I'll Decide on a Title Later

 Today is technically the last day of "Week 9" for this quarter. I have not yet written my weekly reflection for my leadership class, and I'm not quite sure if I will have anything brilliant to write. Next week is "off" due to the holiday week, but I still have a lot of work to do, with assignments due Week 10 and Exam Week. I am "caught up" with work assignments except for a couple submissions not due until December; I have not made those my priority.  A peer taught me a new trick that I enacted this morning. I put all my old course content for Drexel into my Drexel One Drive. That way I can access it as needed, but it does not stay on my desktop. My computer was yelling at me for having low memory, so maybe this mass deletion will improve my computer's performance.  This week I learned that my health insurance payments for 2025 will increase dramatically because I had a good 2024 in terms of classes taught. As of right now I have two online class...

I've started to think of these weekly blog posts as an encore in a concert. They are not always that mega hit you've been waiting for all night, but sometimes that one additional song you remember came from them. I use that as my excuse for these being a bit flimsy to comparison to the writing I do all week. My usual week involves writing to students, both in response to their emails and when I reach out to those falling behind, which is not a practice everyone does, I've come to learn. I usually write a reminder announcement to at least a few of my five classes about the workload and to remind them that I support their work even while my workload is heavy. Believe me, I feel the struggle. I had two major assignments due this week. One was the Results, Conclusions, and Recommendations sections, among other sections, for my pilot study. This took me significant chunks of time to write. I also conducted a conversation with a thought leader. From that I created a 9-minute vide...

I had figured I would reflect on the election results for this week's reflection. But, now that my time to reach this personal goal has come, I do not want to focus on that. What I have to say is futile. Although I do not like the results, I can see why it happened. It connects to ideas I have been studying for the past year. But, it feels too raw to explore that now. I have gone on social media since the results, but I have tried limiting my time. I'm seeing a lot of pain, but I'm also seeing a lot of futile acts that have no impact on what happened or will happen. I wrote a response on my Facebook page, but I understand and appreciate that I have a limited audience there. I couldn't handle a larger audience, nor could I speak to one intelligently. That is not my interest.  I do personal journaling on a mostly daily routine. That is for me and for my eyes only at the moment. It helps me get through my week by exploring what happened and what is coming up on the horizon...

 This academic week started off quite roughly, so I was happy yesterday when I was finally "caught up" for the week. I keep "caught up" in quotation marks because I never truly feel like I'm caught up until the quarter (doctorate) or semester (job) is over. Earlier in the week I was procrastinating more than I have since starting my program. I was just finding everything too overwhelming, and I was escaping into junk food and movies. To be fair, I did all the work that was set out for me and attended three Zoom meetings - two for school and one for work - during the week. I even registered for the winter quarter and bought the books listed for one of my upcoming creativity classes. I stayed busy while finding ways to stay sane. I had posted on Facebook how overwhelmed I felt. I knew it would solicit the sympathy I didn't want to hear. I like to vent and share, but I don't like pity or even support, when that's not why I'm posting. I post to remin...