Mirror, Mirror

I've been in Denver for almost a year now. I go to school full time, I work two jobs, and I'm currently in the middle of moving to a new place. I've done well for the last year. I've gotten good grades, I've done well at my jobs, but as the classes have gotten harder, my stress level has gone up and now with moving adding to an already difficult quarter, the cracks are starting to show. For the first time, I'm not doing well in a few of my classes. I'm struggling with finding enough time to study. I'm struggling with feeling exhausted all the time. I go seven days a week. The snow day we had last Wednesday was the first full day I'd had off in a few months. The cracks are showing and I don't know how to fix them. I live in a stupidly expensive city. I can't afford to quit one of my jobs. I'm trying to graduate by next summer so I don't incur a ridiculous amount of debt and so I can actually start working. I mean, I'm 28. Most of my friends and fellow students around the same age have at least one associates degree and most have a bachelors. Me? I'm at my fourth college trying to get the associates degree I failed to get two years ago.

Future, What Future?

What do you do when you begin to wonder if you're truly cut out for the career path you've started down? What do you do when you begin to question everything that you've been striving for? It seemed so clear initially, everything made sense. But as time passes, it becomes less and less clear. I went for the more practical career, the one that was respectable and made sense. I've always loved animals, always been good with them. But the science of it all makes my head spin, makes it hard to enjoy what I'm doing. So I start to wonder, is it for me. And then I come back to, god, what a failure I would be again if I gave it up with just two semesters to go. But then, what does it say when I dread going back and trying to wrap my mind around all these complex procedures. I love animals, but is that enough? And more and more, I'm thinking not. I find the science interesting, fascinating even, but the understanding of it often eludes me.

Life Is Good

It's been going on two months since I last blogged I'm ashamed to say.  I could say that finals and all really got to me, but honestly it's more been the fact that I haven't been in the mood to just sit down and type.  But I have been pretty busy so that has definitely contributed to the lack of updates of any kind.  In any case, I successfully completed my first semester back at college with all A's which was super exciting.  I honestly don't think I've ever had that good of a semester at college ever.

In addition to successfully passing all my classes, I also passed the test I needed to get into the Veterinary Tech program on my first try.  That was a huge shocker for me.  I had to get a minimum score in four different

areas (Reading, Math, Science, and English) in addition to also getting a minimum comprehensive score of 60%.  The test cost ~$40 to take each time so I really wanted to pass it in two goes at the most.  I knew I could nail the Reading and English sections because those have always been super easy for me, but the math and especially the science would be more challenging.  Going in and taking the test, I was sure that I had failed it.  The science section turned out to be significantly harder than I had expected so I was sure that I hadn't made the minimum score I needed to pass.  But when I finished, lo and behold, I had passed with a 78.7% comprehensive score.  I will fully admit that I cried when I got back out to my car, I was so happy.  I also managed to freak my mom out accidentally when I called her as soon as I got back to my car and I was still crying a bit when she picked up.  She, of course, immediately thought something was wrong.  Whoops!

Doctors Against Down Syndrome - An Essay

Earlier this semester in my English class, I was given the assignment to write an argumentative paper.  We all got to choose our own subjects and me being me, I decided to go big and controversial; I decided I wanted to write about abortion.  From that first idea I slowly narrowed my topic down, going from aborting children with disabilities to focusing on Down syndrome to finally focusing on Down syndrome and how doctors handle telling parents that their unborn or newborn child has Down syndrome.  Doing the research was both fascinating and saddening.  The fact that people seem to have so little issue with a child being aborted solely because it isn't perfect but then have a fit at gender selective abortion makes no sense to me.  And then also reading about how many doctors push parents towards abortion was just appalling.  Despite the fact that I felt a bit overwhelmed with writing the paper and honestly didn't think it was my best work initially, my professor loved it and reading it again, I'm very proud of what I accomplished.  So, I decided to share it, not to brag or anything, but because this is a controversial issue and I think it's one that needs to be addressed.

Awake and Alive

I realize that I really haven't posted anything since last September other than my one post recently so I thought I would give a bit of an update on what's been going on since then since life has changed quite a lot, thankfully for the better.  So back in September I was dealing with a lot of personal issues.  I was severely depressed, even suicidal.  I was cutting again and just generally in a very dark place.  I had hoped to return to school during the fall semester but didn't get everything done in time so unfortunately was unable to take any classes.  I ended up just working.  Honestly, it's a bit of a blur, but I was not doing well during that time.  I tried going to counseling which didn't end up working out but towards the end of December I finally got myself together enough to apply to CNM.  I was accepted and started looking at classes.

It was at this point that for whatever reason I kind of stepped out of the dark zone I'd been in.  Maybe it was just the fact that I was actually making steps towards doing something more with my life, I'm not sure, but I enrolled in six classes which turned out to be a bit ambitious.  Most importantly though, I finally settled on a major.  I've been jumping around with my major since I first went to college in 2009.  I wanted to do photojournalism, then wildlife biology, theatre, and vocal performance, to name a few.  When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a vet because I loved animals so much.  Well, I guess some childhood dreams aren't totally crazy because I'm working my way towards a degree as a veterinary technologist with the goal of graduating in two years.  From there I'd like to hope that I'll go on to pursue my doctorate in veterinary medicine but as that will require going out of state, that's up in the air.  My long term goal is to be able to focus on horses/farm animals.  For now though I'm focusing on just getting the courses done that are required to just get into the vet tech program.

I Found the Perfect Man...But It's Not Romantic

I gave up on finding the "perfect" man years ago.  I don't have any hopes of finding a guy who'd want to date or marry me.  I've learned not to expect any kind of compliments from men, because they don't normally compliment the fat girls.  I basically gave up on men altogether, aside from my dad and my best friend.  I remember talking with a girl friend of mine last year about how "men are pigs."  We were joking, mostly, but there was a part of us that believed that was the case with the vast majority of men.  And then I decided to go back to college this spring and take a Theater Appreciation class and I met him.  A man I barely knew who actually talked to me, listened to me, joked with me, teased me, and told me more than once that I looked really nice or pretty on a particular day.  And there's absolutely nothing romantic or sexual about it, he's just genuinely nice.  I can't tell you how refreshing that is or how much it means to have someone say that to me.  I don't get a lot of compliments on my looks, rarely from girls and never from guys.

I remember being younger and sometimes fishing for compliments when I'd put extra effort into how I looked.  I wanted so badly to be noticed, to be told that I was beautiful because I didn't think I was beautiful, I needed someone else to tell me that I was.  I don't care so much about my looks these days, I don't generally put in any extra effort to look nice.  I'm not trying to impress anybody anymore.  At this point I'm pretty much like, if you don't like the way I look or who I am, you can take a hike cause I don't give a crap what you think about me.  Okay, so not entirely true but I've gotten much better about just being myself and not trying to be someone else or trying to impress others.

I Am Not A Wallflower!

As some of you all may know. every semester UNM does four shows with the theatre department.  In the one year that I attended UNM previously, I only saw one of those shows and I never even considered trying to audition.  This semester though, with starting back at school, one of the things that I determined is that I didn't want to be a wallflower anymore which is something I've been pretty much since I started college.  I would sit at the very back of the classroom, and despite, usually, keeping up with reading and homework and what not, I never really participated in the class.  The biggest part of my issue was because I am overweight, I didn't want to bring any further attention to myself.  I felt if anyone noticed me, they would judge me and possibly make fun of me which was the last thing I wanted.  So I did my best to make myself invisible.  I didn't make a whole lot of effort with my appearance or clothing choices and I think I did succeed fairly well with just blending in.

Bus Adventures and Frights

One of the joys of being a college student for me is taking the bus.  Being a student means I get a free bus pass so I park me car, for free, at the Uptown bus lot, show by UNM ID to the driver, and I get a ride to school.  It's pretty darned convenient but not without it's adventures and, at times, it's frightening moments.

I haven't taken the bus since I was last at UNM which was about, what, two years ago or so?  Something like that.  So my first day, last Monday, I caught my bus, made it to my classes, and then ran to bus stop to catch the bus back to my car.  Now I take the Rapid Ride, there's a Red line and a Green line that run past UNM and I take the Red line.  Somehow, I managed to confuse myself and I thought the Green line was the bus I wanted and literally ran to catch the bus and made it.  Yay!  Well, until we drove past Louisiana and I was like, um, wait a second, shouldn't you have turned there?  Yeah, my brain was not working correctly that day.  It took me a second to remind myself that, oh yeah, the Red line runs both east and west, not just west.  Needless to say, I felt incredibly stupid as I rode the Green line bus all the way up to Central and Tramway and then back down to Central and Louisiana where I was able to catch the next Red line bus.  That was my first bus adventure.

Changes and Losses

So obviously I have not been as good as I thought I would be about blogging after concluding my Lord of the Rings project.  Frankly life has been a bit crazy since then and I have not had the ideas, inclination, or time to blog.  To be honest, I could have made the time, but the inclination and ideas were just not there.  A lot has changed though since the last time I blogged so this probably going to be a longer post.

Half a Year of Learning

So basically we're about half way through the year 2010. A little over half a year actually. On the one hand, it doesn't seem like a lot of time, but for me it's been almost seven months of a lot lessons learned. This is my first blog attempt and I'm basically doing it just as a way to just express thoughts, opinions, dreams, desires, etc.

So, just kind of a brief summary of the first half of this year. The first five months of this year were pretty much spent at college. Those five months were some of the most stressful, painful, worst, but also educational months I have ever had. Despite the fact that they were terrible, they helped me get a lot of things in perspective. I learned a lot about relationships, what's needed to make them work, things to do and not to do, and also they helped me to redefine the kind of guy I was looking for. I also learned some lessons with school. With all the pain and stress and self-doubt, I really let my classes slip, failing one class and not doing so well in others. The result was the lowest GPA score I had ever had and I almost lost one of my scholarships.

So for me the lesson was that no matter how bad life is, when it comes to school, you leave all the bad stuff at the door and just get things done. The doubt, the pain and everything, you can't let that take over and ruin your life. You have to keep things under control, in perspective. The other thing about those months is that all the hardships drew me back to God. The school I attend does not have a very good Christian/church community and I never really developed any kind of close Christian friendships, so I found that I had started to slip away some. Those months made me run back to the one person I knew would always forgive me and take me back: Jesus. Since then I've been working at building my relationship with Christ and getting back into my Bible reading.