Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Common Theme: We'll See

I don't usually post this early in the day because I generally don't have much to write about at 10am, given that my day has just barely started.  But today I'm making an exception because I am unusually tired.  I had the hardest time waking up this morning - apparently I was in a very deep sleep when my alarm went off.  There could be two reasons for this: 1.) I've been feeling overly phlegm-y for the last few days, and I rarely have breathing problems.  I'm guessing it's a reaction to the smoke in the air from the fires in Arizona or whatever, and so I took a Zyrtec to see if that wouldn't help clear me up.  Zyrtec made it's initial fortune on claiming to be the first non-drowsy allergy medication, and it is supposed to last for 24 hours, so of course I felt fine about taking it last night.  I rarely take allergy medication anyway because I don't really suffer from allergies aside from maybe a couple of days a year at most. 2.) Phoenix was up around 3:45am and moving around the house.  I take his collar off when I'm at home with him, but I always wake up when he wakes up in the middle of the night because of his history of digestive problems and I'm fearful of him having massive diarrhea in the house during the night.  Because we have a doggy-door, I'm not as vigilant about getting up with him, but it was weird when I heard him go outside and not come in within a few minutes.  So I walked downstairs and he was just sort of standing at the back door.  Then he left the door and walked towards the side of the house that has the doggy-door and so I stopped and listened for him to come in, but he didn't.  So I opened the back door to see what was going on and he came in, licked me, and followed me upstairs and back into bed.  It was rather strange.  I was never fully awake for all this, but I suppose that it may have messed with my REM sleep schedule and thrown it off by an hour or so.  Anyway, I feel like a zombie today.  Not really awake at all.  I wanted SO BADLY to be able to call in sick to work and then just get up later for school, but I don't have that option and I cannot afford to pull a dumb stunt like that since I need my job like trees need sunshine.  So I'm on coffee #2 (I only drink about half a cup at a time) and not feeling much different.  I'll get some schoolwork done while I'm here today, but I'm already just a smidgen ahead of assignments and lacking the books to read for Criminology so I'm not going to stress out too much about schoolwork after work and school today.  I'll take Phoenix and Nali down to the park and let them run around for a few minutes, feed Phoenix and crawl right back into bed.  I'll probably sleep for a few hours and wake up and move around for a couple hours and go back to bed, but at least when I wake up tomorrow I'll feel normal.  Or more normal than I feel today.

Aside from extraordinarily sleepy, I'm beginning to rethink the Peace Corps idea.  I am still planning to submit my application (if I ever get it finished), but I'm all amped up on school right now, and the possibility of staying in school and furthering my academic career and moving towards a real, every day career in Forensic Anthropology (or the like) is really exciting.  Obviously this may change when my school schedule changes, and when I take Anatomy in the fall and presumably almost fail it, but right now I'm excited.  I want to keep working on the Sociology classes to get that Soc degree with the emphasis on Criminology.  That's about as far as I want to go in that particular direction, but if I have that in addition to my Anth degree, I have a better shot at getting into a decent grad school and that is a way cool thought.  I don't know how far I really want to go in school, but right now the path is towards a PhD in Forensic Anthropology.  I think.  I don't think I could handle med school for a Doctorate in Forensic Pathology, but you never know.  Either way, the thought of staying in school for the next 10 years makes me feel like I have some purpose or some drive to keep on waking up each day and going through the motions.  When I go to bed each night, I go to bed with a sense of satisfaction - that I got through the day, did what I needed to do, did it well (I'm an exceeds expectations kind of person when it comes to school), and can do it again.  I haven't felt that way in almost 10 years.  When I got my first couple of quizzes back in class yesterday and I'd gotten 5/5 points (that's not saying much - it's a 1000 level course), I felt the same sense of pride I used to feel in myself when I got the highest grade in my class on a test (which I did several times in EMT school, but that feels like eons ago and I'm not sure it counts) in high school.  I am working hard, and I am studying, which I could probably get by without doing (and have in the past), and I like seeing the results.  It's a much more positive feeling than the disappointment I feel in myself when I don't do as well, or I don't study like I should have, or I put off the studying to the point where it doesn't get done at all.  I'm not entirely sure the exhaustion and the lack of relaxing time is worth it, but I'm going to keep doing it as long as I can because I would rather feel good about myself and have a sense of self-worth than be out there proving to the world and to myself that I'm not able to meet my own expectations.

When I got in to work this morning (with bike) I had an email from my boss saying that now that summer's here we need to review the dress code, with the dress code attached.  I'm pretty good about following dress code but I'm getting lazy since I'm going to school after work and I don't have enough clothes to sufficiently mix and match for 5 days straight each week, plus I haven't put away my last bajillion loads of laundry, and it's all piled on top of two laundry baskets so it's extra hard to come up with outfits since most of my clothes are all wrinkled.  But the big one is that I've been wearing flip-flops every day (they're not my crappy ones, they're nice-ish.  With sequins) because I've been meaning to get over to TJ Maxx and get some decent work-appropriate shoes that I can wear all the damn time but I keep making excuses for not going and getting them.  I feel so crunched for time what with my body's expectation of like 10 hours of sleep each night for me to function correctly, and I want to be at home with Phoenix as much as possible.  But I'll figure out how to make it work.  Since tomorrow's the halfway point of my week and I need to get canned dog food anyway, maybe I will just bite the bullet and go shoe shopping too.

I feel like I'm not doing a very good job writing how I'm feeling, at least not lately.  I find that school is draining most of what little extra energy I had to write with, and school is my priority, so I'll try to do better about balancing my time so that I have something of substance written every day, and not just an account of my day.  Although, when I write about the things that happen to me each day, I do write a little about how I felt when things happened, so maybe I'm not doing as horribly as I think.

Okay, time to get some Criminology work done.  So far, I've got an A and I'd like to keep it that way.  I may write more later tonight when I get home and have slept a little, but we'll see.

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