School in February

School is hard!

In many ways, I think this semester is harder than the fall was, even though I've gotten better at prioritizing my time and I'm not running up North Canyon every day. 

But I have classes three days a week instead of two, and on Wednesdays I have two classes. Not only do I have assignments due every week, I have long-term projects that I need to be thinking about at the same time. I don't have much time for myself. I aim to spend five hours a day on school stuff, but sometimes I have to do more (and sometimes I end up doing less). 

The graduate history program feels like an expensive book club: we read books every week, then talk about them in class. Two of my classes are undergrad classes, which have a more traditional lecture format (with a Zoom twist, of course), so those are a refreshing change of pace. 

We also have to write a lot of book reviews, as though I were back in elementary school writing book reports. And then at the end of the semester, we have to write historiographical essays, which is basically just saying what other historians have said about a given topic. I'm a competent enough writer than I can adequately fulfill the assignment, but I can't say I enjoy it. Also, I come from a linguistic background, and I think linguistics is more permissive when it comes to tone and structure. (I got a graded paper this week that disliked when I put a preposition at the end of the sentence, a grammatical prescription that is total nonsense!)

Now, when I'm doing my own historical research, it can bring me great joy. It's fascinating to learn new things, and there's this great feeling of satisfaction when you find a source that you didn't know about or that answers the question you were looking for.

But I guess if I want to write my own historical book, I need to know how other historical books are written. And not everything I learned in school (elementary, high school, college) was enjoyable, but it was helpful. 

When I'm not doing school, I try to do daily exercising (which this week included shoveling snow).

I'm getting close to finishing my goal of running on every street in North Salt Lake. I had to do some evening running this week, which is not my favorite. I love evening runs in the fall, spring, and summer, but not so much in the winter. They're just cold and depressing. (It also doesn't help that winter runs are on streets instead of trails.) They're often too cold not to wear a jacket, but when I do wear a jacket, I get sweaty, which gets uncomfortable. 

School and running keep me busy, which is good. It prevents me from looking at random grocery stores and buying seasonal desserts every day—I like doing those things, but they're not good things to do when there's a pandemic and I'm not making money.

Oh well. We only have one more week of February! I like every month but January and February. I'm just trying to keep my head above water until the semester ends in May.