chop and change

One of my favorite Black Keys songs has a line that summarizes my adult life pretty well- “The regular she’d rearrange, the girl knew how to chop and change.” The most consistent thing in my life is change- usually change of address. I’ve been in Gainesville for literally a month and 7 days, and already I’m considering moving. Ridiculous? Perhaps. That’s just how I do things. When something fun shows up, 9 times out of 10, I’m down for whatever it is. 

5 weeks into life as a grad student, the real work is starting to kick in. After getting overwhelmed with the reading load last week (for like 5 mins until I found perspective and prioritized life), I plan to devote my entire day to writing my first paper. Ok, I have 2 or 3 side missions planned, too, and if it’s sunny, I’ll likely jump in the pool for a bit, but those will be sanity breaks. I can only sit still for so long. I cranked out a pretty kick ass intro page in about 20 mins last night (writing inspiration comes post-midnight, apparently), so I’m not too worried about it. I’m writing about student-athletes and how the de-personalization of coaching style can hinder their psychosocial development. Already managed to work my existential debate between a career in sports journalism or academic advising into my grad program :)

I’ve been walking the fine line between burning out and failing out, but now I think I’ve found the work/school/life balance I feared was a myth for a while. I started advising students in the office last week, and am told I’ve been progressing well so far. We were told we needed to read for the forest and not the trees in Theory, which helped reduce a good chunk of class stress (I applied it to both reading-heavy classes, even though it wasn’t said in History… hoping that works out ok). I’ve found a bunch of awesome friends that are fantastic at making me laugh out loud even via text at completely odd times (ie: at the bus stop, walking to my apt, any time where someone alone randomly cracking up would make you question their sanity) and I love them all for that. One has even become my scheming buddy, though what we’re scheming for, I’m not at liberty to say yet, lest it ruin the stealthy operation we’ve got going on. Laura visited last weekend and got to meet my grad school friends and go to the Tennessee game with us. It was awesome to have her experience Gator football so she could finally see what I get so crazy about. Hopefully it makes a little more sense now :) Hockey and college bball are about to be back in less than a month, which means it will become work/school/life/sports balance soon, but not necessarily in that order. I’ve severely neglected the sports blog, but once this paper’s done, I’ll get right on it. Life is a little overwhelming right now, but it’s a good overwhelming. 

ain't no rest for the wicked...

I realized today I’ve only been back in Florida for 3 weeks, but it almost seems like I never even left. (No offense to my NYC or Raleigh friends… you know what I mean) As I waited on campus for my bus to show up, it was impossible not to notice that it’s like 2 degrees away from traditional perfect UF football weather today. Of course, this prompted a flood of thoughts, which made me realize I hadn’t written a blog post in a while due to the insanity of the past 2 weeks…

That being said, the crazy past 2 weeks have been phenomenal. I’m really enjoying my 3 classes and have a fantastic trio teaching them.  My cohort is pretty damn awesome, and so are the 2^nd years. My assistantship is absolutely amazing, as is everyone in my office. It’s great to be back at UF, but also kind of surreal seeing it from this different point of view since I kind of run things now. (ok, I don’t really run much of anything yet, but I have my own office, keys to the AAC(!!), and I’ll be advising students starting in October for Spring advance registration and cannot wait!) If there was any doubt in my mind about whether I made the right choice turning down the Ph.D. at Wisconsin, it is long gone (though that also would have been a great opportunity- don’t get me wrong- but I can’t imagine another situation being more fitting than this). Everything definitely happens for a reason!

I’ll admit, there was a brief anxiety flare when I realized I was out of practice with the whole balancing working, classes and being social thing, but now I'm good. It just threw me to actually have to read for classes… I’ve always been one of those intuitive end of the spectrum students that never has to study and just innately gets logical concepts. Emphasis on the logical. Sciences (logic-based), things with rules (like writing and learning languages), or anything that involves drawing conclusions from observations (like psych) I can do in my sleep. Give me history or anything that just involves memorization without application like that and I’m not so good. I knew grad school actually required a little reading (sense the sarcasm), but reading for classes if I wanted to and not because I had to to understand in undergrad had me a little off. That and my 5 years away from classes. The plethora of free time I've had this past year and a half is shot. In the words of my life mentee: welcome back to college from semi-retirement. ps- For those of you upset because I haven’t returned calls or said hi in a while, this should explain why.

This week, I planned my slow days better so I can celebrate my 2 self-made holidays—First Day of Gator Football and First Day of Packer Football—and still get all my reading done, with an added trip to Orlando to visit my bff and 1 of my favorite people on the planet, and managing teams in 4 fantasy drafts. Busy week ahead, but yay for football!