Getting close to the end...

There's only three more days of classes left, then finals, then closing and then we're DONE. The end is so close...but yet still so far away. Closing meetings are happening right now; I need to make closing bulletin boards that will go up on the floors - there are end of the semester celebrations for staff and students and all the closing tasks.

My office has turned into a storage room lately. It started with the Invisible Children Challenge, more specifically the books for the bookdrive. I finally got the boxes, so I can start packing those up and mail them to Better World Books. But yes, right now there are 500 books sitting in my office. In front of that are the boxes with t-shirts. We have this tradition here that each Spring each Area Council makes t-shirts for the area. Fortunately, they started handing those out today, so those boxes should be disappearing soon. And then there are the Finals Snacks - leftovers from our April program that had low attendance due to the freezing cold weather. So yeah, it's kind of hard to walk in my office right now and I feel embarassed whenever someone comes by for a meeting. I finally at least cleaned off my desk today - I was avoiding doing RA Evaluations, which means I now need to do those tomorrow morning. I was also going to get some kind of gift / token of appreciation for our Global Council members. Their end of the year celebration is tonight at 10 pm in my apartment and I don't have snacks nor gifts and I barely managed to get around to cleaning my place, so there's enough space for everyone to sit and a somewhat clean carpets. On a side note, carpet floors are seriously a pain to clean. I mean, maybe I just have a crappy vaccuum but neither mine nor the one from the RA office can really get the hair and other little things out of the carpet. One day, when I'll have my own place, I won't nice wooden floors - and yes, I'll maybe put a rug on it but I won't have the entire floor carpeted.

Anyway, .... What was I talking about?

It's been a long semester - in some ways - and in others it's flown by and hasn't been long enough. I feel like I haven't had the chance to take a breath since January. It's also been quite the challenging semester. I'm used to doing things on my own, "me against the world" style, but somehow this semester it really got to me and I started feeling pretty lonely. It just felt like I was always fighting alone. The Invisible Children Challenge went alright, but the whole time I felt like I was just struggling myself to keep above water. I longingely remembered last time when two of my RAs stepped up and helped out, even though they weren't even required to help with the program - they had my back and I knew I didn't have to do it alone. This time, it felt like whenever things weren't going the way I wanted them to, I was in it alone without even someone to vent to. Last year, Service Splash caused quite a lot of drama but I knew I could rely on my best friend and fellow co-worker to be there in it with me and when I was ready to freak out, he was there to make sure things were taken care of or to help me just talk through and figure out things.

I think that's been the toughest thing this year - not having someone to talk to. I vented a couple times to a friend, who is not in Student Affairs; but I feel like she started getting annoyed and questioning if this was the right job for me and at times I felt like she was trying to convince me to change my career. But that's just stupid; I mean, yes, there are days when I get frustrated and I need to vent / there are days when I'm just exhausted and draines, but seriously, I couldn't see myself doing anything else and there are more days I love love love my job than days when I'm frustrated. And even when I'm frustrated, I still - in the end - love my job. I just sometimes need to get some of that frustration out and I think she got a bit more of that than she could handle because she was the only one around. To make a long story short, I stopped venting to her. But there also isn't anyone I talk to regularly enough on the phone that I could use them as my support system. And writing e-mails? It's just not the same. And so I've just kind of been dealing with all myself and it's made me feel pretty damn lonely.

I also think this Spring it really hit me what it means to live so far away from your family. I always thought that if something happened and my family needed help - or I needed them - I would be able to be there. I thought by now I'd have all the immigration issues figured out. Instead, I'm still living in this weird state of not knowing what will happen after my visa expires - not being able to go home whenever I want - not knowing what to do. I love my job and I've created a life for me here; I don't want to give that up. But I may not have a choice.

The other day I was thinnking that I'd love to be a regional advisor for our region of NACURH (the National Association of College and University Residence Halls). But that's a three-year commitment. I don't know if I have three years left here.

I want to plan things for my future, but I'm not sure I have a future here. I always feel like everything is just so temporary... And I think that's sometimes why I close myself off from everyone; I mean what's the point when I know that in the end I may have to leave anyway.

Maybe I'm just tired. Maybe in a few weeks the world will look a little brighter again. Less than two weeks left....