iExamen

iExamen

Samuel Williams

              I chose Sunday as the day for me to carry out this self-evaluation because I had enough to do that I would get a large spectrum of observations but not busy to the point where I would get too distracted and forget to perform this self-evaluation. My day started as most weekends do, I woke up at 8:30 and went to practice. That day we had a long run and we were going on a 14 mile long run through Baltimore, on a route we hadn’t been on before.

              The first thing I noticed is that everyone was grumpy and complaining, including myself. When I noticed this I realized that it was something that actually brought us closer together. It gets us in the mindset of, it’s going to be painful and tiring but we are all in it together so we’ll get it done. The next thing that I realized is my interaction with my coach. When I see her and talk to her I act different than I feel. For example, she is always very energetic and happy regardless of the time or the run and it always seems artificial to me, and the fact that she would act artificial as such seems ingenuine and causes me to get frustrated and annoyed. Naturally, I cannot show those feelings to my coach so I overcompensate and act nicer and more chipper than normal. This run was also the time of day that I went without my phone. I did not have my phone for 3 hours, that was the total time practice took. This is a very common occurrence for me as I have practice without my phone everyday, but today was the first time I started to notice differences. For one, my interactions are much more meaningful and not just the common, “Hey look at this picture”. Another thing is that when we got lost at one point, rather than just looking up directions on our phone, we had to ask many people where things were, talk as a group to determine the best way to go and figure it out together.

              Later in the day I was sitting with my roommates watching football, and I realized that all we would talk about for 3 hours was football. We discussed almost nothing else aside from fantasy football or the games. It got me thinking, why does this happen? I never really came up with a good answer as to why it’s all we talked about aside from the fact that we all love to watch the sport and that’s what was on. Maybe it can also be the sense of companionship that we have, because I have started many conversations with random people in random places whom I will never remember just because they liked the same team as me; and I generally am not one to start conversations. There was also a lot of joking and trash talking between me and one of my friends because I like the Eagles and he likes the Giants.

              Those were the two times in the day that I had more major realizations about the way I interact with people. The rest of the day was more small thinks like how I don’t really say people’s names when I say hi, probably because I’m bad at remembering names.