I'm still here!

School. You know how it is. This semester is nutty...but it's already almost midterm time! Come winter break, I have only one more semester of my undergraduate college career! Wowzers. Time flies, huh?

I'm taking a moment to write today because I've been thinking about it a lot lately AND I got two classes cancelled on what is typically my busiest day of the week. So I figured I could find some time for a nice little post.

Let me catch my self up before I get back to writing philosophical things...

I have a wonderful, magnificent, cute and loving boyfriend who I can most definitely say that I am head over heals in love with. As of a couple days ago we've been together for five months - five easy, fun, and surprising months that I wouldn't trade for anything else. I'm so excited about the future of our relationship...it feels like everything I've ever wanted and then a little bit extra. :)

I'm working on changing my relationship with food. I know that sounds random and strange, but something changed with me over the last summer and I'm not okay with it and it's reeeeeal hard to change. I just started eating what I wanted when I wanted and not caring about nutritional value...I just wanted things that satisfied my sweet tooth and I got really lazy with myself in caring about the choices of things I was putting into my body. It's like, I went to Costa Rica and ate beautifully for 5 weeks and enjoyed every minute of it, but somehow still turned a complete 180 as soon as I got home. And I didn't even seem to care! Until now. I'm trying to learn how to tell myself "no, you don't need it" again. I'm trying to find motivation to work out again, because I know how I should look and how I want to look and it wasn't what I let myself fall to over summer.

That being said, I signed up for my first 5k ever! It's here at my school on homecoming weekend (in TWO weeks!) and I mostly only signed up because I found out I wouldn't have to pay. But! It has given me motivation to keep running over the last week and the next couple weeks...let's hope I can hang on to the motivation after this race is over. My ideal goal - that I think I need to make less of an ideal and more of a reality - is to do a sprint triathlon. We'll see...

School is hard. But I'm still happy to be doing what I'm doing. My classes aren't bad this semester, just a lot of overlap and some real busy Tuesdays haha. Spanish is the tough one, but again, it's a challenge that I'm accepting willingly and happy to participate in because it's new and it's interesting and it's not easy for me. This is the first year I've taken an actual subject matter class (Literature) in the Spanish language and not been only learning the language. It's hard but I can feel my comprehension level rising at a satisfying rate. And I feel like it was the perfect class for me to transition into after Costa Rica, where I did a little bit of literature study. I wish I could speak more, but I think I'll get more of that in Linguistics next semester. I need to work on vocabulary, that's my real problem. I need to find time to practice and study the language more so that I can be at the level I want to be at.

I'm still helping in kindergarten...but the more I'm there this year, the more I've been thinking about the appeal of first grade. Don't get me wrong, I still love kindergarten. But some days I find myself thinking about the few days I spent in first grade last semester and how much I enjoyed it. I'm looking forward to doing some more observations at that level this year with a different teacher and seeing if I still see the same appeal in it.

My dad is doing a lot better...but I still worry about him. I'll find myself thinking about the possibility of something happening to him, or my mom, while I'm here at school...how I'd get home as quickly as possible, what I could do to help, etc...and I have to snap myself out of it. The cardiologist says everything looks great. But that isn't going to stop me from worrying, especially now that I'm not living in the house anymore. As much as I distance myself from my family, it doesn't mean I don't love them. It's taken me a while to realize it but my independence isn't in defiance of my family; it's just who I am, and who I am is partly a result of how well they raised me. I've always been a little independent in nature, but they helped me develop on that in an efficient and long-term way so that I could be as reliant on myself as I am now.

So that's that. I know I say it a lot, but I'm trying to get back into this. Homework load isn't too big this year...it's just a test of my time management skills. So if I can get some of that under control....I'll be back real soon. :)