Just Sayin’ ...

It’s crazy to think that this is the last Just Sayin’ I will ever write. I could go all sappy about it, but I’d rather leave Cedarville with a few lessons of “What Not to Do” that I have learned from my time here.

Don’t draw pictures of your professors in your notes. When I took Politics & American Culture with Dr. Rich, I almost died of boredom because I loathe politics. Most of the time in class I spent reading “Twilight” (I was a freshman … those were dark days for me). But when I wasn’t reading pathetic literature, I thought it would be funny to draw funny pictures of Dr. Rich.One day, I was showing my friend Dave these pictures and telling him how much I hated this politics class. I didn’t connect the dots that my friend’s last name was my professor’s last name until he exclaimed, “Bekah, that’s my dad!” I apologized profusely and begged him not tell his father, so I thought I was safe when I walked into Dr. Rich’s class on final exam day. But he walked into the room, looked straight at me and said, “I hear you have some pretty interesting notes from my class. I want to see what I look like in those pictures of yours.” Thankfully, I didn’t have my notebook with me, but I laugh/cried through the entire exam and got a C in the class … my worst grade ever. In all my subsequent classes, I kept my notebooks spotless.

Don’t date anyone just because you’re sick of being single. My junior year, I reconnected on Facebook with a guy I’d met at summer camp when I was 16, and he asked me out on a date. I figured, hey I’m a junior in college and have no boyfriend, so I’m obviously going to die alone … maybe I should give this a try. He ended up trying to take me out to eat at Hooters, used cheesy pickup lines on me (“Are you distracted by the music? I’m distracted by something beautiful in this car right now, and it’s not this Adam Lambert song”) and told me he had a bunch of alcohol in his trunk so that he and his friends could get drunk and see how fast they could solve a Rubik’s Cube. Then when I asked him to take me home, he pulled into the Lowe’s parking lot (real classy) and tried to kiss me … and when I pushed him away, he got his hand stuck in my hair. After that train wreck, I decided I would much rather be single.

Don’t say whatever pops into your head. My freshman year, I was wearing a watch that had a faulty latch, and it fell off my wrist as I was leaving Chuck’s. Some very attractive upperclassman guy picked it up and handed it back to me. I got all nervous and tried to be funny and immediately blurted out what came to mind: “Sorry, stuff falls off me all the time. At least it wasn’t my shirt!” He gave me a very disturbed look, and I sprinted out of Chuck’s mortified. That little incident taught me to think before I speak … and to not wear things that fall off.

Don’t take for granted the time you have here. At JS this year, they played “Larger Than Life” by the Backstreet Boys during the designated “time of movement.” So, when the line “that’s what makes you larger than life” played, I puffed out my cheeks and held my arms out like a fatty and bounced around the dance … erm … “movement” floor. And yes, I did look ridiculous. But now that I’m almost done, I realized I don’t want to waste a minute of my time at Cedarville being self-conscious and boring when I could be having fun. Seriously, it’s the last time you can act like an idiot in public and get away with it. No way I’m busting that move out in a job interview. So until the day I graduate, I plan on taking advantage of every second here and living it up. Prepare for a whole lot of crazy.

Just sayin’.