-5

I'm guessing I won't be good at keeping this up, but I want to try posting every week at least up to and during my trip. Right now I'm at -5, meaning I have five weeks until departure, when I'll start counting up to ten.

I'm planning to buy my plane ticket today. I found a good one online, but it's through a different website than Satish, who I've been in touch with at the NGO, recommended to me. I'm waiting for the people at the site he recommended to give me a call and see if they can get me a better rate on the same ticket.

I also need to get into motion getting my visa today. It shouldn't take long, but I keep forgetting to grab my passport, which is necessary for the process.

Tonight I have a presentation for one of my term papers, and yesterday I submitted my final exam for my terrible statistics class (terrible because we didn't actually learn any statistics). That means the big items on my to-do list are slowly getting whittled down:

• Public Admin term paper presentation
• Comparative Development term paper presentation
• submit Public Admin term paper
• submit Comparative Development term paper
• Public Admin final exam
• Stats final exam
• grade Russian Politics final exam
• buy plane ticket to India
• get visa for India
• run half marathon

Okay, very slowly. Ugh. It will be better soon.

UPDATE: Plane tickets are booked! Presentation for tonight is ready! Here's the wiki article for the city where I'll be staying: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazaribagh

India

I've barely used this blog since I started it, and I haven't actually told anyone about it. It is going to turn into an India blog, though. That's one of the things I'm most excited about regarding my imminent trip to India for an internship this summer.

It's looking like I'll be gone 10 weeks, May 6-July 15. That way, I'll have enough time to be useful at the NGO (http://www.nbjkusa.org/), but I'll still be back in Kalamazoo before my apartment lease ends and I'll have time to move out. I know very little about what it's going to be like, but here's the little I know so far:

• I will be living in a flat by myself for the first 3 weeks or so, until my friend Helen comes and moves in.
• Our primary form of transportation will be bicycles.
• I will have internet at my house. (Yay!)
• There will be plenty of creepy crawly insects. Good thing I got used to that in Senegal.
• My plane ticket will probably cost me more than my entire 10-week stay.
• The state I'll be living in is called Jharkhand. I'll fly into Ranchi and then it will be a 2-hr drive to the place I'll stay.
• The trip there will be about 2 days.
• I'll get there during the unbearably-hot-and-dry season and will get to experience the beginning of the unbearably-hot-and-wet season before I leave.
• My flat will not have hot water (which shouldn't be an issue at all since 1. I got used to that in Senegal, and 2. it will be unbearably hot out).
• We will not decide what I'll actually be doing for my internship until I have been there for a week.

More to come.

End of Semester Rush

I'm trying to decide whether the end of semester is worse or better than the end of a quarter. I'll definitely say it's more frustrating. At K (Kalamazoo College, where I did undergrad), the 10-week quarters were short enough that there wasn't time for too many, too long assignments. I guess part of that was also that it was undergrad rather than grad school.

Now, on semesters and as a grad student, each class has a final exam, a final paper, or both. Exams I'm pretty fine with: get a group together, have each person be responsible for writing something up about each thing we're supposed to know, get together one or two days to study, and ace the exam. Papers I'm also fine with, but they take WAY more effort. This semester, I have two final exams and two term papers between my three classes. Plus two presentations (of term papers) and one smaller paper which is due...in 8 hours.

Papers are frustrating because they're long--18-22 pages--and the give-and-take between research and writing gets me caught up sometimes. You're supposed to start with a research question. So, for example, "Why is the income distribution in Namibia so inequitable?" Okay, so now I need to research Namibia and equity. Different theories of equity. Namibia's Gini coefficient. What would an equitable distribution of income look like? Is the information I'm finding in my research relevant? What's my thesis? Do I know enough to come up with a thesis? What am I doing with my life???

And after hours and days of sitting at a coffee shop with noise canceling headphones playing a Ratatat Pandora station and thinking about little other than Namibia, I eventually have to call it good because my paper is due and I am totally dissatisfied with it but don't even know how to fix it. And then I get an A, so I forget how frustrating the process was and celebrate.

Anyways, I'm getting ready to dive into all that again, only this time I also have a fair amount of TA work to do, I'm running a half marathon in the middle of the madness, and pretty immediately after it all ends, I'm leaving for India! Which is really exciting! And I can't wait for a new adventure! And I'm not even that nervous about it because after going to Senegal for 6 months, spending 10 weeks in India seems like not a big deal!

The only hard part is being away from my family for too long and having to do the whole long-distance relationship thing again. I'm pretty positive it will be easier this time than when I went to Senegal (better relationship to start with, I'll have internet at my house, it's a shorter time apart, and we know exactly when we'll see each other again), but it still pretty much sucks.

Things that make me too stressed to sleep:

1. The fact that I am too stressed to sleep.
2. Knowing that my dog that I have had half my life is probably going to be put down before I can see her again.
3. The fact that the paper I've been working on is due tomorrow evening and I'm still not totally clear on what I'm writing.
4. Feeling like I'm behind on training for the half marathon (my first!) that I'm running in a month.
5. Worrying that I might not get all A's this semester, and if not, getting into a PhD program will be harder.
6. Having my days broken up with a Skype meeting every day at noon, meaning it's hard to get solid periods of time to get work done.
7. Not getting much time to unwind with Jeff (the boyfriend) now that he's in the thick of coaching the girls soccer season.
8. Knowing that this lack of time with Jeff will last until I leave the country for 2-3 months this summer.
9. Not seeing my old friends enough and knowing that it's my fault for being out of touch.
10. Not knowing where I'll be spending my summer or how I will afford an unpaid internship abroad.
11. And again, the fact that I am too stressed to sleep.

Snapshot

I'm feeling very content right now, so I want to record this moment. This is what my life looks like these days:

It's a Sunday. I spent last night cooking and eating good food with good friends, drinking wine, playing games, and laughing a lot. Jeff and I came home around 1 and fell asleep, and slept in this morning. We made breakfast--blueberry pancakes, scrambled eggs, bacon, and coffee--and then cleaned up. Jeff iced his legs, which are sore from his 9-mile run yesterday morning. Now Jeff is curled up asleep next to me on the couch, soccer is playing on TV in the background, we're both under a blanket, and I'm doing a little work and procrastinating a little on my computer. I have a knitting project to work on if I get bored. It's snowy and beautiful outside.

I love where I am right now: cozy, warm, safe, and loved. And I love where my life is headed. I'm so glad to be in grad school and doing well. I'm excited to intern overseas this summer and get some field experience. I can't wait to move in with Jeff this summer and see where life takes us. I feel like I'm at the peak of a roller coaster, where I've worked hard to get where I am right now, and the momentum I've built up is about to pay off in a huge way.

Life is good.

Home Stretch

I'm trying to keep my cool. I just need to hang on one more week, and then this semester will be over.

Unfortunately, since I've been working pretty nonstop for several weeks already, I'm wearing a little thin. Hopefully I'll be able to get through things without any trouble, get A's on all my papers and exams, and feel like the end of this semester was worthwhile and successful.

Right now I just want to hide in bed until it's all over. Instead, I'm planning to go for a little run, take a shower, and then spend the day working at a coffee shop. Or maybe at K's library. I've been avoiding studying at K's library, since I'm not a student there anymore and I feel silly for wanting to use a different school's library, but it really is peaceful and lovely and well-lit and comfortable, and there are fireplaces and armchairs.

We'll see. I know I'll get my work done eventually and it will feel great. For now I'm mentally and emotionally exhausted and just want it to be over.

Ready...go!

I'm a Masters student and a TA. So, in an ideal world, I would have the challenge of balancing my tutoring and grading with my own school work. In the real world, that is the case, plus I have to find a new place to live (my neighborhood has gotten too dangerous), find time to eat (and cook!), make time to meet with my partner for a group project, keep in touch with family and friends who don't live close by, and spend time with my boyfriend and other friends in town. Not to mention those other chores like working out, cleaning the house, doing laundry, etc.

Right now, the semester is coming to a close (time flies!!) and Thanksgiving is rapidly approaching. I know I won't get any work done when I'm visiting family in California for Thanksgiving, so I have to work extra hard now to finish as much as humanly possible before I leave town so I won't be completely swamped when I get back.

I just finished grading 60 exams for the class I TA. Next, shower, lunch, group meeting, homework for Thursday, emails to professors, chauffeur the boyfriend (his name is Jeff, by the way) to his class since he doesn't have a parking pass, and possibly go rock climbing. And that's just to stay caught up. I need to start getting ahead.

That means, in my "spare time" I need to be reading scholarly articles to work on my 20-page research paper for my political development class; researching prices, mental health, and NGOs in Senegal to get going on my 20-page development project design for my development methods and skills class; come up with a presentation critiquing an evaluation of two development projects in Azerbaijan for my monitoring and evaluation class; and reading and critiquing an evaluation to write my 20-page evaluation critique paper for my monitoring and evaluation class.

To sum up, that's 3 20-page papers and one 30-min presentation on top of my normal homework and TA responsibilities, and it's all coming to a head in the next 4.5 weeks. So I'm trying to pretty much finish in the next two weeks. Yeah right.

Anyways...off I go!