Reverb 10.29: Defining Moment.

December 29-- Defining moment.  Describe a defining moment or series of events that has affected your life this year. 

I spent agonizing afternoons looking for the dress that simply stated "I am young and fresh (and a little stylish, to boot!) but I am also ready to face this world as a new professional who acts with maturity and resolve." And I found the dress: a beautifully structured cotton dress with modest neckline, gorgeous bold watercolor floral print, a cute bright yellow belt, and pockets.  All dresses should have pockets. 

And for all that searching, the little gem sat on a hanger in my room for 6 weeks because I vowed I would not even consider wearing it until the event for which it was purchased. 

May 17, 2010 came, and I slid the dress over my recently tanned shoulders and a body that had too long been away from the gym or trails.  And then immediately slid a too-big one-size-fits-most black robe right over that beautiful dress, put my round head in a square hat adorned with a salmon pink tassel that clashed with the intense hues so carefully chosen weeks ago. I covered feet that had figuratively and literally run miles and miles over the last two years with a fabulous pair of brown kitten heels and in the blink of an eye, I had taken no more than 20 steps across a dramatically lit stage in Northrup Auditorium at the University of Minnesota, accepted a scroll and alumni gift, and quickly found my seat amongst dozens of other 30 second graduates of the University of Minnesota School of Public Health.  

For years I had been joking that I was going to put the MPH in 'triumph' and, in fact, you readers have heard the joke many many times (sorry).  But walking across that stage defined what this year has been all about: the passage from one stage of life to the next.  

And looking fabulous doing it.

By the Numbers: Completing My Masters Degree

6: percent of the US population with a Masters Degree.

0.00000000322: percent of the US population that is me.

19: Years I have spent in formal school.

19: Years I have spent in public schools (woo!).

6: Years I have spent in higher education.

12: Number of times I have moved residences in 6 years of higher ed. This number makes me terribly excited to plant some honest roots in the near future.  Transient living is for the birds.

2: Years spent in graduate school. 

54: Credits completed in graduate school.

4,652: Number of complete and total meltdowns in graduate school-- complete with wailing, uncontrollable tears, hyperventilation, assuming the fetal position, throwing of papers and/or flash drives, red-wine self-medication, and desperate phone calls to my mother.  

9: Number of months spent securing IRB approvals, analyzing data, writing, graphing, editing, re-writing, re-graphing, emailing, revising, and presenting my Masters project.

43: Pages in my final project.

38: Slides in my defense presentation.

45: Minutes in my defense presentation.

5: Minutes spent by my committee 'deliberating.'

0: Number of revisions to make to my project before final submission to the School of Public Health.

17: Number of people I mass-texted this message to on Tuesday, October 19, 2010: PASSED.

0: Experiences like finally earning your Masters of Public Health. 

I definitely put the MPH in triumph this time.

De-fense! De-fense!

 "Coming to a cramped conference room near you, October 19, 2010...

A thriller two years (and a little extra, but who's counting) in the making...

An effort filled with blood, sweat, and tears (but mostly tears)...

An example of triumph over Stata, PowerPoint, and Logic Models...

The story of one woman's journey from falsely hopeful undergraduate to totally exhausted, semi-employed graduate student boiled into 30 minutes of action packed graphs and video screen captures...

Starring a committee of three individuals with near total control over our protagonist's potential future...

And the ever charming, ever witty, ready to graduate Mugwump.

When you learned your alphabet in Pre-K, you never knew the most important letters would be...

MPH." 

Read it in that movie announcer voice.  Then it actually sounds pretty bad-ass. 

Alphabet Soup

So sorry for the long delay in postings.  In the famous words of my sister, who was once appalled that she had been asked to help out at the house after earning her first part time job, "Well, I worked all day!"

That's right, kiddies, the ModMug is a working girl.  And oh boy does that wipe a kid out.  Oof dah.  But I do do do love it.

The real news... the juicy good stuff is.... I graduated (sorta)! I still have to defend that thesis, but let's not talk about that right now.

So, sooner rather than later it will be Modern Mugwump, MPH.  Yes please.  And the only thing I keep thinking is how do I get some more letters after that comma?  I think I might be addicted to higher ed.

Knowing Someone Has Walked in Your Shoes

Literally 2 minutes ago, my sister and I were discussing thesis writing and setting goals for completion and she said to me "Don't forget to reward yourself.  Go for a walk, talk to a friend, take a shower."  

Shower as reward? So grad school.* 

I know she's been here.

*There has been more than one occasion in the last two years that I had no idea when the last time I had taken a shower had been.  Guh-ross.

"What Have You Been Up To, Katie?"

This is the only way I know how to respond to that question:

 tabulation of m1cat20 

    m1cat20 |      Freq.     Percent        Cum.
------------+-----------------------------------
 0: No data |        146       53.28       53.28
   1: 1-20% |         33       12.04       65.33
  2: 21-40% |         11        4.01       69.34
  3: 41-60% |         20        7.30       76.64
  4: 61-80% |          2        0.73       77.37
 5: 81-100% |         62       22.63      100.00
------------+-----------------------------------
      Total |        274      100.00

. tab1 m1cat50

-> tabulation of m1cat50

    m1cat50 |      Freq.     Percent        Cum.
------------+-----------------------------------
          0 |        203       74.09       74.09
          1 |         71       25.91      100.00
------------+-----------------------------------
      Total |        274      100.00


Love you all!  See you on the flip side of the Masters! :D

An Ode to You, 3M

Oh, 3M, how you have blessed my thesis-writing life with your highlighter with the red flags right in the marker itself.  I think I am in love.

Please Don't Feed the Grad Students

There is a little gem my institution of higher education seemed to leave off their recruitment brochures: grad school makes you eat like an animal.*

Here are a few of the recent food/beverage pairings I have made or witnessed in the last few weeks:
1.  Coffee and buttered popcorn.
2.  Surly Cynic and chocolate chip cookies
3.  Coffee and lime chips
4.  Hershey's mini chocolates and lime chips
5.  Chocolate milk and cucumbers
6.  Sushi and a Shirley Temple
7.  Milk and turkey slices (I was out of bread, give me a break)
8.  Dry cereal and coffee
9.  Pomegranate/mango juice and Everlasting Gobstoppers

When's graduation?


*There's an awful lot of stuff not on that brochure, actually.  Grad school makes you fat, grad school makes you think everyone should know Rose's Theorem, grad school makes you think that a complete work day can be only 3 hours long, grad school makes you obsessive and easily bothered, and grad school has all the favorite side effects of most advertised medications (tremors, eye twitching, uncontrollable itching, upset stomach, headaches, inability to pay attention in meetings over 15 minutes, limited sleep patterns, red-eye, dry mouth).  

You're Never Too Old For an "Atta Girl!"

Sunny moments on a rainy day brought to this Mugwump by the following emails:


1. 4:09pm- 

The IRB: Human Subjects Committee determined that the referenced study is

exempt from review under federal guidelines 45 CFR Part 46.101(b) category

#4 EXISTING DATA; RECORDS REVIEW; PATHOLOGICAL SPECIMENS.

Study Number: 1003E79754

Principal Investigator: Kathryn Muehe

Title(s):

Evaluation of Public Health Emergency Training and Simulation

________________________________________________________

This e-mail confirmation is your official University of Minnesota RSPP

notification of exemption from full committee review. 

This is a snippet of the email sent to anxious grad students to tell them that their request to do a study involving human subjects has been approved.  APPROVED!!  Even though I am not using any identifying data in my research, because it does involve the responses from human participants, it much meet Institutional Review Board standards for ethical use of data, beneficence, and confidentiality.  My process was actually really easy because it is a secondary data set, meaning the data was already collected (or would be collected whether or not I was doing the research) and there is no way I can discern the identities of participants given the data I will have access to.  Still, the IRB is sort of this mythical 'NO'-machine that makes everyone a little nervous.  It is hard to know exactly what they are looking for, whether you have sufficiently done your paperwork, etc.  If you do not appropriately sacrifice to the 'NO'-machine, they can seriously clog/halt/reverse/destroy project progress. 


2. 4:28 pm (In regards to the previous email)- 

YES!!! Start your engines!

-----Original Message-----

From: irb@umn.edu [mailto:irb@umn.edu]

Sent: Tuesday, April 06, 2010 4:09 PM

To: [Advisor E-mail Redacted]

Subject: 1003E79754 - PI Muehe - IRB - Exempt Study Notification

 From my advisor who I, admittedly, was painfully intimidated by at one point in my career.  But she has turned out to be the right balance of support and pressure to get things done.  


All I can say, after getting these emails today is: VROOOOOM! VROOOOOM! 

Do You See That Blip? That's Me, Getting Back on Radar!

Sorry for the long hiatus.  I had once vowed I would never do that again, but I did.  Luckily, there won't be a marathon review of what I have done in the last 2 weeks because it really hasn't been much.  In the interest of full (blog-appropriate) disclosure, I will let you all in on a little secret of grad school:  it messes with your mind.  Majorly. And there are honestly stretches of time that can last for weeks in which grad students feel as if they never have done anything right, and likely never will.  And at every turn someone tells you what could be better.  And in reality, this is a great time for constructive criticism-- maybe less so that undergrad, but still more so than the real world, grad school is a beautifully safe place to make mistakes.

So anyway, long story medium, I had a minor lapse in mental health.  And it was different from midsemester breakdowns of semesters past, as it was accompanied by a break up*, and then both of my roommates went on Spring Break vacations, and I was home alone at the apartment.  Until I jumped ship and did what every independent, courageous young adult would do in the same situation: I went home and cried to my mom.

And I am finally feeling like I didn't fall off the face of the planet.  And that I am making some progress.  And things are going to be fine.  I am back, literally to my blogging, and figuratively back to my life.

And holy crap, I have a lot to do.

*Yep.  I was dating.  Nope, I didn't write about him.  Not that it was bad or anything-- it was an excellent 10 week relationship that ended out of circumstance, not disinterest.  Despite my gift of gab and inability to filter, some things just don't get blogged about.

Calvin and Hobbes is the Cure for Graduate Burnout

Found a fit of extreme motivation because I am ready to be done with school.  Ready ready ready.  Right after I post some Calvin and Hobbes cartoons that perfectly express how I feel about school right now! 

This wish has been wished so many times...

I have been known to add over a page in length by using more complex words and sentence structures in a paper.

This is one of my favorite Calvin and Hobbes of all time.  

I think you can only get away with calling everyone a drip when you are 6.  

I have never considered math to be all that 'miraculous,' but if it got me out of doing some, I could cite this cartoon as major logical evidence.

Haha.. haa..  ha, heh... back to work. 

Logic Models: Making Chaos Make Sense

This is what my Saturday morning/early afternoon looked like, as I built a logic model for the program I am going to be evaluating for my Master's Project.  What I love about logic models is that the finished product is a very orderly set of color coded boxes containing succinct and direct text with arrows that connect only the directly related boxes.  Things make sense.  It is easy to follow.  It is easy to see gaps and mistakes.  It just takes the above-captured level of disorganization and resource chaos to make it happen.  Luckily, the process is made better by later color coding.  Life is always better with labels and color codes. 

You Better Be Moving

"Every morning in Africa a gazelle wakes up.  It knows it must move faster than the lion or it will not survive.  Every morning a lion wakes up and knows it must move faster than the gazelle or it will starve.  It doesn't matter if you are the lion or the gazelle.  When the sun comes up, you better be moving." 

- Maurice Greene

I was looking for some running inspiration this morning, and found this gem that I think speaks much louder to the other aspects of my life than running.  It is a good reminder that no situation gives us the privilege to stop trying, to stop working for something.  

Idioms for Idiots: Grad Student Edition, Vol. 1

To get the ball rolling is to get something started so it can begin to make progress.

I am not always a ball roller. . . sometimes I am ball nudger, moving things at whatever pace I choose and just enough so that the ball is in a slightly different spot than before so other people tend to stub their toes on it and go, "Huh.  Where did that come from?"  I also have a tendency to not nudge the ball until it must be nudged, and more regrettably sometimes a day or two after it was supposed to be nudged.  I would like to think time and deadlines are fluid, and open to interpretation.  But they really are not.

But, in the last semester of my graduate program, there was still a looming ball that had not even budged since I started the program.  The dreaded Masters Project ball, roughly the size of a VW van, I thought the Masters Project ball (from now on we will call this the MP ball) assigned to me must be defective, flat-bottomed.  Because it certainly wasn't rolling.  And for some reason, when I blew on it like it was a spoonful of hot soup, it just sat there all unmoving-like.

A few weeks ago, I panicked a bit about the MP ball.  For a few months I had been tripping on it and just walking around it, but with the final semester ahead of me, all of a sudden no matter where I turned I was running face-first into the behemoth that seems to separate the haves from the have-nots (as in I have a Masters degree, or I have not done anything worth my time and money in the last two years).  So, I launched a Hail Mary email to a professor, hoping she would be able to light path for potential projects, or at least throw a tantalizing enough flashlight down the dark cave of possibilities that I would chase it.  Turns out, she had the perfect project for me.  This is when the MP ball got a swift kick, shaking a little of the moss off of it, and making a few clumsy revolutions.

Fast forward to this week.  I met the staff that is currently working on the project.  Excellent people.  Exciting to be moving forward a little bit, but there is this wedge stuck at the base of the teetering MP ball-- putting together my committee.  It is sort of a no-no to start much by way of your project without getting all the paperwork done.  Which means having 800 signatures, timelines, approvals, exemptions, and a detailed map of your toeprints.*

Talk to academic advisor: check.
Secure non-program faculty: check.
Get a project advisor: as of 2 hours ago, check!

To say, at this point, that the ball is rolling is an understatement.  I should be up for exempt IRB review, which is a good thing, and my staff is super excited to have me on board and get started.  Not to mention that in addition to being asked to publish by August, my project advisor thinks defense in June is not only doable, but should be accomplished (as in, "Katie, I really see no reason why you shouldn't be defending this in June.  are you getting married?  Going to Aruba for a month? No? Then June is now your expected date of defense.")

The MP ball is hurtling uncontrollably towards degree completion, adulthood, and (at least temporary**) release from the academic world.  This is extremely exciting, although I have already picked estimated dates of mid-semester meltdowns and anticipate some late nights, high volumes of coffee and tea consumption, and a pleasant mix of Oh Shit! and Aha! moments.

Get ready, you are about to hear all about Emergency Preparedness modules, regression analysis, and logic maps.  I hope you can handle it.  Come to think of it, I hope I can handle it.

*Well, no. . . not really.  But kind of.  I think I may have promised my first born to someone along the lines. 


**If you ask me whether or not I have considered returning to school at some point for a PhD and/or Masters in Emergency Preparedness/Crisis Communication/etc, I will probably not tell you the truth because the truth makes me think I am an absolute glutton for punishment and clearly have no desire for things such as an income, my own living habitat, and social life.

9.4% of US Adults Hold a Masters Degree

You know why the percentage of US adults holding a Masters degree is so low?  It's a rough life.  Super rough, in fact.  Just listen to the morning I had, on the first day of classes for the semester no less.  

8:00 am: Alarm goes off.  Snooze.

8:05 am: Ditto.

8:10 am: Ditto.

8:15 am: Ditto.

8:17 am: Roll out of bed, check email.  Nothing important.  Lay back in bed.

8:40 am: Decide to make breakfast.  And not a wimpy Wheaties breakfast, either.  On the menu: fried eggs, toast, fresh mango and freshly brewed Guatemalan Peace Coffee.

8:58 am: Say "Good Morning" to Matt, Meredith, Al, and Ann at the Today Show and watch shamelessly, enjoying perfectly cooked eggs.  The mango is especially sweet today.  Mmmm!

9:30 am: Take longest, hottest shower known to man.  Scrub behind ears-- it is the first day, after all.

9:55 am: Check class schedule, print final document for class.

9:58- present am: Surf Facebook, update Google Calendar, blog, read NY Times online and curse them for entertaining the thought of charging online readers a subscription fee, watch a viral video sent via Facebook Chat, sip coffee, check bus schedule, think about getting dressed.

It's probably fair to say that only 9.4% of us can truly handle mornings like this.  I mean, it's not for everyone.

Disclaimer:  I am very well aware that this is about to change.  You could leave rude comments about how I am a selfish, unaware young adult and don't know what it really means to work.  Which may not be wholly false, but then I expect I will see you at 4 am finishing papers and cramming for exams.  Let me have my day, please.  It has been such a beautiful morning and at 10:39 am, I love that I am still not wearing any pants.  

Paper Writing: Pushing Every Boundary You Ever Thought You Had Set

Physical Boundaries

1. The Gut: I have recently discovered that my stomach does not like to be left out of any event, including paper writing. The harder my hands are working to type things up, the harder my stomach thinks it needs work. It's favorite wartime victims? HoneyComb cereal, mini marshmallows (mmmm mallows), Lime Tostitos and salsa, chocolate, and pickles. Not usually all at once, but the next three weeks may test that boundary as well.*

2. Amount of Sleep Required To Function: Very little, actually. Now, I am not staying up all night to write papers because I value my mental and physical health too much to do that unless it is an emergency, but I am constantly outlining, editing, rearranging, and creating tables in my head. All day. Even when I should be sleeping. I have discovered that the only way to ensure myself some solid sleep is to roast myself into a beautiful coma via electric blanket. Set the dial to [H] and eyelids to closed and. . . I dream in data analysis code.** Okay, not an ideal dream, but at least I am sleeping.

3. The Body is a Vessel Built for Caffeine Storage: An entire pot of coffee? Child's play. However, I do refuse to use anything harder than espresso shots, and even 2 or 3 shots of espresso in a hot beverage is about my max.

Mental Boundaries

1. Multi-tasking: Two tasks at once? That's it?! Pick your knuckles up off the ground, caveman, and learn to really multi-task. For instance, it is 10:50 am on a Tuesday and I am currently engaged in the following:

• Listening to GIS disease tracking lecture
• Paper crossword puzzle
• Harvesting Farmville crops
• Updating assignment due dates on the Google Calendar
• Shopping at rei.com

2. Creativity: There is no bounds to creative ways to eat, sleep, get out of a pickle, create a pickle for someone else, communicate with friends, etc. I also find that my mind is so mumbo-jumbled, that the things I say make less sense, but people think I am being funny. I just roll with it.

3. Memory: If it isn't related to the following items, I have forgotten it:

• Rotaviral vaccination in developing countries
• Mandatory AED placement in Hennepin County
• Official University of Minnesota email as an effective communication method to inform students about H1N1 preparedness
• The risk to human rights by allowing water to be treated as a for-profit commodity

Emotional Boundaries

There are currently no emotional boundaries, because the last three weeks of a grad school semester strip the student of all signifiers of emotion, except tears. There is no patience, no sympathy, no empathy, no epic joy, a little epic heartbreak, little compassion shown, tons of sarcasm, heaps of dramatic and heavy sighs, and many tears. Except, luckily I have crossed into the realm in which there is no time to cry. Which is good, it frees up all the time I was spending sobbing to actually do some work.***

*I bet pickles with salsa could be good in someway. I'll let you know.

** So a lot of times when I am frustrated by irony, I will say "Jesus!" Rarely am I a "Jesus Christ!" exclaimer, but I do like "For christ sake." Okay, so then the other day I say someone else's blog in which they typed "Geezus" in place of what I assume is to be "Jesus" when used as an exclamation. So then I debated what to type here, where I eventually decided not to type anything. But, what is up with that? Like misspelling his name means you aren't using it in vain? Gimme a break. Jesus.

*** This could be interpreted as the most giant "I don't give a flip about anything else." This would not be wholly correct or wholly incorrect. Take it as it is.

What's In an Inbox?

Once upon a time, in a barren cold land far far away--called Fargo-- I was an RA. Also known as remedial parent/adult babysitter/do-gooder. I loved my job. Loved everything about it (almost) and wanted almost all of my residents to be my best friend, and a lot of them were. So, each year we wrote a newsletter article introducing ourselves in the fall. Now, I could have just written a standard "My name is Katie, I like puppies and ice cream blah blah blather." But I'm not that girl. And I truly believe you learn a WHOLE lot more about a person by what they're not saying: the friends the keep, the way they act, and the stuff they have. So I used to introduce myself by giving my residents a literary tour of my room and highlight things that I owned that were important or significant and why, letting them get to know me that way. I thought about doing that tonight, but I think it would be cooler on here with photos so I am saving it in my idea box for the next time I have too much creativity but no real structured idea.

Not wanting to abandon the whole idea though, I decided tonight I will give you a select tour of my email inbox. I pretty much live and die by my email-- I keep all my most important documents saved there, I use it as my calendar in some ways, I prefer to send work/school communication that way and I even talk to my best friend through email more than any other way even though we only live 25 miles apart, simply because you can send an email at 3am on a Tuesday, but she would skin me if I called "just to, you know, chat" at that time.

Buckle your safety belts, and welcome to @gmail.com:

207 Total Messages

I almost never let it get this full. I love to archive my mail or sort it into the little color coded labels (which I custom made-- every single one of them). The fact that my inbox spills on to a third page is indicative of the true fact that when I am stressed the VERY first thing to get dropped is organization. This is a poor coping mechanism, as disorganization is stressful. I am developing a coping mechanism to deal with my failed coping mechanism-- it isn't refined yet, but usually involves chocolate.

7 Unread Messages

I never leave unread messages. Except it made the blog more interesting if I did just for this part. I am going to check them now.

Of the 7 Unread:

• 2 were NYTimes News Alerts. I want a job where I read the news all day/every day from sources all over the world. I would excel at it.
• 3 were spam. Deleted.
• 1 was a Facebook invite for a running event. Save and star.
• 1 was from DirecTV. It is probably most akin to a very bad dog coming home with it's tail between its legs. They were naughty, and got FULLY reprimanded tonight.

Highlights from the Other 200 Inbox Cloggers

• Subject: Happy Hour Tonight! I super loved that the time stamp on this was 9:02am. Because this week, all the SPHers are thinking about drinking as soon as we wake up. On the plus side, we are quickly sliding in to a less stressful zone (we think).
• Subject: One more thing you could try I asked my professor one very simple, benign question about median splitting when you turn a continuous variable into categorical, and 6 (SIX) emails later, she had given me yet "one more thing" I could try on my dataset that "might be kind of neat." If I do it, can I have an A? I mean, it's something you could try and it might be kind of neat.
• Three new friend requests on Facebook! I am cyber-popular. And not sure how I should feel about it.
• Two returned, graded papers. Sometimes I call these day-brighteners. Sometimes I feel like they are some higher power, channeled through red ink (yes, I have a professor who does in-text comments in red type), telling me to join the circus. And I think, too late, whatever-higher-power-you-subscribe-to, I already JOINED the circus. I am that stinkin' elephant balanced on the little box holding a bouncy ball in my tail, working for peanuts. Luckily, this week my returned assignments were day-brighteners. They were much needed and appreciated.
• Newspaper articles I sent myself to streamline reading. I think I need to learn about Google Reader, and what it can do for me, because I email myself stuff to read all the time, and it is kind of sad to see 6 messages in a row that list the sender as "me."
• 4 password requests. This one cracks me up because I should just use one password, but its hard to do. Some have to be 6 characters with 1 capital and 1 number. Some must have a special character (you know, they kind you swear with: @%I*#), some can have NO special characters. No spaces. No numbers. Cannot use the answer to your security question in your password. Cannot have repeating characters. Cannot be in foreign language. Must be reference to early childhood. Must be written in Webdings. Must reference at least one Prince song. Cannot be be written in "Elmer Fudd." Entering password is not an appropriate password. So you see, I struggle to remember my passwords, and writing them down is sort of not the point of something only you can know, so I always have to click that [Forgot your Password?] button at secure websites. So embarrassing.

Okay loves, it's tomorrow now. Today is already yesterday and tomorrow is today so I have to get some sleep so when I get up tomorrow I can go to work today.

I apologize that this was random and disjointed. I am also feeling that way. I also had 6 cups of coffee today.

I also apologize that entries are a bit biting, sarcastic, and defeatist. Of course, I know you guys know this is a phase, it is me coping with stress, and I am sort of at a point where little things that shouldn't bug me do. Stress makes me appreciate and seek to maintain status quo. I promise to return to the more positive self that I actually am (not that this isn't me). In the meantime, thanks for putting up with my "grad school is hard" pity party. I don't mean to take it out on you. Thanks, friends.

I Am Typing You This Weblog From Inside a Lion

The title is a reference to the Shel Silverstein poem "It's Dark in Here."

My "lion" is a pile of homework, but I just wanted to share a little nugget with you. In grad school, you gotta rely on the little things to get you through or you will never make it. So, everyday I find something little to be thankful about, and its usually something funny because it makes my mood better to laugh at myself a bit. My 'get-thru-Thurs' thought today is:

"I bet Dr. Phil would find my life totally boring. Oh, thank god for that."

Warning: This is a Bit "Stream of Consciousness-esque"

My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning. And yet I am happy. I can't figure it out. What am I doing right? -- Charles Schulz

It's a curious thing, the measurement of happiness. Sometimes I catch a toothy smile reflecting at me in the mirror, and ask "What do you have to be so happy about?" And on the surface, it seems like maybe not much.

I have no job, and thus no income, but still have bills. I eventually will owe back to the government all of the money I have borrowed from them to be in school. The amount of money I owe them is more than the total worth of all of my possessions combined. I "work" well over 40 or 50 hours per week on school and internship things, and when I am not working on those things I am thinking about them. They stress me out, which is not always physically or mentally healthy. I do not see friends and family as often as I like, it has been almost a year since I had the chance to visit Fargo, I have not been able to see my out-of-state grandparents in a painfully long time. I eventually have to look for a real big-kid job in a crapper of an economy. I am in a class that makes me feel stupid- and that almost never happens. And the homework I am doing is researching babies dying from diarrhea. I mean, if that's not reason enough to think about new career choices, I do NOT know what is.

Ooof, that list of less than happy things is totally not short. But tonight, I shirked homework responsibilities (a little) to watch Grey's Anatomy with my roommates, who I adore. And then I made chocolate chip cookies, including one the size of my face for my roommate's boyfriend. And I don't go out often anymore, but I appreciate the times that I do a whole lot more. And I don't know when the next Sunday dinner at my parent's house will be, but I am so excited for it because it is always the perfect rest and relaxation I need, even if only for a few hours. Today, for the first time, I ran without my headphones in. The first mile totally sucked. My pace was all over, I couldn't concentrate, it was awful. But the last 2 miles-- so cool. I got to enjoy all my favorite parts of my neighborhood and tune into the dog park, and the honking traffic, and the hippie playing guitar at the lake, and kids jumping in the leaves. All while doing one of my newly favorited activities.

On the surface, I think most people would think I am crazy for allowing myself to be in the situation I am in (unemployed, nearly-broke, frazzled single grad student). But somewhere, even where I don't know, there's a secret to this because I am ridiculously happy (and I have not had a beer tonight either). That's so cool.

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads. -- Albert Camus

Good night, loves.

The Perfect Gentle Nudge/Kick in the Butt

I usually refuse to allow myself to cry over things that are trivial or that I have done to myself (the latter being most of the things that bring me to tears). And of course, it all builds up.

Today I got this email, and it definitely brought me to tears, but at the same time was a great "There's nothing to cry about here" reminder. And I got over myself and got to work.

To: Katie

From: [Removed]

Subject: first notice

The Caribou Mafia wants you to know it expects you to be working on your thesis.

Make a group of opinionated ol' men lattes for months, and they will return the favor by leaving decent tips. And by looking out for you. Thanks guys.