Life: Lots of work, and a coming visitor

I’m already through the second week of Spring semester, amazingly enough. Ten graduate-level credits, sitting in on one additional class, and working ~15 hours per week has me fairly well overwhelmed. Actually it wouldn’t be quite so bad if I hadn’t come down with a cold in the middle of the first week. Oh well, back on my feet again, marching forth.

It’s been a while since I’ve been so very busy, and I can’t say I like it too terribly much. Thirteen class-hours per week plus an estimated 3 out-of-class hours per in-class-hour (39 hours) is over 50 hours/week already. Tack on work, a growing list of extracurricular activities, a bit of exercise, and not much is left for my precious lazy-time: blogging.

In very good recent news, my very lovely Spanish lady-friend is planning to visit in the end of March. She is finishing a Law degree in Spain and is considering further studies in the U.S. or England and using that as an excuse to come see me 🙂 and perhaps for the two of us to go to Los Angeles as well. She is a wonderful young woman, committed (at least for now) to using her education to help abused women and children, those who are, in her words, the most vulnerable. She also told me in a recent email that when she first met me in Bristol, she thought of me as an extraterrestrial, stepping out of my spaceship (my room) to observe from time to time and then going back to do research or analysis of the world. Somehow she found my alien activities attractive.

It’s an interesting juxtaposition though: between my view of myself in Bristol and that of myself in Missoula. There I accepted and enjoyed the position of an outsider committed to my studies; here I feel a pull toward fitting in to social cliques and occasional disappointment when I see that I’m not in a given group. There’s a bit of social insecurity here that didn’t come up for me in Bristol, and I think it’s mostly environmental (i.e. my surroundings are pressuring me to fit in, whereas in Bristol there was no such pressure).

But, I’m too busy to ruminate further, so for now I’ll just sit with and watch any perceived pressures or feelings of disappointment; and watch them dissolve into constituent parts, past fears, unnecessary hopes… eventually returning to ‘just breathing’ and the openness which blissfully accompanies it.