A Brief Me Update

Things up here are alright. You know what's weird? I thought I would feel more homesick. Mostly what I've been feeling is a little stressed at times, but mostly bored. A little lonely. I can handle Utah when I know it's temporary, even if it's a kind of long temporary.

I ran into a friend on Sunday at church, and he was the first person that I've known personally, that's in my age group, that has gotten a divorce.

School is good. I'm still managing to spend a lot of money, but luckily I'll be doing some additional work collecting data for a study that I'm working on with one of my professors that should eventually turn into a publication.

The best news I think (besides the marathon stuff, I'm way excited about all of that) is that I've got my thesis committee chair lined up. And I'll actually be doing the work on sexual harrassment, which at first sounded boring to me, but after reading some of what he's published in the last couple of years it's actually really interesting. And it relates great with some of the stuff that happened at work over the last year or so. Yes, including when the African dude asked me out. He's developed a nI2S scale - I'm Too Sexy Scale, and part of my job over the next year or so will be submitting that for publication. I'll talk more about what I'm actually studying later, and I promise that it's actually really interesting. Hopefully I'll be able to convey it well to you.

This time last week I was really stressing about everything in this program, but somehow I got all caught up, my chair, my topic, everything lined up perfectly. My favorite part after I was done talking to Dr. Ridge this afternoon, was that I noticed on his wall that he had some framed tickets of games from the 1991 World Series, including the classic Game 7 between John Smoltz and Jack Morris. We talked about baseball for about 30 minutes. I never thought I'd have that conversation with a professor of mine, and the best part is that I'll be working really closely with him over the next several years. I'm really excited about that.

Plus! I got in contact with a professor from the Political Science department, and he does work in political psychology, and I'm meeting him tomorrow to talk about some possible research topics. So I'll be able to do this stuff in addition to my thesis/dissertation work.

I can't believe how well things line up sometimes. It really amazes me. All this stuff fell into line within the last several days, and for the last couple of weeks I wasn't sure if anything was going to line up right for me in this program. Anyway, I count myself very blessed.