Today, I got online to vote in the USFT elections, and I realized that I'm probably not going to get re-elected.

Oddly enough, I felt relieved.

Because I want to focus more on local action. I want to work with TCU organizations, where I can see people, and touch them, and really work with them. And because I cannot truly see the people on the Coordinating Committee, I end up lagging in my commitments. It tears me apart, how much I cannot do. Why have I not already worked on the newsletter for USFT? Why not the mentorship program with the Advisory Council? Why not established an Interfaith Coalition? At the end of each day, I go to sleep in a state of near-panic (exemplifying the extent of my fatigue), thinking on everything I did not complete, everything for United Students for Fair Trade, for Frogs for Fair Trade, for ideas of on-campus activism that I could achieve through the Fellows Alliance which I could use to reach out from Interfaith to Living Wage, to work with Heal Hunger more, with the Gay Straight Alliance.

Everything I join, I join because it's something I should be able to do. Something I can do. Something I should do. This is the most difficult thing, this sense that I should be doing all of this. To not be on the CC for USFT would weigh heavily on me, but worse than that would be this continual inability to support USFT. Because the truth of the matter can be summed in the first question asked for our self-nominations: How many hours are you able to commit to USFT weekly during the 2007/2008 school year? I put five. The two other women who applied can commit ten to fifteen. This alone puts them above me, leading me to ask the question: Should I vote for myself? More important than my networking opportunities and getting to see Nicaragua, more important than me, is Fair Trade. Can I, in good conscience, choose to vote for myself, when these other women can offer two to three times as many hours as I can?

If I don't get elected, I won't have to make the choice. That would make my life so much easier. Choice, which is so valued by our depressed society as a means to happiness, in fact tends to make people unhappy. Oh, sweet irony.

I can't do this. Every day the impossibility of my commitments manifests itself in some way. In my fatigue. In my overbooking. In my double booking. In the hours of studying that frequently proscribe more than four consecutive REM cycles.

And somehow, I can't picture my life any differently. Perhaps this is because my life has been this intense since ninth grade, and in some ways since middle school, in my commitment to studying and drumline and a myriad of honor societies and extracurricular activities and, more recently, life as a wage laborer. Without the pressure, I doubt if I could function. But I also doubt that I'll ever know.

In other news, I've been thinking a lot about forgiveness lately. What a concept.

"Sometimes I wonder, 'Will God ever forgive us for what we've done to each other? And I look around and I realize, God left this place a long time ago.'" (From Blood Diamond. See it. Or at least this clip: http://youtube.com/watch?v=UVIVtU8mCe4)