All of the Things

I don't know how I manage to stay as busy as I do even without theater. My post-show life has been crazy, and not just because I spend four days a week downtown at my internship. I only have 4-5 hours each weeknight that I'm comfortable spending with other people simply because I have to wake up early again the next day, and that makes it really hard to see people who may not be available until the time when I want to go to sleep.

I guess reflecting on my internship (now that I only have four weeks left), I've really learned a lot in terms of life adjustment. I can now get up and commute to a job each day, be productive at the office, and then have self-control when I get home. I know what a career in public health looks like, have a better feel for what area of public health I would like to pursue, and have a new appreciation for student life now that I've had a mock real-world break from it. My internship experience has really lived up to everything I wanted it to be.

I've had time with friends, casually helped a couple of tech weeks, spent social time down town, saw some theater, and my parents were just in town visiting. It's been really great to connect and re-connect with a lot of the friends I have been seeing, and spending time with awesome people makes me happy. The theater I've seen has been a production of Company, Flat Stanley, The Quare Fellow, and Julius Caesar. With the exception of the Shakespeare, I found the writing of the shows to be not quite my style, but the performances were fine. Caesar was awesome. My parents took me to see it at a professional theater, and it reminded me what kind of difference being out of school makes in the quality of a production.

I also had a field trip for my seminar last week to an after school program in an impoverished neighborhood of the city. It was a day that I was interacting with bright, cheerful, hilarious, smart kids who do not have the opportunities to lead a life like mine despite having the same inherent abilities. I appreciate my privileges so much more, and it's really affected me because I know that there's not much I can do for these kids other than be encouraging that day that I was with them. I am trying to collect some board games to send over to them because I was playing games with the kids, but none of them had all the pieces, and that seems like such a simple thing to make a difference in how they can play. These kids are also the exact demographic that my internship organization is trying to affect, so knowing a lot of the statistics and studies done on neighborhoods like that one made the experience all the more impactful. It's really easy to go along and just live my life, but it's important to recognize that I do have opportunities that others don't, and I want to face that and appreciate it. I really do.

I've just been busy, have lots of good things now and coming up, and really appreciate the people, places, and things that I have.

Today is awesome because I had brunch with my parents before they left to go home.