Traveling

Since it was Spring Break, I traveled to visit my family in Texas. It was so relaxing and wonderful to see everyone. My younger sister is getting married and we managed to pick out bridesmaids dresses, her wedding dress, and our bridesmaids shoes in two days. She had done a ton of research online but I was still amazed that it was so easy to accomplish in person. I'm excited that my younger sister and her fiancee will be coming up here in the next couple of weeks for their engagement party.

My boyfriend is still away visiting his family as well. He seems to be having a blast and really enjoying his family. I'm very happy for him since he hasn't seen them for so long.

Sigh, back to reality on Monday. I'm really not looking forward to that at all.

Questioning

I'm not exactly sure how I ended up in this position in life, teaching at a university. I'm trying to remember who I was when I started all this. I think I was pursuing graduate school for the wrong reasons. I think I had some idealized notion of what being a professor would be like. I wanted the prestige, the freedom to pursue intellectual interests, the autonomy. Now that I have grown older and changed bit by bit, I'm not entirely sure whether this is what I want anymore. In a sense, this is what I want. But, the ideal never matches reality. The ideal never was, and may never be. The reality consists of too much teaching and not enough research. I had some hyped up image of myself as a researcher when in reality most of what I've done is very amateur-ish. And my teaching has lots of room for improvement. I used to think that if I found what I was supposed to do in life that it would come easy, and I'd be very good at it. Would something else be easier, more fulfilling, and more enjoyable? Do I need to change my attitude so that I don't feel pangs of anxiety surrounding my job or do I need to change my career choice to something less anxiety-provoking? Sigh, or maybe I haven't found my niche in academe yet...it could take years to find that.