It really is funny how things work out sometimes. After getting a blessed 9 hours of sleep last night to compensate for my 0.5 hours of pseudosleep the night before, I'll celebrate by allowing myself to sign up for yoga classes. And I'm so, so happy I'll be able to teach signal processing in person; we're setting up a snack rotation, the audiology students are excited about it, I'm trying to get us switched out of the computer lab we're scheduled in and into a room with tables that can be moved around for groupwork...

It's not the semester I'd imagined, but it's going to be a good one. A hard one, but a good one, with a lot of growth. Oddly enough, for someone who's spent most of her life around guys, next semester will be one in which I'm surrounded by other women -- teaching them, teaching with them, learning from them (all my students and professors are female next semester), living with them, dancing with them... it seems like such a strange and incongruous experience to think about, but I think it will be good for me.

And summer? We'll see, but I'm okay with not knowing. I'm a lot more okay with not knowing things in general than I thought I was. I know I am surrounded by good people in Indiana -- I feel this way most often during shared mealtimes, at dinners over at James's house, or Lee & Ana's, or with Patricia and Joi, or with my fellow dancers at whatever place will fit us all (last night: Poblanos). That's where "normal life conversations" happen, or at least that's where they happen and I can hear them (I don't know if other people have them other places; I don't know what I am missing). And whenever you're with good people, then... you know that you can handle whatever comes your way. It's going to be okay.

My mom has been encouraging me to keep an open mind about future careers, especially in the audiology-related realm. I still don't plan on going into it as a career (this open source and engineering education stuff, you know?) but it's certainly something that's important to me (for obvious reasons) and also a nice thing to be able to bring open source and engineering education into. I read through Phonak's job postings this morning on a lark, and grinned at being able to understand them all with basically no problem. They're based in Switzerland, so half the postings,  including all the interesting-sounding engineering ones, were in German. In the world of audiology R&D, everything is published either in English or in German (Austria, Germany, Switzerland), so that's been an unexpected side benefit of developing basic reading skills in the language. I'm still trying to find a non-classroom way to earn my grad-level engineering credit, so maybe research or a co-op type thing in the hearing-tech direction might be possible; I'm looking into Zambia in the hopes that I can get part of my engineering credit requirement from there. We'll see! The technologies are fascinating, and the field so badly needs people who can translate between the technical and clinical worlds.

Tomorrow is 12.12.12, and the One Day On Earth film project will run again, the last chance in our lifetimes to participate in a shoot. I don't have anything to film -- much of my life has been internal lately, and that's hard to capture (plus I do not have a camera). But I loved watching the first completed film. And I would love to see the third when it comes out.

I have some hearing aids exams to revise and some research work to do today and tomorrow, but I'm taking those in bite-sized chunks, and probably going to the movies with my cousins (Wreck-It Ralph!) tonight. So let me find my phone so I can text 'em and figure that out. And maybe I can swing by to see Anne on my way to/from Purdue for Thursday's meetings, and maybe...

It's funny, the places life takes you.