Big Picture

What? I'm blogging again and it hasn't even been a full month. Is this real?

Surprisingly enough, I felt like blogging today. The real surprise here is that I feel like blogging seeing as how I just got home (spent the last 13.5 hours on campus). I'm feeling mentally drained, and yet revitalized at the same time. Sometimes in graduate school, you work on all these little things separately and you forgot about the big picture. Seeing that big picture again? So nice.

I had meetings, classes, and clients all day. Ended the day with a three-hour, live-graded report writing session with my group (3 classmates) and professor. Three hours. Despite being exhausted and occasionally getting distracted, I really enjoyed this three-hour report writing session. Who knew? Learned a whole bunch of tricks for Microsoft Word (yessssss!) and learned about things I had never considered before. Serif fonts vs. non-serif fonts, the importance of letterhead and fancy paper, precision of decimal points (obviously you round to one digit after the last nine, even if that means that number is longer than the ones around it), how Ms./Mrs./Miss differ, how to make good signature lines (mind = blown)....the list goes on. I think my sister would enjoy much of the trivia that I learned during this report writing session.

I also had another good session with a client. I really thought that counseling was stupid, and that I would not enjoy it. Surprise....I really do enjoy it. And I think I'm not too bad at it. There is a certain art in getting people to tell you things that they haven't told anyone else. And getting clients to return homework (but for that I use plain old-fashioned bribery in the form of YouTube clips). Some days I wonder if I got anywhere, and some days I am just stunned by how successful I feel. I wouldn't say that today was particularly successful, but I learned more and saw that my client is making progress on some of his goals. It doesn't really get much more exciting than that.

We're coming up on the end of the semester, which likely means I'll have many more 14-hour days ahead (but no more than two weeks worth, so that's a plus?). Final projects and papers are due (and getting done--a paper AND a presentation for tomorrow, go me!) and everything is starting to wrap up for the semester. I alternate between a calm, relaxed feeling (some light at the end of the tunnel, I guess) and flat-out panic/hysteria. I was just talking to someone earlier about our ridiculous mood swings (super happy to extreme anger to tearful panic...in no particular order) but overall I'm really not feeling too bad this week--which is nice.

Whether I'll continue to feel okay will probably fluctuate with the day (and maybe even the hour) but I'm looking forward to the end of classes and being able to enjoy the holidays with my family :) No complaints here.