There’s one in every group. She is generally found with an agenda in one hand, a venti coffee in the other, and a mood directly proportional to the current number of checkmarks on her to-do list. She’s the one who always, without fail, makes reservations at restaurants. She makes pro and con lists for every decision, ranging from break ups with boyfriends to deciding whether she should buy that dress in peacock blue or ultra teal. She has even been known to have mild panic attacks about graduate school during the summer before her undergraduate freshman year.
Yeah. I’m that kid. I’m a planner.
Telling me to “just sit back and let whatever will happen, happen,” would be like telling an arachnophobic child to just sit back and hope the spider he saw in his bed doesn’t strike in the night.
My general philosophy is: If there’s something I can do right here in the present to prevent issues later, then you can bet that that’s exactly what I’ll do.
I don’t believe in damage control-just damage prevention.
So now, a goldmine of planning is staring me in the face. But while I prepare to leave to study abroad in Rome next month, the part of my summer that hasn’t been spent interning, working or learning, has been devoted to the computer-more specifically, to Facebook.
In other words, a month and a half out, I’ve done almost no planning for my move to Italy, unless you count naming my new MacBook, Fabio.
Yet, while the planner in me is having hissy fits because I haven’t figured out where I’m going to travel every weekend-and whether I have a large enough suitcase for my shoe collection; another part of me feels uncharacteristically cavalier about the fact that I haven’t thought out every step I’ll take from Aug. 26 to Dec. 22.
And that’s despite the fact that I’ll be living in a country with a language in which I consistently mix up the words for “peach” and “fish.”
I’ve been breaking my life into 15-minute increments with daily to-do lists for at least the last 13,287 15-minute increments. At long last, some rebellious part of me that I never knew existed is finally showing signs of resisting the opportunity to ruin my study-abroad experience by planning out every day and weekend travel trip within an inch of its life.
After all, how will I have any European adventures if I don’t sit back and let the experience take me where I-OK, Rick Steves-could never have planned that it would?
How will I capture any pictures other than the typical “Here I am in front of the Trevi Fountain/Colosseum/insert monument here” if my camera only follows the comfortable pace of my tour guide? How will my friends and I ever come up with new inside jokes if I actually review my Italian, thereby destroying my chance of getting the surprise of my life when I try to order fresh fruit in a trattoria somewhere?
There are simply so many things that could go spectacularly wrong, yet I think that that is exactly what makes the prospect of studying abroad so exhilarating. For once in my life, my only plan is to make mistakes, get lost, waste time and speak improperly, and I’m going to eat all the tiramis? I possibly can while doing it.
Others may disagree, but all I know is that the last thing I want to do is return from my semester abroad saying, “Well that went exactly as planned.”
Kat Patke is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences, studying abroad in Rome, Italy.
