I am lying on my bed after my marathon Thursday, utterly exhausted, listening to the German version of Thumbelina's "Let Me Be Your Wings" and trying to figure out how long I can wait until I have to start my homework.

My day started most definitely in the middle of a REM cycle. I did manage to roll myself out of bed and get to work only 10 minutes late, though, which was not a problem. The teacher at work gave me a cup full of Cheerios when I got in the door (breakfast! Since they figured out that I'm a poor college student, both the teachers want to make sure I can eat at work, so I don't have to "waste" meals on things like eating. I love them so much) and we headed upstairs to their Montessori classroom. An awesome thing I've been doing this quarter is coming in the mornings on Thursdays, so I get to see them actually doing official Montessori work. I realized that my favorite, Ferran, knows all his letters, and can actually spell some words. He's four, but I had just never seen him doing any of that before.

At 10:30, I zoomed off to my Politcal Science class in Tech. The 25 minute walk was infinitely more pleasant than last week (last week, with windchill the temperature was -25 degrees Farenheit, so today's +15 felt absolutely balmy). I was incredibly exhausted, so I used my points to buy a can of Starbucks energy/caffeine something or other from "Lisa's Cafe." It did manage to keep me awake during my 90 minute lecture, but by the time it was over, I felt ready to collapse. My lecture gets out at 12:20 and my discussion section starts at 1. Usually, I use those 40 minutes to buy a salad and go over the readings for discussion to be sure I'm able to discuss things intelligently. Well. Today I passed another initiation in the life of a college student. Tech has incredible couches outside of all the huge lecture halls. Instead of getting lunch, I curled up in the corner of one, put my headphones in and my hood up and slept for thirty minutes. It was absolutely incredible.. I was then able to go to discussion awake and refreshed. I just felt like such a college student, sleeping in an extremely public place.. but the funny thing was that about every other couch has a sleeping occupant in the corner.. sometimes they even stretch out, occupying the whole thing. Obviously, that was one of the things I never thought I would do, because that's just so ridiculous, but the kind of late nights that I've been pulling made me rethink that. :)

At work this afternoon, for the third time in a row, they pulled me from my kids to strange children in another group. This makes me very unhappy.. but I try and be flexible and work wherever they need me. I just have the feeling that this is going to be a pattern, and I feel so inadequate when I don't know the group's routine, the kids.. and I feel extremely unhelpful. My motto this week at work has been, "You only have to show me once, but you have to show me once." The first teacher was incredibly unhelpful and got angry with me for not performing my tasks (which I was unaware of).. anyway. But this class (Group D) won all the awards for unusual names. Not one kids had a "normal" name.. I wondered if maybe they categorized them that way on purpose: "oh, you have a strange name.. off to group D!" I think the most normal were Asher and Clive. (Meaning, the names that I had heard before.) Nakaya (girl), Durius (boy), and Dresdon (also boy) were possibly the most unusual.

After work it was back to Chapin for my mystery class, and now it's fifteen minutes after I first started writing this, my German "A Whole New World" has also ended, and I'll probably go and try to get some work done. Tomorrow is another busy day!

Redefining busy...

If I thought I knew what being busy was before this quarter, I was drastically wrong. The last week has shown me just how little I ever understood about really being busy- and yet I'm also coming to understand the insane amount that God is enabling me to accomplish. The knowledge that He is giving me strength to get through each day and to keep going full steam all the time is what gets me through the times when I am so busy that I have no time to breathe.

This weekend, though, is a really nice and relaxing weekend. I only have one research project to do, and I'm about to go to the library and take care of that, but otherwise, I just have reading. Medill decided to give us the week off from insane assignments, and all I have to do is photograph an event on MLK day and pick a place to do a bio piece on for Wednesday. Incredible, I know. And usually I have papers due every Monday, but this week Monday is a holiday, and our paper was cancelled! So essentially, I am enraptured by this blessing of free time- and I'm definitely enjoying it to the fullest! Yesterday, I read 2 Agatha Christies (one of them was for class.. my very favorite class is a mystery tutorial, where every week we read a couple of mystery novels and discuss the development of the novel.. it is incredible!), watched the final episode of Survivor with my roommate, worked out, went out to lunch with a friend, and sat on the floor of my hall with girls talking the night away. Relaxing? I should say so.

Another revelation I had yesterday came from watching The Devil Wears Prada. Now, I had seen this movie before, but not recently enough to realize how scarily close it could be to my life. See, the main character is a journalist who graduated from Northwestern and went to New York looking for a big job to start off her career. Of course, the movie is a bit extreme, but I could see a lot of parallels to my life in it. Just sk Tricia.. I kept yelling, "This could be me!!" at opportune (or maybe inopportune?) moments. But the possibility of a life filled with craziness doesn't faze me.. and in fact it excites me! Someday, I will be the person running around everywhere, someday I will learn to operate under high stress and fulfill the wishes of my boss and my company, someday I will change my small corner of the world. They say that if you want to change the world, don't be a journalist.. but I plan to impact the place where I live and the people around me. And even as a journalist, I'll bet I can do that.

Happy New Year and welcome back to school...

After an incredible three weeks away from school and with my family, I was a bit shocked to come back to school and be hit by the insane amount of work that comes with being a Medill student. But I'm getting into the groove now, which is good, considering that I'm possibly twice as busy this quarter as I was last quarter. I feel that maybe, just maybe, I might be working to my full potential. When every second is planned, every hour mapped out so that I am doing something that accomplishes and/or furthers my goals and plans, I feel so happy and successful. Today, for example, is my craziest day: start work at 8:30, work til 10:30 when I run to class in Tech which starts at 11 (and yes, I do have to run.. Tech is 15 minutes away from my dorm, and my work is 10 minutes away, in the opposite direction), have class til 2, then run back to work and work til 5:30. At 5:30, I dash back to Chapin for my 6-9 class. Exciting? I should say so. But I thrive under pressure and find myself enjoying the fact that I have absolutely no time at all. Oh, and of course I forgot to mention the metric tons of homework which must be accomplished every night.

My current Medill challenge is an article suitable for publication in Chicago Bride. I thought and thought and finally came up with a pitch to write something about how the current economic recession is affecting weddings and brides, kind of like an advice column about how to plan a beautiful but cheap wedding. Tomorrow after class, I'll go talk to dress salons, florists, and bakeries, to see what they can tell me. Hopefully, I'll find customers in some of them who will be willing to tell me about their personal experiences, or at least give some insight. I hope I can pull it off.. my current journalism professor is not quite as marvelous as my first one, and I can already tell that she expects much, much more of us than was expected in 201-1. The level of professionalism that she expects us to uphold and the ease with which she expects us to maintain it.. let's just say I'm not quite there yet. But challenges are good, and hopefully she will push me but not break me.

Oh, and in case anyone was wondering how I managed to be posting in the middle of my self-proclaimed insane day.. I'm at work, watching the desk. Which, to tell the absolute truth, is a terribly depressing thing to do. Instead of sitting and playing with small children, I have to sit at a desk and do nothing, unless someone walks up to the door, in which case I press a button and let them in. Stimulating, I know.