What I really spent the semester doing OR I'm not actually obsessed with my neighbor

Ok, so you know the title's not actually true, because denials are--without loss of generality--never true.

That said, here's what I spent the semester doing:

1. Reading articles...and more articles
2. Writing papers...and more papers
3. Practicing for a real job by showing up for my 8 a.m. class at 8ish.
4. Pushing the limits of my ride's carrying capacity (AKA stuffing as much crap as possible into the milk crate bungied to the back of my bike).
5. Thinking about how cold my feet are (activity is not unique to this semester, but rather is a constant activity that gives my life consistency)
6. Pondering the imminent doom of the journalism-as-we-know-it industry
7. Wondering why people never warn me about things (namely, why people didn't tell me about #6 before I started studying journalism and why people never warned me that #1 and #2 are all you ever do in grad school)
8. Defending liberals to my conservative friends and conservatives to my liberal friends...and struggling with my personal love/hate relationship with both.
9. Trying to become the kind of person who isn't ashamed to admit that she likes drinking box wine.
10. Becoming a defender of Communism. Not because of its merits, but rather because I get tired of people immediately writing it off as being merit-less and...dangerous.
11. Being glad that we don't actually live in a Communist nation. That would mean food rationing, and I certainly needed more than my fair ration of frozen food to survive this semester.