Slacker!

I’m falling behind on updates for this blog. I need to rededicate myself to this project, as well as to others. Mostly, though, it’s just because I’m so damned busy. Between working 30 hours per week at two jobs and taking a full-time courseload of 12 credits of upper-division history classes, I don’t have a whole lot of extra time left over for, well, anything, and most of what little free time I do have gets eaten up by playing video games. (Star Trek Online is, in fact, a key offender in that area.)

I want to continue the project I started here, however. Chronicling my life, putting it all in writing, is both cathartic and enlightening. In the course of writing the last several entries, I remembered things otherwise long forgotten, and realized things about myself and those around me that I’d never understood or realized before. That, I think, is its greatest value, even if no one else ever reads it.

School started again a few weeks ago… doubly so for me, since I not only am a college Senior but also an instructional assistant at a high school, so I’m up at dawn and I don’t typically get back home until after dark. I’ll be graduating next semester, and I know that big changes are coming… sometimes it feels like it’s just around the corner, sometimes it feels like it’s so far off that it’ll never happen. Even once I graduate, I still need to go for my teaching credential, and to that end I’m signed up for the required tests already, and have taken half of the prerequisite courses… Then the doubts come back. Is this really what I want to do with the next 20 or 30 years of my life? I think so, but every so often… I waver.

My GI Bill will be running out soon, too. It won’t be long before the financial burden of my education will, once again, rest solely upon my shoulders. There’s enough to finish my Bachelor’s, and possibly the first semester of my teaching credential, but it worries me sometimes. I’ll still have my jobs, and I’ll try to save as much as I can to avoid having to take out more student loans, but I find myself dwelling on it from time to time. If the disability claim I’ve got processing with the VA goes through, at least I’ll have that to help offset the costs as well. Nearly four years since I got out of the military, and I still find myself relying on the VA and veterans groups to get by. The training wheels are about to come off, and frankly it’s a little scary.