I have to say that I have loved my grad school experience so far.  I am constantly amazed at how drastically my day to day life has changed over the course of a few days time.  I went from my last day of work on a Saturday into orientation the following Monday.  My life hasn’t been the same since.  I have loved everything about the experience, even though at times I might gripe, I am honestly the happiest I have been in a long time.  I come out of every class a little bit more confident than the last and I have gotten the hang of the work load in 6700.  The only thing lacking in my experience right now is actual literature.  I hear other GTAs discussing books that they are reading and I really miss that aspect of my college experience.  I know it will come later and that it would honestly be too much for me to handle at this point, but that doesn’t make me miss it any less.  I, like Conor, have also struggled to maintain a certain balance between school work, teacher work, and personal fun.  I feel like I have had many years to develop strategies to keep everything afloat (the busier, the better for me), but I have never experienced a work (and fun) load as heavy as I have in the past few weeks.  I hope the work (and the fun) continue because I honestly wouldn’t trade either. Well maybe I would trade HotEL, because it is basically like learning a foreign language, but I know I will come out better for having gone through it.

I am very much the type of person that if I can do something other than what I am suppose to be doing I will do it. This blog post is an example within itself; I have promised my kids I would have the notes on their rough drafts by tomorrow and I have plenty of reading for 6700 tomorrow, yet here I am.

That being said, you can not necessarily pick when something is going to occur in your life. I’m slowly becoming involved with this guy who is somewhat perfect. He is handsome, has money, and we get a long well so he meets all the criteria on my wheel of vanity. He likes to party way too much, but so do I so its not an issue I can really hold against him. And strangely enough he is not turned off by my ability to make any situation awkward.

At this point you are probably thinking: He is making an academic blog post to gush about his new relationship, and you are partially correct. But my real grievance with the situation is the imbalance that I am currently facing. It is easy to say that work and academics come first but in practice in often becomes all-consuming. I want to be able to explore all aspects of my life without feeling guilty that I am neglecting others. My new romantic involvement seems superfluous to probably the entire audience this post will reach, but it is important to me. I want to be the well-rounded person who is able to keep up academically, teach two classes, hold a part-time job on the weekends, and maintain a healthy social life but I am starting to realize that not everyone can be Rory Gilmore.

There is not necessarily a solution to this problem besides make more time, sleep less, or do not date boys outside of the English department but I am fully taking advantage of the colloquial nature of this blog to make my first post an airing of grievances I have about my personal schedule, regardless of the fact that it is only week three of the semester. And I have a feeling that, much unlike the popular support campaign, it does not get better.