How did I get here?

Today is April 27th. I went to go visit a 3 bedroom home about 10 miles from Dartmouth (which, therefore, makes it in the middle of the wilderness) with one of the new potential roomates. We drive up to the house in the snow (yes, snow), I got out of the car and was walking through the apple orchard on the property, and I realized just how much my life has changed.

Like, seriously? Walking through the snow on April 27th to check out a house that "might" get high speed internet soon but has an apple orchard and plenty of room to store firewood for the fireplace in the middle of the living room (fireplace, not tv, fireplace). Can I admit that I miss the ghetto of Columbia Heights?

Also, adding to the "ugh" factor for the day, I went to a conference this morning on government funding for predoctoral candidates. It was a great talk, but the one factor the speaker hit home about 1,000 times is that having a mentor you get along with and who fosters your development is the most important thing ever on the planet. Thanks, because that wasn't already weighing heavy on my mind. Literally, his last slide was "if the situation isn't right, you need to get out of there". Fabulous.

What else? Being a TA for the psychology research methods class has changed the way I think about life. The juniors and seniors in my class are turning in assignments I wouldn't have handed in as 6th grader (at a pubic school no less). A final paper CANNOT contain cross-outs and entire paragraphs written in the margin in pen! I don't expect these kids to know statistics just because they have all taken a statistics class, but I do expect that they can write a paragraph to describe an experiment that we conducted. I would guarantee that everyone reading this blog (yes, all 3 of you) would be more capable of writing a paragraph describing an event that took place than this ivy league wastes of life. Stupid kids.

I must admit that I really enjoyed emailing the person who turned in said paper with pen markup with the comment "This is unacceptable and I will not read this. Feel free to redo for partial credit. Thx". (for those of you saying "wow, bitch" this is the 3rd email I have sent along the lines of you cannot be 30 minutes late to my class, you cannot hand in assignments with more than 1 typo per sentence when the assignment is only 7 sentences).

Um...what else? I am still working through the housing stuff. I am sort of simultaneously looking for a one-bedroom, checking out three-bedrooms with the two guys, and emailing around to other random people who have bedrooms open. So, I have basically made no progress or decision. But I have time.

Work sucks and is never done, but I am starting to feel that little rush of excitement in my stomach when I think about getting to analyze the brain data I collected on Sunday. It's still only a little excitement, because there are 10892348923409823489 steps I don't understand to getting to that point. But, it's sort of a relief to have that feeling again and think "oh right, this is why I strayed off the easy path and have chosen to make the rest of my life suck".