Buried in work I love: Thesis, Text Books, and Work Uniform. PS: I love gnomes!

Saying there is a secret to balancing multiple workloads is like saying a pool-raft will save you in the middle of an ocean!

I sort of have my hand in everything: I teach an awesome Writing and Rhetoric I class, tutor/mentor brilliant students at the writing center, manage a cool Austrian-style restaurant, curate the wonderful Dollhouse reading series, edit for the amazing CPR, get to be the Grad Ambassador for poetry, and I am writing my thesis, which I hope is equally stellar!

It sounds like a lot, but there are ways of swimming, and here is how I have survived grad school so far.

The first is by listening to the advice of comedians. Louis CK has this amazing bit about going to the doctor for a sore ankle, and the doctor gives him all these exercises to help. Louis responds, “ok, but how long will that take to fix it,” to which the doctor says, “Oh no, that’s just a new thing you do now.”

I know this humor operates on a pessimistic level, but I’ve sort of adapted this idea to my workload, this mentality of “Oh! Okay, yeah I do this!” And then I do it.

I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m sort of in this cycle of eat, work, sleep, wash, and repeat. However, I knew that’s what I was getting myself into when I got here! I knew that to pursue my dream it meant getting involved and I mean in like every way possible.

Fellow curator Dolly Lemke @ The Dollhouse.

Buckingham Fountain (Pre WAC Crawl)

But the key is to sort of stay sane, or prevent yourself from hitting the tipping point where you sort of lose it. I think it’s about learning your own threshold. I’ve learned to listen to my body and mind when it’s telling me enough is enough. And I mean really listening to it, because we’re human still, right?  We need to eat, which is a lesson I recently learned! And we need sleep! All-nighters, at this point, just don’t make sense to me! I try to stay a week ahead in class, and to successfully improvise my teaching syllabus, so that it adapts each week to the needs of the students.

It’s also been important to me to have something else on the back burner. On the weekends, I barista/manage a restaurant in Lincoln Square. As an artist, it’s my sort of security check, my assurance that I can probably move anywhere and get a job quickly in the food industry.

So, what’s the secret then? I don’t know, it’s different for everyone, but the secret for me is mixing planning with improvisation and adapting the mind to the moment. It’s about staying organized in all aspects of your life. I recently moved all the furniture in my apartment.

Apartment Feng Shui

The feng shui had some bad magic, and after cleaning the air, I felt refreshed and ready to grade.

But please don’t forget adventure, especially in this beautiful city of Chicago.A few weekends ago, my fiancé and I found ourselves on a sudden and improvised tour of the Chinese gardens in China Town with Nancy, a local senior citizen, simply because we said “Hi!”

Nancy teaching us the names of the vegetables in Chinese