Saturday, May 14, 2016

Sometimes what you discover about yourself is neither particularly new nor surprising

- and a heartfelt thank you to Bremy for being an amazing lab partner.

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I have this really bad habit of leaving things partially undone, in this sad state of 90% completion, for all eternity. Like for example, blog posts. I have no less than 4 blog post drafts that only require a final pass through, and of course, I waited until the very last day to finalize my last couple of blogs and post them. And, of course, in classic me fashion, I decided to sit down and just start a new one from scratch.

The same thing happened throughout the whole semester… I sit down and plan things out, get a ton of pieces done, and then just kind of push it aside at the final step when all the pieces just need to be glued together. Now, although technically this is something I learned about myself this semester, it’s also neither new nor surprising – my mom has been telling me this my whole life. The number of projects I’ve started only to lose interest right before completing them… It’s enough to drive just about any mother insane. So Leslie – I swear I wasn’t lying when I turned in homework late and said it was because it was almost finished just scattered in pieces through a few Word documents on my computer!

A questionably accurate representation of what Leslie saw at one point during the semester

Now, this ties in really well to another character trait that I learned some new things about – my teamwork abilities. In this case, I myself have worried on many occasions that I may never be able to be a good team player because I’ve always tended towards the alpha side in situations requiring cooperation. As you can imagine, this, when combined with the tendency for my attention to fluctuate, doesn’t make for a good teamwork situation… Enter: Bremy!

Bremy and I were both skeptical of each other, to be honest. Unlike most other groups, we just kinda… happened. I was the odd one out and he happened to join our section on the second day. But it was like a match made in lab partner heaven. While I oscillate between crazy, hyper, psycho cat thing and demure, is-she-still-alive blob, Bremy is a consistently calm, determined, motivated workhorse chugging along – so we perfectly filled in all the roles a good partnership needs. I had the excitement to get the ball rolling and brighten the day, and he could push me forward when my excitement waned. He never lost his patience when I would pull up ten different Word documents with thoughts all over the place as he pulled up one well-organized file. I never stopped annoying him with my outbursts of “Oh! I just had an idea!!” And I never tired of sighing “Bremy, let me take that paragraph and rephrase it into a sentence,” and luckily, he never had any hard feelings!

Once a high school newspaper editor, always an annoying "wait I can rephrase that" connoisseur 

So in the end, although when it came to learning about myself I didn’t discover mind-blowing new abilities or crazy hidden weaknesses, I did discover the magic of finding a work partner with whom you just… work. I definitely gained a brand-new appreciation for working with another person, something I had never been able to do well in the past, and I finally found myself being able to whole-heartedly trust the person I was working with. For once, I don't agree with these pie charts for haterz: 


20.109 - dispelling every preconception you've ever had and making you question the fabric of reality



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