1.       Can­cel all your plans for the day. Since you’re prob­a­bly los­ing your mind because of the won­der­ful thing that’s life, you most cer­tainly need a break. So what­ever you have planned for the day – can­cel it. Take a well­ness day if you have to work. Don’t plan to do any­thing con­struc­tive. Don’t plan to do any­thing that could cause stress.

2.       Stay in bed until noon. Since you can­celled all your plans, there’s no need to rush out of bed. If you’re lucky, your sig­nif­i­cant other will bring you break­fast in bed on a tray that used to be a pizza box. Sorry there’s no pic­ture to sup­port this fact.

3.       Make flour­less choco­late chip cook­ies. Why flour­less? Because flour gets every­where and makes a mess. Peanut but­ter is sticky but eas­ier to clean.

4.       Find a marathon on TV or pick a series to start watch­ing on Net­flix. Pick a series that will keep you glued to the couch. I’m cur­rently on a Bat­tlestar Galac­tica marathon but I’ve also watched Pretty Lit­tle Liars, The Killing, and good ole Law  and Order SVU.

5.       Indulge in a guilty plea­sure. Since you already made cook­ies, why not fix a drink? Fix a drink — beer, wine, mar­garita, mar­tini, or what­ever — and set­tle back into the couch with the remote in your hand.

I wouldn’t say that I’m the most self­less per­son out there. I have plenty of self­ish thoughts. I have a to-do list that never goes away. Some­times when I am hang­ing with friends, I think about what I could be doing when if I were home instead.
I always have to jug­gle between say­ing yes and no to my friends, espe­cially while I was in grad school. While I had some fun dur­ing my time in grad school, there were plenty of times that I missed out on the fun to fin­ish a project.

I’ve been fin­ished with school for two weeks and I felt like I haven’t had a moment to breathe. I’ve been count­ing down the days for when I’m on some beach in Florida. For the last two weeks, I haven’t had a quiet, peace­ful week­end. And since I don’t have the excuse of school to hide behind, it’s hard to say “No”.

But yes­ter­day, I finally got a moment to myself with noth­ing on the agenda. I left work early after feel­ing sick. While I was upset for wast­ing gas on my morn­ing com­mute, I enjoyed being back in my bed. When the peace and quiet set­tled in, I real­ized that I could finally have some time for myself. I kept things lazy for the most part. And I have to say that it wasn’t dif­fi­cult to ignore the out­side world. I had no guilt about being self­ish and refus­ing to talk to any­one that I didn’t want to. The only time I opened my mouth was to yell at the TV – within two episodes of Fringe, two major char­ac­ters were shot.

Some­times you have to say “No” but when is the right time?

When you’re feel­ing burnt out

I don’t know how many times I would make a com­mit­ment to do some­thing for a friend and by the time I got there, I would be com­pletely exhausted. The entire time I would be kick­ing myself because before I even left home, I knew I should’ve can­celled. Or even worst, I knew that I would have a busy and still said “Yes”. It didn’t take long for me to start say­ing “No” when I felt too tired to move.

When you already have enough on your plate

This is sim­i­lar to the first one. I have tried to fit way too many things into one day. By the end of the day I would be com­pletely exhausted and angry about allow­ing myself to get over sched­ule myself. There’s noth­ing like drag­ging your­self through the day and then hav­ing to com­plete a home­work assign­ment later that day because you didn’t do dur­ing the weekend.

When you rather do some­thing else or noth­ing at all

There are times when it’s OK to be self­ish. When you are offered to hang out with the girls but you rather catch up on your sleep, favorite TV show, or book. It’s fine to say “No” and do for your­self. There’s no need for you to wait until you’re run down and too tired to do any­thing for your­self. But this doesn’t give you per­mis­sion to start knock­ing off birth­days, hol­i­days, chris­ten­ings, or other spe­cial occa­sions. If you’re too self­ish, you might start los­ing some friends.

After spend­ing 12 hours away from the house and fight­ing through a 45-minute com­mute in traf­fic, noth­ing feels greater than walk­ing through your own front door. Hav­ing a place to retreat to after a long day out in the world is really bet­ter than noth­ing is. That is unless that place has choco­late of some sort – ice cream, cookie, candy, cake – it doesn’t mat­ter which. Com­ing home is the best part of my day espe­cially after spend­ing the most of my 20’s “homeless”.

I spent the major­ity of my 20’s couch surf­ing. My par­ents advised against me liv­ing on cam­pus. I remem­ber that day out in the garage. My father sit­ting in his shed tin­ker­ing with the lat­est bro­ken thing from around the house. I walked into the garage accom­pa­nied by my mother and we dis­cussed the rea­son­ing behind my desire to stay on cam­pus. My dad thought it wasn’t a good idea for sev­eral rea­sons but the main was issue was  money. Look­ing back on it, he made the right deci­sion for me. I didn’t need to stay on cam­pus. We only stayed 20 min­utes from the school so we agreed that I would commute.

It didn’t take long before the com­mute started to wear on me and I wanted the inde­pen­dence that my friends from high school had. Soon after I started col­lege, my fam­ily decided to move which added an addi­tional 20 min­utes to my orig­i­nal com­mute. My adven­tures in couch surf­ing began.

I started first stay­ing in my boyfriend’s dorm room. It was an all boy’s dorm so it wasn’t the most ideal sit­u­a­tion. Just to use the bath­room, he had to walk me to the girl’s floor or make sure their bath­room was clear. The clos­est thing to a kitchen was a microwave where I per­fected ramen noo­dles. All it took was some sausage and sev­eral shakes of hot sauce to make some­thing that resem­bled a meal. I remem­ber glid­ing down the hall mak­ing friends with the neigh­bor­ing boys. I even bat­ted my eyes a cou­ple of times to get free pop­corn. Now that I think about it, I’m not even sure if I was sup­pose to spend the night but hey it was college.

By my sopho­more year of col­lege, my boyfriend moved to his own apart­ment and I fol­lowed him there. This time we had a kitchen and more room but the liv­ing arrange­ments weren’t ideal. He was messy. On sev­eral occa­sions, I would have to use super­hu­man strength to get the door to our room open enough for me to walk in. Once in the room, I saw piles of clothes sprawled out on the floor as if it was laun­dry day after a 7-month strike. The great­est pile of laun­dry was con­ve­niently located behind the door.

When I was a junior, the messy boyfriend was out of my life and I was back at home with the 40-minute com­mute. By this time, I had made more friends, which increased the couches that I could crash on. I joined a soror­ity, and had all these new sis­ters to hang out with. I also had a new boyfriend and spent the major­ity of my time at his house. Between my sis­ters, and my boyfriend, I hardly ever went home. I lived out of my car and jumped from couch to couch. My back seat always had a bag filled with clothes for every occa­sion. Going home was such a task, that I had to be ready for any­thing that popped up last minute.

This went on until I grad­u­ated. Though by the time I walked across the stage, I had a more sta­ble home even if the fourth wall was a cur­tain. I stayed in the sun-room of a three bed­room apart­ment with three of my clos­est sis­ters. Three of us shared one bath­room, which led to many pas­sive aggres­sive notes stuck to the mir­ror. One of my sis­ters then pro­ceeded to move her messy boyfriend in which led to tense sit­u­a­tions around the house.

Finally, after liv­ing in the “soror­ity house”, I paid rent at my own place, which I shared with two other girls. One of them decided to move their boyfriend in which of course cause a repeat of my pre­vi­ous sit­u­a­tion. Even though I put an end to couch surf­ing, I still longed for a place where I lived alone.

My next apart­ment sat­is­fied my wish and I was at peace with my liv­ing arrange­ments. More at peace than I had been in a very long time. Then one day I lost my job and I was back stay­ing with some­one else.

Fast for­ward to 2010, I moved into my own place. The same house that my fam­ily moved away from when I started col­lege. For the past two years, I have lived on my own and enjoyed the lack of room­mate. Well unless you count my dog. Every­thing was on me. If there was a mess, then I made it. If some­thing needed clean­ing, I did it. If some­thing was lost in the house, I lost it. I moved it. I broke it. I burned it. I left it on. I turned it off. I unplugged it. I plugged it in. I had no one to blame which made things sim­ple and lovely. If I needed to cor­rect it, I did.

Around the same time that I found my peace in my child­hood home, I fell in love. With falling in love, I thought it was a good idea for my love to move in with me. Plus, I had begun to couch surf again at his house (no, he didn’t make me sleep on the couch but I was tired of split­ting my time between two houses). So he moved in.

My couch surf­ing has ended and so has my joy of liv­ing alone. Even though I have to turn off lights that I didn’t turn on, clean dishes I didn’t dirty, wipe messes that I didn’t make, turn off things I didn’t turn on, and unplug things that I didn’t plug up, I won’t change it for all the choco­late in the world. Too much choco­late can make your teeth ache. This whole “liv­ing together” sit­u­a­tion, (not sure why I put that in quotes) is an adjust­ment espe­cially for some­one that once stated that her and her hus­band would live in duplexes next to each other but never in the same house. It is one that I am glad to make – I mean it’s bet­ter than couch surfing.

This past week, I’ve been reac­quainted with lazy. We haven’t seen each other since ’09. We ran into each other between the couch and TV. Before I knew it, I spent hours on the couch and I was on the last episodes of sea­son 2 of The Killing (a damn good show if you haven’t seen it). I only started sea­son 1 of the series the day before.

I was so unac­cus­tomed to being lazy that I tried to fight it. I felt guilty for lay­ing there on the couch only mov­ing to eat and pee. There are so many things on my to-do list that I wasn’t doing.

Lying there on the couch wasn’t entirely unpro­duc­tive because I finally had time to think. Think about what I wanted. What should my next step should be? What do I have to offer the world? I already know that I want to write for the web but even that is too broad.

While I would love for one of the many com­pa­nies that have my appli­ca­tion to hire me, I would rather cre­ate my own path. Wait­ing for a phone call or email to let me know if I qual­i­fied for an inter­view is painful. I’m not one for wait­ing on peo­ple to do some­thing I want. I don’t want to wait around to ful­fill my dreams. Enough time has been wasted. I’m ready to strike out on my own.

I noticed that peo­ple who take the uncon­ven­tional road to suc­ceed have spe­cific goals in mind. Maybe along the way they stum­bled into suc­cess but I don’t feel this is the case. I admit I did spend some time envy­ing these peo­ple while I laid on the couch. I wanted to under­stand their suc­cess, pick their brains, and fol­low their example.

Out of all this came an idea. An idea that I kept tucked away in the back of my mind where all dreams deferred go. The idea that I have is daunt­ing. I really don’t know where to start and the idea of fail­ure is more fright­en­ing. It’s one thing to dream about an idea but then to pur­sue it and fail…. I don’t even want to think about it.

For now, I’ll take baby steps towards my idea. I will still apply to jobs, and look for free­lance work. I have to pay the bills. That’s still the most impor­tant thing. On the back burner my idea will sit sim­mer­ing. Wait­ing for me to stir the pot and bring it to its deli­cious debut.

Some­times a well designed poster is more effec­tive than a para­graph. Here’s my rules on how to stay in love inspired by other cou­ples who have stayed in love for decades.