TYOT and Other Various Random Doings

I’ve never really been known for my spontaneity.

At least, I don’t think so, seeing as I’m not a really spontaneous person. Maybe I do things without any real warning or whatever but generally it’s not who I am. I like to mull over situations for a while and weigh my options and then, usually, make excuses as to not do whatever it is that I’ve been thinking about. Doing things is hard.

But recently I’ve decided that I just need to start doing things. So maybe the idea of doing things spontaneously was not a spontaneous decision, but whatever. I’m getting off track.

I’ve decided that Tuesday, when my house schedule works out, will now be dubbed TYOT. AKA Treat YOself Tuesday.

This past Tuesday I took myself to the movies. We live right by the coolest theater in the world and on Tuesday, tickets are only five dollars, and I wanted to just do something by myself. When I was in college I had to eat a lot of meals by myself, but that was more due to the fact that no one ever had free schedules to eat food with me and my group of friends was limited. This was an intentional choice, me taking myself out on a date, and it was great.

There’s something incredibly freeing about going to the movies by yourself. For reference, I saw Thor: Ragnarok, which was totally worth it and very funny. At the end of the movie there was no pressure for me to turn to whoever I was sitting with and ask how they thought, there was no need for the conversation of which scenes were the best, about what could be done different, etc etc etc. It was just me and my thoughts and my walk back home. It was nice.

Ideally I’ll start doing lots of things like that on my own, like meals or walks or something, but we’ll start small. Previously I have gone thrift shopping on my own a few times (and, I must admit that I broke my previous decision of only buying clothes from thrift shops during this year (Target was having a sale and I’m weak)) which has been nice but I still want a little bit of something more.

On Thursday my placement went out for drinks to celebrate a guy who’s leaving (and before I am scolded, we didn’t have work Friday, so Thursday night drinks are totally allowed) which was a lot of fun! But afterwards, me and a couple of co-workers hopped on BART and rode the train up two stops so we could visit another bar, to see another co-worker and her band play. The rest of the night was also pretty random. We’d walk the streets and see somewhere to stop for food, so we’d swing in for pizza, and then we’d walk some more, pretending like we were going to the train, only to end up in another bar so we could dance.

There weren’t any expectations to the night. We’d just go where our feet would carry us without any real plans in mind, and that was the best.

Expectations, I feel, are something that ruin a lot of things.

Following the theme of spontaneity, me and my two co-workers who I’d been wandering around San Francisco with, decided we wanted to go hiking on Saturday. None of us are very good with logistics.

I ended up leaving my wallet at home, Nico got on the wrong train, and the bus schedule was totally screwed up because a street was closed. At first, because it wasn’t really planned out, I was worried that it wasn’t going to be great. But the whole time we were on the bus (which was a pretty long time) we kept saying, “It’s not about the destination, it’s the journey!”

Which is cliche, but true.

The three of us, me Nico and Maria, went to Lands End, and I fell in love with the west coast all over again.

We listened to the waves crashing against the rocks and we took an absurd amount of photos and the three of us talked about life for the entire day. We hiked down and we hiked up and we stopped at every bench possible because some of us weren’t made for hiking no matter how beautiful the weather was.

Afterwards we found a place for food, where we sat around for an hour talking about life some more, and then we went to Nico’s house and continued to talk about life some more, and then I went home.

Nothing about the day was planned, and yet everything fell into place.

I’m not naive enough to think that life will always turn out that way. Sometimes things need planning. But I’m learning that you don’t have to schedule everything out to still have a good time. While I’m not always a spontaneous person, I’ve always been pretty adaptable, and that was what I needed. A weekend of just doing whatever it was that our feet led us to.

Once I got home, me and Carly walked down the street to the piano karaoke bar where we drank cider and listened to people sing old songs we didn’t know the words to. On the way back we sang Part of Your World, just the two of us, because the bar didn’t have it on their list of songs.

Opportunities aren’t always going to step up and present themselves to you, and when they do if you sit around for forever thinking about it then you won’t get anywhere. So take yourself on a date, and go into the random bar that had some fun dance music, and sing Disney songs on the walk home. You never know what it’ll be unless you give it a shot.