Hello there, sweet internet! It's so good to see you again!
Let me tell you how the last few weeks have been for me. TERRIBLE, is how they have been. I mean, I guess they haven't been 100% terrible. There was the day I went to the farmer's market and ate bread and goat cheese in the sunshine, and the weekend my friend Kiki came down and let me show her around town. And the time I ate dinner out with my friend MB and we sat in the parking lot catching up until 3am. That was all pretty awesome. Nevertheless, I have to say that large chunks of the past few weeks have been pretty terrible. Mostly the chunks having to do with school. How to explain? Let's try a little comparison exercise. Last semester, in the Fall, I had the following commitments:
1) Four master's-level classes
2) One or two days a week at my field placement, and
3) A research assistantship that involved very little work.
And it was good. I survived and did quite well until the last two weeks of the semester, and let's be honest: that was pretty much all my fault for procrastinating and putting everything off until the last minute. So when it came time to plan for this semester (Spring semester, the one we are currently in), I decided to challenge myself a little bit, and so I took on the following commitments:
1) Three master's-level classes
2) Another master's-level, seminar-style half-a-class
3) My first doctoral class (That's 5 classes, for those following along at home)
4) One or two days a week at my field placement, and
5) My research assistantship.
(Those last two things are non-negotiable, required sorts of things.) Anyway, all of this sounded totally do-able in theory, but has turned out to be kind of miserable in practice for two reasons. For one, I grossly underestimated the amount of work that this doctoral class was going to require. Work like "read 10 chapters of this unintelligible book by next week" and "hey, what say we just randomly add a whole extra novel to the syllabus?". For two, sometime at the beginning of this semester, my boss apparently suddenly remembered that she had a research assistant. So even though my planning for this semester kind of hinged on maintaining the extremely low level of work she was giving me last semester, she apparently missed the memo and suddenly wanted me to start writing research proposals and building rocket ships and planning assassinations of foreign dignitaries*. All of that being said (because I know reading about someone else's schoolwork is boring as hell), I survived pretty well up through Spring Break, at which point I optimistically set some adorable goals for how I was going to be spending all of my free time for the month of March. Oh, what a fool I was.
*Note to the CIA: That was a JOKE.
What actually happened was that I laid around all of Spring Break, and as soon as it ended I became busier than I have ever been in recent memory. The week right after Spring Break I was doing psychotic things like throwing all-night paper-writing parties in 24-hour diners with free wifi. The next week, things got marginally better, but still pretty terrifying. And so on. So I did not finish my goals for March, not even a little bit. But I'm also not sitting in a corner right now rocking back and forth and weeping, so I'm going to go ahead and call it a draw.
Things are pretty calm right now, but there's another maelstrom of schoolwork coming up fast, so I should really be spending this time getting ahead, rather than reading the entire internet, as I sometimes do. Which is to say, as I have done, more or less all weekend. I'm relieved to find that at this point, the end is so close that I'm hardly even stressed out anymore. I'll live to see May, one way or another, even if I leave a trail of shoddy papers and half-hearted group presentations in my wake.
Oh! And don't think I've let my failures in March discourage me from setting any new goals. I've already set a goal for April: to get back on the running train (now that the weather is so beautiful!) and start following this training plan again. You may remember it as the one I was using to train for the imaginary 10k last summer, which I dropped like a hot potato once I moved and started school. But now I'm back! Like seasonal allergies! And I'm currently finishing up Week 2. So look out world, the Slow Motion Runner's Club** is coming to a flat, shady, relatively unchallenging road near you!
** I just made this up just now, so currently the Slow Motion Runner's Club (SMRC) consists of only me. But if you want to join, holler at me. I'll make us t-shirts! Or... hats? Maybe we'll just stick with buttons for now.
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