So, I’m a little behind on the monthly challenges — both writing them, and this month, doing one… so I’m trying to catch-up on both today. So I’ll start to get myself back on track by talking about what I did the past two months. I’ll skim quickly over March as it was a pretty boring ‘challenge,’ and note more details on April as it was a fun challenge.
In March, I decided that I would go back to a dietary challenge and instead of eating something different, I just made myself record everything I ate. I used the Calorie Counter app for ipad because it was both free and had good ratings. The first few days it was pretty easy — I would come home from work and record my breakfast and lunch; I would cook dinner and then record it’s particulars. Generally, the app had most fast food restaurants I would eat, so my discretions were noted diligently. It brought another level of awareness to my day and actually was paying off. I lost a couple pounds during the month as noting the whole foods cookies, or other snacks was distressing to say the least.
April was another attempt at bettering myself and my experiences by trying to tear myself away from the text messages, facebook-ing, and emails and learning how to reconnect on the phone with friends and family. I made it my goal to call someone every day; I had a list of a cousins, friends from college, b-school, and previous jobs. It was a relatively random grouping, and ranged from people I talk to quasi-regularly, and a few friends that I hadn’t seen in years.
It’s generally amazing how phone calls have almost become “events”… partially through the month of April, I started to consolidate my daily phone calls into one or two evenings because I knew that the phone call wouldn’t be a quick one and I wanted to savor the conversation. I actually used my ‘commute’ to the mountains as prime time to make these calls because it was a relatively static two hours that I could focus on the person (while safely navigating i-70, of course).
I generally think that there are two types of people in this world: Callers and Callee’s. Often in life I have fluctuated between these two classes of people. In high school, and part of college, I was a Callee. I wouldn’t be the one who made the plans for my group of friends, I was the one who just let someone tell me where to go and what to do. When I lived in Park City, I became a Caller… I was a sort of central connector between people I worked with and was friends with, and people my roommate knew. It was a pretty small town, so there was a lot of overlap, and I definitely used this to my advantage to create circumstances to bring people together. When I moved to LA, I was less comfortable, so I moved back to that Callee roll and would go where the masses went and the large b-school events were planned.
You often learn which type of person someone is relatively early into knowing them, and you fall into a particular roll naturally depending on the people you become friends with… my buddy Steve, he is definitely a Caller — almost like clockwork, he’ll call once a month to ask some random question, just chat about work, or complain about how a mutual friend of ours hasn’t returned his calls. I never have to call Steve, but I love that he calls me. One of my best friends from undergrad, Lauren, used to be a Callee, but since she had a baby she has become a bit of a Caller. This role reversal generally makes sense as her time schedule has forced a bit of a change. And so on down the line — with some people I’m always the one who calls, with others, I am not shocked when I see their name pop-up on my BB. For the month of April I was making a concerted effort to be a Caller, and I tried to call both types of people.
It was funny the first few phone calls I made — especially the random “wait… is everything ok? why are you calling” calls that I definitely made. I would kinda explain why I called versus emailed, and we’d have a few minutes of awkward, “i think i saw that you were blah-blah, how is that going?” but then it would become more natural, and it would end with a “let’s definitely do this again soon…”
Facebook is awesome, because it keeps you aware of your friends, their activities, and daily musings, but because it’s so public, you end up only getting glossy version of life. I generally feel like I’m close to my friends, but becomes of this new phenomenon, I don’t realize that I’m missing the real person until I have a phone conversation with them and get the full picture of what is going on.
However, I left a bunch of messages throughout the month… that’s the good/bad about the phone vs. a text/email. I may have had time and intent to converse and catch-up with the person that I called, but sometimes it was an inconvenient time for them. If I had texted, we probably could have slid in a short little chat, but with a phone call, it’s something you have to come back to, something you put on the to-do list… and after every call I’d have, I’d think of a couple more people I should add to that to-do list, and I definitely ended the month thinking that I should keep an hour blocked on my sunday night or saturday afternoon so that I can continue to have these conversations and these reconnections.
