Crippled, Cops, and College

It took me an hour and ten minutes to drive my usual half hour drive home today. Apparently the rain has magical powers where it wipes away any memory of how driving works. But that's not what this blog post is about. This blog post is all about how crazy life can be in only a few short weeks. Let me start at the beginning: So two weeks ago on Monday, I was working at my mediocre grocery store job (I will spend plenty of time discussing that later) and I hear a truck backing up into the hub signaling me to go and unload the pallets. Now, I have been unloading trucks for months. There have been plenty of issues with the pallets being too tall or they're leaking suspicious liquids, issues that I've gotten used to. The only thing I had going for me was that I had never dumped and pallet... until now. I was creeping out of the truck when one of the wheels on my power jack got caught on the lip of the truck and next thing I know, half of my pallet is on the floor. It took three of us to clean up all the boxes and broken salsa jars. I was completely rattled by the experience and to this day I still take pallets off with high amounts of caution. Bear in mind that this is only the beginning of my story, because on Tuesday is where more obscene things occur. The next day after my pallet plunge, I walked into work and commenced the cleaning of the back storage area of the store much like any other day. The only difference was that not forty-five minutes into my shift do I accidentally roll a cart full of soda and other beverages right over my right pinky toe. I was more mad than in pain at that moment in time because I had moved those two hundred-plus pound carts hundreds of times before. My toe instantly started to swell and bruise, yet I still continued to work, hobbling from one area to the next. I think the funny part about it was that my manager had to re-watch the footage and witness me angrily fist pump the air for a good three to five minutes. I was almost certain that it was broken but due to the fact that it's a toe, the best I could do is suck it up and keep working. Two weeks later and I still have bruises on my toe and have troubles with wearing certain shoes. After an agonizingly long shift, I aggressively limp to my car and begin to drive my usual route home through the employee parking lot. I noticed a cop car hanging out in said parking lot but thought nothing of it until he proceeded to drive up real close behind me and tail me the whole way home. It wasn't until I had reached my street that he finally decided to flash his lights. He comes up to my window and tells me that I was driving "suspiciously urgent" out of the employee parking lot and that there have been a lot of break-ins occurring in that lot recently. He let me go seeing as I was doing absolutely nothing wrong but trying to go home and ice my little deformed toe. I could not believe my luck was so poor at that moment in time that I couldn't help but laugh hysterically when I told my parents about it. The next week was filled with balancing work, making sure the house didn't burn down while my parents were on vacation, and attempting to prepare myself for my first week of college. I commute to college every Tuesday and Thursday and have to drive through the heart of downtown Kansas City in order to do so. I arrived on my first day an hour and a half early and proceeded to walk around blindly in hopes of finding out where the heck my classes were. I found out that my first and last of the day is in the same room which is located right next to the parking garage which is super convenient for when I want to get out as fast as possible. I am taking eighteen credit hours and they are all crammed into nine hour days twice a week. Those two days are long and monotonous but they make having a four day weekend every week all the more rewarding. I am slowly attempting to adjust to the college life and realizing that everything is independent. Assignments aren't handed to you, you have to go onto a website, find them, learn them, and turn them in. You aren't reminded to turn something in or given any extra time to complete them. You have to make time to complete all of them or you'll fail the class, simple as that. It has become a sort of eye-opening type experience because high school was very lenient in so many ways. I didn't even turn in my final projects for half of my classes and my grades weren't even affected. The hardest part of all of the craziness going on is learning how to manage my time. I work two jobs and go to school and spend every hour of my "free time" on some kind of school-related task. Just a couple of days ago I was working at one job and was planning on working on homework when I got home only for my car to die in the parking lot. It's hard to expect the unexpected because life just keeps moving forward at what feels like an exponentially fast pace. I've learned that it's impossible to be prepared for everything, so taking things one step at a time is the best and easiest way to fix any problem that I may stumble upon. College is hard, but I can already tell that it is going to be incredibly rewarding.