Time Flies

(Note: This entry was written on March 3, 2018, while flying from DC to Omaha. Apologies for the delay in posting.)

It’s odd, how when you’re in a plane, you notice when the landscape below turns into farmland. I don’t know where in the country I am right now, but I’m over farmland. The land becomes more sectioned in the Midwest; the intersections are all neat and planned-looking, and probably a mile apart each. The squares are sectioned off into smaller shapes, differentiating the land used for different purposes. In the growing seasons, it’s even more apparent, but right now in early March, practically still winter, it’s all just varying shades of brown. Darker brown for the fields that will probably hold crops later in the year, lighter brown for grazing land, the occasional thicket that I know has a house in the middle but is too far below for me to really see.

I’m in a plane, probably somewhere past Illinois at this point, on my way to Omaha for spring break. It’s been a very long time since I last wrote. I regret not writing – here or anywhere, really. In the past year, I’ve avoided reflecting on life, and that’s all blogging or journaling is. Writing a blog post describing the happenings of my life makes it almost impossible not to reflect on those happenings, and I didn’t want to do that.

In the past year, my life has changed. I’ve become more reclusive, and my priorities have changed. I don’t know how they changed, but I can feel that they’ve changed. Since my last post, I’ve been on psychiatric medication; it’s been extremely helpful for me, and I’ve attended therapy most weeks. I’ve learned how to parse through my moods and how to determine what I need and what will be most helpful. I’ve strayed from the Church, and started to come back.

It’s been a hard eleven-ish months. I lost my grandfather in June; I think about the time before and after his death often. It’s gotten easier with time to acknowledge that he’s gone, but most times I still feel my eyes start to sting with held-back tears and a lump in my throat. I’ve learned how to breathe through it whenever I don’t feel up to crying. Last summer, I cried so often, and I never felt up to it. It took a while to learn how to control the tears. I cried at least once a week, but usually more than that. I always cried at least once on the way to or from my grandmother’s house each week; I cried whenever I said “my grandparents’ house” and had to correct myself. When I went back to school in the fall, every time something went particularly well for me, I started to cry when I realized I couldn’t tell my grandpa about it. Whenever I started to feel discouraged by all of the work I had to do, I reminded myself that my hard work was admirable, and I’d be struck with sorrow that I couldn’t tell my grandpa about how hard it was to balance three jobs on top of classes and that I would never hear him tell me he was proud of me again. I know he was proud of me; recently I looked back through my old journal entries, and at the bottom of the very first one in this journal, I wrote, “My grandfather is proud of me.” I cried when I saw that. I know he was proud, and at least I have that. I don’t even necessarily wish he was still alive; I’m not that selfish. My grandpa Rich had been sick for a long time, and he was tired and ready to go. I just miss him, is all. I’m glad that he’s not hurting anymore, and I can deal with the missing. The missing has made me more sensitive to a lot of subjects; I can’t watch anything in which a parent dies, because the whole time my grandfather was dying, I kept thinking about how that was my mom’s dad, and how one day I am going to lose my parents. (I’m quietly crying on this plane now and I’m really hoping nobody tries to ask me if I’m okay. I’m okay. I’m just sad, and that’s okay.)

It honestly kind of sucks that people die. It sucks that this is part of life. I think this more than anything else shows me how young I still am. I may live on my own, work, and care for another life (albeit a cat’s), but I’m still angry about facts of life. Or maybe that’s normal. I’d like to think that one day I’ll learn to accept the facts of life, but today I think it’s unfair and scary and I want to scream and cry that I never want my parents to die, or Preet, or my cat, or anyone I love. I just hope and pray that I have a long time until I have to deal with any of those things. (My nose is runny and gross, and I feel like the Weird Girl on this plane.)

Other than dealing with the facts of life, things have been okay enough for me. Last semester was challenging, and there were days that I wasn’t really sure I’d make it to Christmas break in one piece. I ended with decent grades, and I applied to Georgetown’s grad school at the end of December. Yesterday I received an email saying that I’m officially admitted into the Georgetown Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. I applied for an accelerated program, so some of my undergraduate coursework will count toward my Master’s degree. I’ll be earning an MS in theoretical linguistics; that umbrella includes syntax, phonology, semantics & pragmatics, and language acquisition. It should take me about one extra year to finish the degree.

Update: I’m over northeast Missouri, about to enter Iowa. We’ll be landing in less than an hour. I stopped crying somewhere in the last paragraph, and now I’m exhausted. For all the crying I’ve done in the last year, you’d think it wouldn’t exhaust me so much. It should be like running: the more you run, the less tired you are at the end of a medium-paced mile.

This semester is going fine so far. It’s just about halfway through. I’m not working as much, just a few hours here and there doing odd jobs. My classes this semester require more regular work than last semester or the semester before that; I have to write a lot, and I can’t get away with not doing my readings like I sometimes could before. I’m actually writing this to procrastinate writing a paper; my head felt full of thoughts, none of which were related to my paper, so I decided to put them down.

This semester I’m taking four classes: Cross-Cultural Communication (taught by Deborah Tannen), Justice and Consumer Culture (a theology class about consumerism), Research Methods in JUPS (a required course, as much about research ethics as methods), and Peace Education. The paper I’m avoiding is for Peace Education. I don’t know why I’m avoiding it. I know from some sixteen years of education that everything seems hard until I start, and then only sometimes is it actually hard. For me, it’s the getting started that’s the biggest obstacle, really getting started. I’ve put some stuff down for this paper, but I haven’t gotten to the point where my ideas are flowing easily and the work is just putting them into words in an order that makes sense.

Right now, everything is pretty much okay. There are some snags – like the fact that I haven’t found an apartment to move into in May – but my classes are going along alright, and they’re interesting enough. I’m okay, and the people that I care about are mostly okay, and nobody is worryingly sick. Maybe now that everything feels a little less intense, I’ll be willing to update this blog more often. I suppose we’ll just have to see.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you find a moment of peace today.

P.S.: This is roughly how long my paper has to be; if only I’d started writing that instead, I’d be done with it instead of still avoiding it.
P.P.S.: At time of publication, the paper was finished and submitted. Also, I apologize for the pun in the title, but only a little bit.