Yep, after a week and a half of waffling, I did it:



I sold my parking sticker back to the College. In the short term, this puts $500 immediately into my "going to China" fund.

In the long term, it's a promise to myself. Albert Einstein (I think) said something like, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result." There are a number of changes I want to make in my day-to-day life, and foregoing parking is one of the ways I'll remember to make them. Without a parking pass, I'll have to ride my bike (good for me) or ride the bus, which will require me to be intentional about my time.

And control over my time is what I most need right now. I have about 65654756765 irons in the fire, lots of which will just burn out without attention. And they're not things I have to do, exactly; they're things I want to do, but that it's all too easy to let slide once the semester's craziness starts. (How can I make myself study Chinese regularly? How can I make time to read books for pleasure?) So, being forced to think about how I'm getting to campus will, I hope, remind me to plan the rest of my time, too.

We'll see how it goes . . . stay tuned.