senior year of high school, when drinking consisted of little stronger than Smirnof Ice, the only "bad judgement" would have been going into Senor Frogs in the Bahamas sober.
Anyway, this year, after careful consideration, I've come up with a short list of things to rid myself of. Cursing is one of them. This, I've learned, gets difficult when I am drinking- so taking advice from an old CCD teacher, I now sport a cross most of the time, with the hope that it will help me remember (even through the haze of a Saturday night at The Moose).
I also intended on giving up lying, but that was quickly thrown to the wind after I had to cover up for a friend the other day. And tell a professor that my "older brother" was getting married on Saturday, making it imperative that I miss the midterm scheduled for 3pm that day.
I have also effectively broken that one multiple times this week via what I am going to be doing tomorrow- but all with the best of intentions. I am not very good at things like this, as usually when I am excited about something, I immediately tell everyone I know. I've been very good this time though- so... that's all I am going to say for now
In the spirit of speaking the absolute truth: I cannot WAIT for tomorrow.
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