Amoresse Cool in the Pool
This is more of a decompression post than anything else; the photo is pretty much my excuse to talk about my past week. But before I do, [please excuse the random glittery bits and the disastrous cleanup with the orangewood stick], here's a gorgeous royal blue creme. Almost jelly in finish, super easy to apply. In my limited experience, though, Amoresse is inconsistent: it's either fabulous or just tiresome. This one falls in the fabulous category.
I am so overwhelmed right now, I don't even know how to handle it. I mean, the only way to handle it is to work. Work constantly. Work consistently. Forgo sleep, exercise, the things that keep me sane. All in favor of work. And all to feel massively behind and incredibly stupid and practically illiterate.
My "job description" has me working about of 70 hours a week between teaching (20 hrs), my own coursework (30 hrs) and research (supposedly the BULK of my "job", which should account for at least 20 hrs a week). After my courses and my teaching responsibilities, where do I get the time to concentrate on what is supposed to make my career? (Um, where do I get the time to squish in a life?)
My courses this quarter have comparatively large workloads for an average graduate student. The secret about graduate coursework work is that you are graded fairly easily but the work is more challenging and there is far more intrinsic motivation to do well and to impress your peers and professors. It's not that I can't handle structural equation modeling: surprisingly enough, it feels intuitive to me... more intuitive than my "native" ANOVA (the psychologist's analysis of choice) and the double dose I've received of multiple regression courses. It's not as if 90% of my psycholinguistics course isn't practically review: my goodness, the lab writeups are a foregone conclusion. And it's not like colloquium has assignments past processing the information. But between this and that and the other things, I come home every day feeling like work is unending... feeling like the pile of papers I have to grade never diminishes... and that my research that has not progressed since the end of the summer...
It's just hard to breathe. Ironically, it's just hard to... think. This, friends, is the life of the mind. My mind, anyway. I knew it would be hard. I knew it would be this hard.
