Back in the saddle again

The new semester has begun! As I watched my semester break slip away day by day I felt more and more apprehensive, tired, skeptical, and generally negative about starting back up. Then, Friday, I took the morning to myself to read and drink coffee at our local caffeine hole. As I listened to some swell tunes, the singer's words hit me:

Love the life you choose.
keep yourself feeling brand new.
And love your strife with life.
Everyone wants to know why.
And love your strife with youth.
Keep yourself feeling brand new.
And love you strife with god.
Yeah, everyone wants to know love…

I stopped, rewound the digits and listened again:

Love the life you choose
keep yourself feeling brand new.

This week isn't a time to be feeling tired, run-down or depressed! This is a week to reinvigorate myself, to take the semester by the horns, to write run-on sentences like there is no tomorrow, to engage my classes, my colleagues, and my work, to love the discovery that comes with study and the challenge of learning new information and engaging new concepts and arguments. I get to introduce a whole new crop of students to fantastic and interesting communication concepts, to take them from what they learned in high school speech and deepen those concepts with research and theory.

I've chosen this life as a masked doctoral student...and this semester I'm going to face it like a brand new person, eager to accept its challenges.

-M.D.S. AWAY!