Column: Ordering pizza and other life decisions

By Mary Novokhovsky

Published Nov. 5, 2010

Pizza Hut, Domino's, Papa Johns, Shakespeare's, Gumby's and Wise Guys: Pick a pizza place.

Maybe you have an obvious preference right off the bat, or maybe you're like me and have just experienced a mild panic attack at the thought of a whopping six options.

All right, all right, I'll make it easier: Pick the one you'd most likely order on a budget — still stuck between a few choices? I know how you feel.

For some of us, making even the smallest decisions incites internal chaos. Your brain begins to rapidly process every option, you Google each menu, and you now have to decide if you're getting sides. So what if one restaurant has better pizza? You suddenly feel like wings and the best you're going to get are somewhere else. Thirty minutes goes by, the hunger in your stomach builds, and you realize there's going to be a 45-minute wait time for delivery. Suddenly, pizza seems out of the question.

You get up, walk to the fridge and make a sandwich. Maybe it's not pizza, but you congratulate yourself for satiating the hunger and saving money.

The truth is, though the final outcome to your predicament may have spared you the extra $20 in your pocket, you merely avoided having to make any decision. Your dining options were limited once your body couldn't take waiting around anymore, and you had to seek immediate hunger relief.

One of the great struggles of getting older, at least in my opinion, is that entering the "real" world presents you with more options than you might have encountered before. Suddenly, there is a wider range of friends to choose from, classes to take, social functions to attend and a larger gap of time to fill.

It's easy to abandon the structure of your old life in lieu of embracing freedom, but if you can barely decide on a pizza place for dinner tonight, then how do you plan on deciding what you're going to do with all that free time? If you have three hours of free time on a Wednesday afternoon, the constructive and destructive possibilities are endless.

You can easily use this time to head to the Student Recreation Complex and get a workout in, you can do some extra reading/work to order alleviate the load of next week, or you can listen to music, read a book, make dinner plans with friends or call your family.

The positive and constructive time options are plentiful, but so are the justifications for not doing them. It's too cold to walk to the gym, you're too tired to focus on schoolwork (much less reading), and you just don't feel sociable.

Maybe every reason you give yourself for not doing something is completely valid, but that doesn't make it a good excuse. What I've learned — or a better way of putting it is, "the idea that I've been smacked across the head with" — is you are going to have to do things that cause you discomfort, because they are the right things to do.

If you take those three hours to get high, get drunk or sit on your ass and watch TV all night, then maybe you'll be fine for that one night or even the next night you choose to do that. But at some point, your consistent desire to not have to step outside of your comfort zone and make an honest effort to do what will benefit your reality will catch up with you.

And when that happens folks, it's going to hurt more than the "cramp-in-your-leg-excuse" you used this morning to not make it to the gym.