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.

Only in the Humanities dorm...

... is the phrase "let's sing some Christmas songs!" followed by an impromtu performance of eight people singing "Angels We Have Heard on High" in four different harmonies around a piano. It was pretty amazing. We had sopranos, altos, a bass, and a tenor. (I was the "#*%$ soprano" who got to carry the melody. :) Yes, only in college are those things called by such lovely names.)

I just love the amount of musical, artistic, and literary talent that is buried all around Chapin. We had a "talent show" before Thanksgiving in which we had an impromtu sight-reading music performance by our piano performance major and a violin major, which involved a lot of flying pages with notes, but sounded absolutely incredible (and they had never seen the music before!), a salsa/rhumba by Suz (soooo good, I was stunned), a flooring acapella duet, and some original, very well written and composed, songs. And this is what these people do for FUN!

Happy Thanksgiving!

I had a wonderful first-holiday-away-from-home, enjoying the wonders of extended family this Thanksgiving season. Favorite tidbits were getting ALL the visting-with-grandparents time to myself, finally going to a Bed, Bath and Beyond, sleeping eight hours a night, eating home-cooked and non-dining hall food, and catching up with my life-long friend Leah!

Today consisted mainly of working on my final draft for my Medill project, which is actually coming along rather nicely. I just need an interview (really, just a sentence) with the Northwestern police that I'll get Monday morning, as soon as they'll let me talk to them, and then I'll read it outloud one final time.. and then submit it to the CMS system and be done! Except for my final presentation, which is just talking and easy to get ready.

Another incredible highlight of my weekend was talking on the phone to Marina, Diana, and Vika! Ahhh.. so much fun. I miss my friends a lot.. and it's fun to realize that but a great moment was leaving campus and realizing that I missed Chrissy, Suz, and Tricia too! I used more texting this weekend than I have since I've gotten here put together, probably. :)

I'm watching the ending of Return of the King with Papa on TV right now.. and remembering being obsessed four years ago.. I still know it by heart, though. Fun times..

"My friend.. you bow to no one!"

"And thus it was that the fourth age of Middle Earth began.. and the fellowship of the Ring, though eternally bound by friendship and love.. was ended. Thirteen months to the day since Gandalf sent us on our long journey, we found oursevles looking upon a familiar place.. we were home."

You know a story is a real classic when you find parallels to it in your life no matter when, where, or who you are.

Today I went to the University of Chicago and I successfully did not get mugged, shot, accosted, or (most importantly) LOST! Yes, I think Jackie is officially a grown up now that she can take the El, transfer to a different line, take a bus an unknown number of stops and pull the stop cord at the right time (go figure, American buses are SO complicated!!), walk to a campus she's never even seen before, successfully find the university's Student Center, interview her people, find a Starbucks to interview non-students AND find her way back. All by herself. To places she's never even seen before, let alone found. Yes, I am very proud of myself.

And I also have a lot of work I should be doing. I just wanted to brag a little bit about my success. I still can't believe I didn't get lost and I never got on the wrong train.. amazing.

Medill Final Project

The end of the quarter is rapidly approaching, which means it's time to write long papers, study for finals, and, of course, spend countless hours doing my final project for Medill. On Thursday, I spent no less than 6 frantic hours on my computer trying to come up with a good topic because in journalism, a good idea can make or break your story.

Today, though, after a good night's sleep and a talk with the RUF intern Randi, things started coming together. The story has to be something that is backed with numbers and something that is relevant today, an idea where I can access official studies and talk to official people. My idea? Campus crime and safety.

I hope to compare the crime rate at three universities- Northwestern, Loyola University, and University of Chicago- both with each other and with the crime rate in the areas surrounding the campuses, to see if a higher crime rate in the area around campus actually results in a higher crime rate on campus (although the logical answer is yes, my preliminary research has shown me that that is not the case, as the crime rate at Northwestern is actually higher than the crime rate at University of Chicago- and Evanston is certainly more peaceful than the south side of Chicago). I hope to interview students at all three universities, talking to them and figuring out how safe they actually feel and if their safety is proportionate to the statistical evidence.

My professor approved it, so I'm going to go ahead and go for it! Of course, some things can change along the way, as it always is with stories.. so we'll see how it goes.

So for a Saturday, today was a highly productive day. I'm off to dinner and then to see an on-campus showing of Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court!