Ok, so its been a while, so bear with me 
Since the last post that I wrote during the middle of exam weeks a lot has been going on. Exams went well and results were a pleasant surprise. Holidays then came along, and for the first time in a couple of years I actually found time to relax and chill out in them! What is annoying about the june/july holidays normally is that exams have just finished, and then a week and a bit later results come out. Then before you know it, course selection and timetable signing up is upon you. In between all of that you try and relax. This year I blocked it all out and had a very enjoyable couple of weeks off. The weather wasn’t great up the coast, so little fishing and no surfing happened. Strangely this didn’t worry me though. It was the act of being away from home for a week and just chilling out that really helped me to focus on having a good time.
After that week up the coast, the holidays seemed to be long enough, but blurred slightly. It’s a weird feeling when time just seems to roll along and you do lots of things, but not much registers. It’s not that time passed exceedingly quickly, it was the fact that nothing really of note stuck out (well there was one event ). So the holidays came to a very enjoyable ending (not that I wanted them to end, it was things that happened near the end that were enjoyable). And reluctantly I started my final semester in science at UQ. It was slightly annoying that course choices are kind of crap bad in second semester of 3rd year, but oh well, I still got some that were interesting at least. Having your friends do very similar courses is a massive advantage at uni. Not only can you do group assignments together, but you can also confer within lectures and tutorials etc. If anyone is entering uni and has no one that they know around, just be friendly and reach out, generally you’ll start to find people that have similar interests and it’ll make the experience sooo much easier.
So if you follow me on twitter (twitter.com/nelpix) you may have noticed that I have been going through some interesting times as of late. In my everyday life with uni and photography I am constantly thinking through everything to make sure nothing is missed or completed incorrectly, so when this certain situation started to arise, I had to change tact quite quickly. There is someone that I go to uni with that, to put it in the words of one of my long time friends, “I am courting”. What is interesting for me is that I have never actually had a personal relationship with a female friend. So it was for me an intrepid journey of new experiences. It is a type of situation that requires me to turn off that part of my brain that constantly and overly analyses everything. In everyday life I would consider myself a confident person, but when it comes to certain things like wording of messages and the right thing to say I start to doubt myself. For me this is weird. I don’t mind sticking my neck out for a lot of experiences as the first person, but for this situation where I want something to work, I’m so reluctant to just jump in and be spontaneous. I think the main reason that I feel this way is that it is such a new thing for me. Sure there have been people in the past of the opposite sex that I have liked, but never to the point that I’ve wanted to ask out. For this reason I ask advice of some of my closest friends/relatives. To me it’s all fascinating. It is likely the analytical scientist inside me buzzing with ideas and thoughts about what to do next as so much information on the topic is gained.
It has certainly been a little while in the making, as messages flew back and forth, coffee meet ups were set and then had to be postponed, but eventually it has got to the point where I just need to ask her out. So right now that is what I am working towards. We are good friends, and have been for a year and a bit now, but I want to find out if it can go to the next level. With the variety of ways that people can contact each other nowadays it is so easy to come off too keen; and when you have heaps of spare time it is so hard to just put down the phone, close facebook or any other networking site, and just be patient. Patience is just so important, but then you start to wonder, how long is too long? This is when my brain starts to really act up….
Word choice for me is a big thing. What to say and when to say it. This is a hurdle that I run into as part of this situation as I will over analyse what I plan to say. When I send a message I will always read over it half a dozen times just to make sure that it says what i want it to… Dam it is infuriating! For me it is like a type of OCD. I find the same thing when I am handing in an assignment at uni. I will get to the chute to drop it in, and although I have checked it through quite a few times, I will still flick through it once or twice to make sure that everything is in the right place. That’s just me I suppose. So when it comes to chatting I just need to get the analytical foot out of my mouth and say what comes to my mind. All the time I make sure that I don’t anger people talking to them. I am a listener, and will happily absorb all that someone says and be happy to provide minimal input, that’s just who I am. But in this new type of situation I just think that I become too analytical and worried to a certain extent. See I want this to work, but I want to say the right words to get the ball rolling at the same time. Make that step beyond just good friends
Coffee is on for tomorrow, which is good, but I need to be able to communicate the words that get across the message that I want to try moving to the next level. Arrghhh! To put it bluntly, ask her out face to face. Often I’ll just get caught up in conversation or start talking about something else, and then we’ll have a lecture or something else, and I’ll be left pondering what I could have or said or done. So for tomorrow I want to try putting my thoughts into words. No longer just dancing around the fact, and being just good friends. I want to test the waters and see what happens, either way.
If you’ve read this far, then I have to congratulate you. For me this was kind of a ‘get everything off your chest’ session, and hopefully it provided some insight to people out there as to how the human brain reacts in such a situation.
For those interested, I have been accepted within the pool of applicants for medicine at UQ in 2010, and will receive offers on August 11. I’ll let you all know how I go. Fingers crossed.
I promise to update this very soon, perhaps in regards to this certain situation that I have outlined above, or maybe something entirely different…
Chat with you all soon! Comments welcome
Nelson
