Lessons Learned From My Week of Being Early

Or things I have reflected on but probably won't integrate into my life even though they are brilliant ideas, mostly because I am stubborn and not so smart.

Lesson One. I learned that just because it takes me fifteen minutes to drive somewhere, it doesn't mean that I should leave fifteen minutes before the start of the event. This is profound, so I am going to repeat it, just for good measure. Maybe I'll write it on my bathroom mirror or my hand or something:

Just because it takes me fifteen minutes to drive somewhere, it doesn't mean that I should leave fifteen minutes before the start of the event.

This is somethineg they call "planning". Sometimes I need to park my car, sometimes I can't find a place to park my car, sometimes I have to get gas, sometimes there is an accident blocking three lanes of the highway, sometimes aliens suddenly take over the city and set up toll roads that only collect their form of currency, the urple, and you have to allow time to find a place that will exchange the dollar for the urple so you can get through their alien toll plaza and across East Washington Avenue. All of these things take time, and building in a few extra minutes for things like this is a really, really good idea. For instance, I can't think of a single place on the East side of Madison that does urple-to-dollar exchanges. It might require driving to the far West side of town.

Lesson Two. When I leave with what I used to think of as "too much" time (which I found out recently was actually just "enough" time) I yell at other drivers a lot less. I am less inclined to swear or get angry at the other drivers on the road because why the hell are they driving so slowly and can't they get out of the way class starts in four minutes and I am still ten miles away from campus and OH MY GOD IF I AM LATE IT IS ALL THEIR FAULT.

Lesson Three. I suck at this being early thing.

Lesson Four. Despite sucking at it, I like this being early thing. If for no other reason than to shock the hell out of my friends and family.

Lesson Five. I don't actually have a lesson five. I thought I should have five lessons because five is a good number and lots of lists have five things, or three or ten, and few lists have four or six and I didn't want it to seem like I just didn't have enough ideas to get me to the next increment in list properness. But four is all I have, and really I am not sure I have a solid four, maybe more like two and half, but you can't say that you learned two-and-a-half lessons from something, because who would take you seriously?

Seriously.