We are officially halfway through August and I have no idea what I have been doing with myself. I’ve seen one fringe show, still haven’t finished the draft of the paper from hell, and still have not taken a vacation. I’m back to the States in 5 weeks for a short visit, and the new school year starts in two weeks.

But I am a week behind,  so I will not waste anymore time. The challenge for the week is to write about how I have been spending my time lately. That is actually easy.

I’ve been avoiding responsibility.

Okay, not really, but sorta. This month has sorta spend by. I’ve been making time to see my friends, whether it is movies, dinner at my place, or comedy shows at the Fringe. I’ve really been putting in the effort to be more social and not just spend my time at home moping and watching bad reality TV. It’s been nice to be busy, and to be social. It keeps me from thinking about my depression, from all of the work that I am being asked to do at the university, and from all the ways I wish that I was different.

I’ve been subbing at a language school. One of my friends got married this weekend, and so I have been covering her classes while she is away. The classes have been great. One is a one-on-one conversation class where I can pick the topics we discuss and all I have to do is ask questions to get the conversation going, and the other class is a test prep class that is a lot of writing. All in all, not a bad way to spend an evening.

I got to get out of the city and visit Ireland and watch my friend get married. the wedding was lovely. It was very intimate, and I felt very VIP for having made the cut to witness such a beautiful day. I was also reunited with one of my favourite people. We hadn’t been in the same timezone in about a year, and we got to catch up on life and figure out how to drive on the wrong side of the road. This weekend I not only mastered driving on the left, but I mastered the art of going through a roundabout. One of the goals of my list of things to do before I am 30 is to get my UK driving licence. I now know that I can drive a car on the left side of the road, and make it through a roundabout without anyone honking at me.

So really, I’ve mastered the most important parts of the test.

The last bit of my time has been spent actually trying to get words on a page that are related to my thesis. While there are bits of the paper I am working on that will eventually become part of my thesis, as they stand now they are not part of it. I have been feeling like the last year has had nothing to really do with my PhD, and that is starting to stress me out. I only have about 3,000 words so far, and chances are they will change a lot by the time it actually becomes my thesis, but it makes me feel better that I have something written, and something that sounds like me and has my voice in it.

Perhaps the most exciting bit though is that once I survive this week I get five days on a beach in Malta.

And really, that is all I ever really want out of life.