My, oh my, oh my. Hello there, blog. I remember you. I nearly didn't, and then I spent the past twenty minutes re-reading my life in 2009.

I haven't posted in more than a year, and since I'm guessing that my parents have long since stopped checking to see if I've updated, it's a safe bet that no one is even reading this, but I was thinking I should get back into the groove of blogging. It's nice to have a record of the things that go on in your life- especially the little memories. It's easy to remember flying home to surprise my mom two summers ago, but harder to remember reading the book Drunk aloud with friends at Borders on a Friday night.

It's almost comical how much has changed since I last posted, but it is the genesis for my absence. Last March, I was offered a job at a Catholic school here in town, a school I loved for a thousand reasons long before I even first set foot in it. From their mission to their staff to their curriculum, it's like a less homeschooled Hillsdale who pledges allegiance to the Pope. Not hard to see why I was sold.

I spent the week before I started there in Indianapolis, Chicago and Michigan, and while sitting in Patrick and Margaret's Lincoln Park apartment on a Tuesday night, I received an email informing me that I'd been accepted to Clemson's graduate program for school counseling. And so it began.

My seventh day of work at my new job, the headmaster called me into his office. The look of doom on his assistant's face should have tipped me off that not all was well, but like a chump, I assumed the big boss was just checking in to see how my first week went. And when he started out with "I'm not sure how to say this..." my naturally guilty mind immediately thought "oh no- they found out that I checked my personal email during work hours yesterday. It was just gmail, not like I was cruising the personal ads on Craigslist! But they must be really strict here..." So wrapped up in my Catholic guilt was I, that I nearly missed big boss telling me that my immediate boss had been let go the night before. The one I was hired to directly support. Ummm.

I didn't say much except for "okay" and nod my head repeatedly- a response that has gained me a certain amount of infamy in the time since. I guess you don't know what to expect when you give someone news like that, and you prepare for the worst, so the fact that I didn't run screaming from the room instantly gave me some street cred (or the Catholic school equivalent of it).

From that point on, things ramped up very quickly. Two days later, I threw my first event for 70 of our highest-level donors, feeling very much like I was inhabiting someone else's body the whole time. I was, to use the term loosely, promoted almost immediately, and my stress level consequently jumped about 9000 percent. While I loved everything about the school I worked for- the education we provided, the people I worked with, the perks (like half-days all summer long, and wicked awesome vacation time), in my first two months there, I began to experience headaches so bad that I finally went to a doctor and told him, through tears and sniffles, that I was certain I had a brain tumor, because I hurt every day, all the time. My doctor, to his credit, tried not to laugh, and instead ran tests, finally assuring me that I was neurologically sound and based on the events that had recently transpired in my life, my choices were a) anxiety medication, b) therapy or c) waiting it out. Guess which one this anti-drug introvert chose?

So that's the job. It's much calmer now, and the headaches are gone, for the most part, thanks largely to a newfound commitment to working out. I do love it, and everything else that has come in this new phase of life. Well, perhaps not everything- there are moments when I'm sitting in class, discussing Charlie Sheen's psychological issues, when I experience a bit of nostalgia for my calm life of a year ago, but those are stories for another post.