You know those moments in life when you feel like you can genuinely be proud of yourself? Well, I'd like to be proud of myself for a moment. I accomplished so much this week, and though there is still a lot of accomplish, I feel content with the way I pushed through tiredness, boredom, and lack of passion in order to work on the things I had to get done.

Of course, nearly all of the credit goes to Joshua (as always) for holding me up in so many ways. The most selfless this week was transcribing a substantial part of my one of my interviews for a project. But, the most important is the way he puts up with me when I'm crabby and I shut-down emotionally just from stress and exhaustion.

But, all things considered, I really did accomplish a lot this week. I still have another interview to do in the morning, and transcription for that one. Then, there is the coding task - which I'm pretty confused about, but it will be fine, I'm sure.

I think the real test for me will be next week, in my marriage and family class. I have to lead discussion about a book I just finished reading today. It is an excellent book called "Promises I can Keep: Why Poor Women put Motherhood Before Marriage." The problem is, I have such strong reactions to the book that I'm not sure how to lead an effective, intellectual discussion about it. I found myself almost totally unable to remove myself, my morals, my sense of self-righteousness, whatever you want to call it. Yesterday, I walked into the professors office and simply said "Steve, I'm having a real problem with this book." He was helpful as always when he blurted out - "I know. Don't you just hate these women??" We had a little laugh about it and then a serious discussion about how to proceed. For me, the real struggles of graduate school don't come from the work load, the expectations of excellence, or my ability to succeed. They really come in the depths of who I am - when I feel futile to the task of addressing the Big Questions; when I feel completely isolated as a young, Christian woman with drastically different ideas about life than most of my colleagues; when I can't help but make normative evaluations of the data, etc. I also struggle with whether or not I truly feel called to this. I think, more often than not, when I want to answer "no" it comes from my fear that I'm not adequate to the task. As much as I've learned and grown here, sometimes I long for a retreat to my college days, when most people agreed with me, when you were affirmed at every step in your faith and the opinions that were the outgrowth of that. I am fortunate to have a very small "inner circle" of Christians here - most of whom I will hopefully get to know better through the newly formed Contra Mundum, of which I spoke here.