Saturday, December 04, 2010

Don't throw away your playful beginnings

Once again, too much time has passed and I haven't even thought about this damn blog.

Since the 17th:
1) Thanksgiving break was pretty uneventful... considering that it wasn't really a "break", more like an "oh-shit-this-4,000-word-paper-is-due-monday" kind of thing. I worked on it a lot at my grandmother's house, which was pretty nice because it was a quiet warm place to work and I had a nice fast mac to work on. I finished it friday night after about a 6 hour marathon, and then met up with the Crew at Chipotle. We ran around the mall after that for a while, which was quite interesting. I miss all my friends so muchhhhhhh. I miss the way we used to hang out, because now it feels different and I'm not sure why. I guess that's part of growing up.

2) I am not sure what to make of a few people, both at home and here. They're sending me mixed signals, and I'm not sure if it's just myself and the terrible trait of overanalyzing everything, but I can't help shake the feeling that I'm not - that something is actually going on. I'm not going to go into details, partially because I just had a marathon talk with a good friend for like an hour and a half and we talked about this and frankly I'm a little tired of talking about it right now. Half of me wants to go crazy and be reckless, and half of me is scared that I'm just looking too much.

3) Surprisingly, I don't have that Final Exam Drowning Feeling. I have three finals (plus trumpet and piano juries) and I think that if I put some real time in, things will be okay. It helps that band is now over, so I don't have to take two hours two days a week out of my schedule, and tutoring is now over which was three hours a week. Granted I'm going to lose that time on my paycheck, but hopefully I can make up for some of it by getting back to organizing the band library which I've neglected recently.

4) The more I think about it, the more excited I am for next semester. Dr. w and I met up this morning because it had been a while since we'd seen each other, since before break, and we talked some about the poverty honors class. He sent out an initial framework for the class and encouraged us to think about it in preparation for a pre-class dinner meeting next weekend, and today he asked me about it. I think right now I'm at the point where I'm excited to do work, but don't know where to start and the whole issue seems so daunting. It is hard to change the world. It is hard to change people's mindsets and really make a difference. We talked about the starfish story, you know, and that's great and all but at the same time there's this little voice in the back of my head that says "what about all the other starfish we might pass up?" What about them? What about those it is impossible to reach, or frankly cannot reach because there is not enough time/energy/resources/daylight? Right now I am stuck. I want to make a difference in something, somewhere, so badly, but I don't know how. I hope, obviously, that this class will help there. w also said something about possibly being able to actually go to Kenya, where he went this past summer, where they're doing a lot of the same things but even on a more basic level - clean drinking water, books for the kids to read, things like that. Jeez, I couldn't even imagine that. What if I got to go to Africa? Ugh, I can't even let myself think about that possibility right now.

5) I FINALLY got the petition for my H credit back. Witt has this requirement where you have to take 8 gen. ed classes from 8 different departments as part of the gen ed curriculum. Well, with my ridiculous schedule, that is nearly impossible. So Dr. w and I worked on a petition to waive that rule so I'd have 8 classes in 7 departments. On Thursday (while I was feeling like death, 24-hour stomach flu) I got a call from the Registrar's office saying it had been granted. HALLELUJAH!!!!! One more thing to cross off my list and get me that much closer to graduating on time. Now I need to submit a credit overload petition and pray that they offer Spanish next summer, so I can get those pesky gen ed requirements done with. But - I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel - things are not so insurmountable.
Praise God.

Oh - Yay for snow! December 1, first snowfall that I've seen. So grand.

A week and a half and I'll finally be done with this hellacious semester. Looking forward to it with all my being.

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