Another breath begins, another chance to win the fight.

It’s been years since I last considered the Scorpions one of my favorite bands. I’ve gone from identifying with every ballad to noting the tired cliches that fill them; from jamming with their older, harder songs to tiring of the repetitive “rock never dies” theme. But Humanity: Hour I is an album that I keep coming back to. Dystopian, haunting, unique, yet still driving, this is the sound that I still search for in music.

The quote above is a lyric that continually takes on new meaning for me. You don’t think about breathing much. It happens more or less automatically, a bodily function that keeps you alive and becomes important usually when it’s lacking.

Another breath begins, another chance to win the fight. Breath is everything for choir. We spend rehearsals learning how to breathe correctly, from the depths of our...

My head is a lot louder than the rest of the world around me.

Impostor syndrome is a loud thing, a judgment that interrupts and demands acknowledgment. It will have you begging your choir director to please not dock your grade for missing a week of rehearsals to visit your dream school that you still can’t quite believe you actually got accepted to, you know this puts you at four absences but if it helps, that one earlier this semester was from a different school visit, you know you should have told him that beforehand but at the time you honestly believed you wouldn’t get into this school. And it will leave you surprised and humbled and with a strange twinge of guilt when he reminds you that you’ve hardly missed any rehearsals in four years, so yes of course you can visit that top-tier engineering school without punishment.

When my head is so loud and so judgmental, it’s no wonder...

I have a month to finish my undergraduate honors thesis so I can graduate, which makes this is a good time to begin blogging for real, I think. I have bedsheets in the dryer, a Cooking Light dinner waiting to be made to sustain me this upcoming week, and a to-do list on a whiteboard, half marked out. One item is

Get back to your F***ING TO-DO LISTS

I always underestimate the power of to-do lists to minimize the overwhelming vague despair of I have so much to do down to I have fourteen tasks to accomplish today. Even better if five of those take thirty seconds and can be marked off promptly. Best if one is write to-do list. You’ve already accomplished something.

The dinner only makes two servings, as it turns out. I have to choose another for the rest of the week. Hopefully something using blue cheese and butternut squash, since I already had to buy those for previous recipes.