As you may or may not have noticed, I have a slight obsession with “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock.” To be entirely honest, I am not sure where it began. As a freshman, I insisted on doing my final project on the life and times of T.S. Eliot. The following year, my teacher challenged me with “Prufrock” for a recitation grade. It took me about nine minutes to stumble my way through it in front of my class, but I never fully lost my footing, so Mrs. Reynolds had mercy on me and gave me a 100. I made my Twitter bio an excerpt from it, and I even captioned some beachfront pictures with lines about sea-girls wreathed in seaweed red and brown. I know… I kind of hate myself, too. But my point of mentioning this is not just to point out how profoundly pretentious I can be. There is a certain line of “Prufrock” that has really been sticking out to me lately. I have always had my favorite stanzas or lines, but this has never been one of them. Now that I find myself in a period of great transition and change in my life, however, it suddenly has so much more weight.

“For I have known them all already, known them all/Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons/I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;”

These are lines 49-51 of the poem. The part that I have really been mulling over lately is line 51. “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” Though when I catch myself thinking about it lately, it is out of context. I do not think about it in terms of the rest of the poem. I can practically see T.S. Eliot rolling his eyes at my audacity and turning to vent his frustrations to James Joyce. When I think about this line lately, I hear a question or a challenge that goes along with it.

With what are you measuring out your life?

I have a lot of potential answers to this question. Different periods of my life have had different forms of measurement. Some of my answers seem trivial and silly, others seem sentimental and schmaltzy.

I have measured out my life in many things. I have measured my years out in movies, in books, in "NCIS" episodes, in "SNL" casts, in obsessions, in various historical figures’ biographies, in Fleetwood Mac and The Spice Girls songs, in grade levels, in classes, in "Nancy Drew" mystery novels, in writings, in poems and in thoughts. Some of these things seem inconsequential and insignificant to other people, but to me, these things are extremely important. When Ziva left, I cried for hours. My sister made fun of me for it. I looked right at her and -- quite dramatically -- informed her that she didn’t understand. I had measured my life out in "NCIS" episodes. She just laughed some more.

While it’s true that I had indeed measured my life out in "NCIS" episodes, that was far from the only coffee spoon I had used. I am the type of person who cannot like something halfway. I am either entirely enthralled and utterly obsessed, or I am apathetic. There be no road between. I realize this can be annoying for my friends sometimes. They aren’t so easily besotted, and frankly, they don’t care about crazily-long rants on the untapped talent of certain actresses. And that’s okay. I need that balance and their indifference to bring me back to reality and remind me of what truly matters. Sometimes it’s necessary for me to put things in perspective and look at the grander picture. I have a completely different unit of measurement for my life that isn’t as trite as the aforementioned.

I have measured my life thus far out in people and relationships: in meals spent with my entire family, in hugs from my Mama Golden, in evenings reading with my grandmother, in memories made and moments spent with my best friends, in long talks with my mother, in fishing trips with my father, in arguments and embraces with my sister. Those are the life measurements that matter.

When I did the “Prufrock” recitation in tenth grade, I also had to write a paper analyzing the poem. For the paper, I had to interview my mom and include quotes from that interview in my analysis. I remember very vividly during the interview she responded to one of my questions about her personal life philosophy and how it related to the poem by saying, “I believe in measuring life by moments, and trying to make the most of your moments. You have to approach life in increments, making the most of each increment, so that one day you can look back and feel you have lived a satisfying life.”

At the time, I didn’t really think too much about that answer. Then, this school year I found myself asked on multiple occasions what my favorite high school memory was, and every time that question was posed, I drew a blank. I did not have one all-encompassing favorite memory of high school. What I did have was lots of little, cherished moments with people I had grown to love. I could not very well say my one and only favorite high school memory was sharing a joke with my best friend and us both laughing until our eyes teared up and our sides hurt, but that would have been the closest thing to the truth. The little moments were what made the memories.

Too often in today’s world, we forget the importance of the little moments. We focus on the monumental things and the milestones. Do not misunderstand me, those things are important, too. Immensely so. But as a goal-oriented person, I tend to get swept up in the hysteria and forget about the happiness. I won’t lose sight of my goals, but I have to learn to be content and happy in the moments that come before I reach them.

I want to look back later in life and enjoy all my increments. I want to have measured out my life in things like laughter and love. That’s the only way to not find yourself afraid when the Eternal Footman is holding your coat and snickering. After all, when Prufrock was awakened by the human voices and found his life ending, all he had to show for it was a set of stained yet empty coffee spoons. I refuse to let a similar fate befall me.