Cleveland and Planning and Grad School

Part I: Cleveland

I’ve been in Cleveland since Tuesday afternoon for a training conference. It has been…well…weird. I’ve never traveled by myself to a place where I wasn’t meeting up with people I know. Any time I’ve ever traveled I’ve been with someone or I’ve been on my way to see someone. So it has been strange to be by myself this whole week.

One of my co-workers encouraged me to put myself out there and try to meet new people…but I’m not really an extrovert. In fact, my Myers-Briggs is consistently INFJ (I almost typed IMDB…). I’ve been quite content spending time in my hotel room watching TV or messing around on the computer. When I’m forced into social situations I’m perfectly capable of smiling, maybe cracking a joke or two, and being polite–I’m not Ted Kaczynski! It’s just not my cup of tea to make small talk with strangers. I’m told it makes me appear off-putting. Meh. My entire social circle is almost completely different than it was two years ago, so clearly I’m not that difficult to get to know.

I’m definitely ready to come home. I miss Bobby. I miss my bed. I miss sunshine and the outdoors (I haven’t been outside since I got here). I miss familiar surroundings. There’s a mall attached to my hotel and I wandered it on Wednesday afternoon–bought a Knot magazine and some white chocolate covered pretzels (one of my favorite things), but it was scary. This is probably going to sound bad, but there were a lot of scary, thuggish, and trashy looking people walking around the mall (Also, what kind of mall closes at 7pm? I just wanted a damn McFlurry at 7:30pm but the entire mall was already closed!). It was too cold and I was too alone to venture outside, so I didn’t get to do much of what I had planned.

In a few hours I’m hoping to be back on the road…as long as my car doesn’t protest starting up after being dormant for 3 days.

Part II: Planning

When Carly got engaged the first thing I did was make her a gift package. I made a binder complete with inside jokes and quotes from "Friends". Then I bought her a small pocket planner so she can keep track of her appointments.

I need one now.

I already have the binder…didn’t really give people much of a chance to beat me to the punch on that one. But I already have a handful of appointments I need to keep track of and I’m afraid I’m going to forget. Bobby and I are going to look at two reception/ceremony sites in the coming week. Then we agreed to be guinea pigs for a finance capstone class on campus to have them "help" us merge our financial lives together as part of their final projects. I say "help" because Bobby is a financial wizard. In fact, I’m almost certain he’s a robot of some sort. The boy can cook, fix cars, fix anything electronic, take care of finances, and there are other areas he very much excels at, but I’ll leave those to the imagination.

According to theknot.com our wedding is in 414 days and I’m already feeling like there’s a ton of stuff to do and I don’t want to do it. I guess I can scratch bridal consultant off my list of career aspirations…I should probably get that taken off my checks too!

Part III: Grad School

Before leaving town on Tuesday I had my interview for grad school. The program I’m applying for is very selective. They didn’t say how many people are applying, but they did say they are doing group interviews and recruiting for between 15 and 20 spots in the cohort. I’ve decided that my prayer about this situation will be that if grad school will be a positive experience for me, then I want to get in. If it will only add to my stress (being on top of a wedding and planning thereof) then I won’t be too upset if I don’t get in.

Unfortunately, I had to open my big fat mouth on Facebook and say that I was going in for my interview. People were being polite and saying that I’ll be fine and of course I’ll get in. I understand the sentiment behind those statements, but they’re actually pretty damaging if they’re not true. When I was going to take my motorcycle class (that would have ended up getting me my license if I had passed/not quit) I heard all sorts of comments:

"You’ll be fine!"

"Of course you’ll pass!"

"If I can pass it, you can pass it."

"If she can pass it, you can pass it!"

Anyone who has kept tabs on this blog in the past year will know that I was thrown from a motorcycle and stopped for fear of further injury. Bobby says that if the weather had been better (i.e. it hadn’t been pouring immediately prior to the quick stop practice) I would have been fine and passed. It just frustrates me when people seem to think I should have been able to accomplish/achieve something and then I fall short. Makes me feel inadequate, when I know their intentions were not to do so.

Anyway, the panel interview included 4 interviewers and 3 interviewees. There was a guy who was about to graduate from Central State and he was really eloquent and seemed like a shoo-in. There was also an older woman who had a good personal story that could be compelling enough for her to get in (her husband died and her children have Ph.D.s and she wants to further educate herself to keep with with her kids). Then there was nervous, unimpressive, boring, INFJ me. :-/ *sigh*