getting out of the car and moments like these

Well, it's been a while since I updated. Life has been moving pretty quickly. I've been in nursing school for three weeks now. While the studying is a drag, the information is really interesting, and I find myself really able to connect the new things I'm learning with things from past courses and with future applications. Also, reading about all the different ways in which people can become sick makes me marvel at the fact that anybody is healthy. It seems like we should all be walking around infested with bacteria and with kidney and liver failure and one arm falling off, and yet our bodies have this amazing restorative capacity and incredible resilience. It's really given me an appreciation for how blessed I am, but there is always that moment when I'm reading a set of symptoms and begin to worry that my tiredness is really a symptom of "insert dramatic illness here" rather than a result of staying up too late the night before. It definitely can make your head spin if you're not careful.

I've been babysitting for three boys, who are 10, 7, and 2, a couple days a week, and they're completely adorable and yet exhausting. The two-year-old is who I watch the most, since the other boys spend a lot of time at school or in activities, and he's the cutest thing ever but incredibly curious and active and always asking "why." Whenever something isn't right to him, he looks at me and says, "It's broken," whether it's that his sandwich has fallen apart or he's just noticed my nose ring for the first time.

And I've been building up my mileage to prepare for the Marine Corps Marathon, which is in late October in D.C. Today was the Philly half marathon, so my dad and I trekked up there at 5:30. It was mentally challenging, and I had a lot of difficulty breathing, which wasn't helped much by my inhaler, but I set a PR by a minute, so I was really happy with it. I'm sure that tomorrow I will be cursing every muscle in my legs, but for now I'm pleased.

All this has left me little time for reflection, and I'm much happier for it. It's an odd sensation, though. For most of my life, I've felt as though the days have dragged by. But for the past six months or a year, time has just flown. I've felt each day when I get out of my car in the parking garage that it was really just moments ago that I was shutting the car door the morning before. It seems like the twenty-four hours that have gone by in between could collapse into a single breath and just vanish. And so looking back on a week just seems like a montage of this me-getting-out-of-the-car scene, with nothing changing except my clothes.

This makes me think of the scene in The Bell Jar when Esther describes how each day is a white box with a black curtain separating it from the next day until suddenly someone has drawn up all the curtains and all that's left is a blinding white stream. Except for her, it's an incredibly depressing and overwhelming sensation, and for me, it's disorienting and dizzying but not really a negative thing at all.

So, that's it. Life is good.