by Kate Newman on February 1, 2012<\/p>\n
My first impression of university president Jim Danko as he addressed the sophomore class shocked me: This guy was nervous. The president! Nervous! He fiddled with his microphone, searched the audience for his wife, very similarly to all of the things I do when I give a speech in class and feel more like vomiting and running from the room than actually speaking.<\/p>\n
According to Pres. Danko, I should probably have that feeling more often. This speech is well-timed for much of the sophomore class, a time that is so often referred to as a \u201cslump\u201d that it is clich\u00e9 (and where there\u2019s smoke, there\u2019s fire with those sort of things. Love is blind! Reach for the stars! Go with your gut!)<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve found that the best way to pull myself out of a slump is to do something that gives me that first-day-of-class-introduction-speech-in-a-foreign-language wave of nausea.\u00a0 Whether it\u2019s trying hot peppers on pizza (I never looked back after that one) or diving into a new relationship (or in some cases out of an old one), the things that seem terrifying usually turn out pretty wonderfully.\u00a0 Or not. But that\u2019s part of the fun, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n
As a kid, I was as much in love with piles of mud and pill bugs as any other squirt on the playground, but my adventurous streak was more or less suffocated by my desire to be \u201cthe good one\u201d for my recently divorced parents (and, I\u2019ll admit, occasionally to see my little brother in trouble\u2014sorry Mike!). I didn\u2019t like mushrooms, didn\u2019t ride roller coasters, didn\u2019t publish my poetry under my own name in the school literary magazine.<\/p>\n
I was a chicken, and my life got pretty boring. NO MORE! I now put mushrooms in, on, or around most things I eat. I rode TWO roller coasters this summer with moderate success (thank God for Dramamine). I\u2019m still a little shy about sharing my poetry, but hey\u2014my name\u2019s on this blog, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n
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by Kate Newman on February 1, 2012 My first impression of university president Jim Danko as he addressed the sophomore class shocked me: This guy was nervous. The president! Nervous! He fiddled with his microphone, searched the audience for his wife, very similarly to all of the things I do when I give a…<\/p>\n