decisions, decisions

Today I officially signed up for next semester's classes. I had a good meeting with my advisor, and he helped me make a couple of wiser decisions with regards to workload and difficult/time-consuming classes. I'll have him next fall for Computer Architecture, which should be a blast. Yes, a bit of fearful sarcasm should be detected.

The longer I am at school, the faster the semesters seem to go by.

It's good in some ways, because the sooner it's over with, the sooner "real life" starts. However not-fun people may say that is, I am looking forward to it.

But, that also means finals come quicker and really, I'm thinking "Hey, we just started this class and now I actually have to learn it for the test?" Double-edge swords everywhere!

I think if I sat down and thought about it, most things in life have an upside and a downside. I love cake, but it makes me fat. I love surfing the internet randomly, but it wastes productive time doing other, more meaningful things. I love What Not To Wear, but it makes me seem a bit...effeminate. I think inside, when we decide what we want to do, we weigh the choices of the benefits of the upside vs. the costs of the downside, and if the upside wins, we do it. If our brains made this quick calculation so informatively, how come we always end up making unwise decisions?

I'd say out of 10 choices in a given day, I'll make 7 bad calls. I'll make someone upset with one too many put-downs, I'll spend one too many hours on the internet or gaming and have to stay up late doing work.

Obviously if my brain would have decided that sleep was more important than the internet, would it have decided to go to sleep? Does that mean my priorities are messed up, or does it mean that my brain doesn't make decisions that way? I think its a combination of both, but not necessarily in an obvious way.

I think my priorities of activities are just fine. I know sleep is important. I think that making wise choices is not a priority to me. I let myself go on autopilot and don't actually make that benefit-cost analysis with regards to what would be best for me, my friends and family, my well being, my past, and my future plans. So, making the decisions is the problem. We need to make the decisions instead of just letting the decisions make us.