I'm feeling preeeety good right now. I have had a few good days in a row. I got some new shoes, which I have needed very badly for a while. I had one pair of flip flops and one pair of sneakers that were so old they had become uncomfortable, one pair of winter boots and one pair of heels that I can't really walk in. I was wearing the flip flops, but it has gotten a bit cold for them. In the past few days I have gotten a pair of funny sneaker things, a pair of flats, and two pairs of boots, one dressy and one casual. The casual ones are too small, so I need to return them, but to have so many shoe choices is just mind boggling to me. The boots were also pretty pricey; they are both real leather. I have never owned nice shoes before and I am pretty psyched.
Also, last night I had that successful date I talked about somewhere already.
Also, today I had a long talk with a girl in one of my classes about how we feel like we are not excelling at grad school the way we should be and how we don't know what we are going to do with our lives. That sounds depressing, but it is actually comforting to hear someone else articulate the same things. I hope she and I can become some sort of friends, because I don't actually have many friends in Michigan, let alone in my program. I've invited her to go to a job fair/professional networking event with me, which is a thing we both know we need to do, but are bad at doing. I might be good for her, and I think having someone I know at the same event might be good for me, but we will see.
Also, a few weeks ago I volunteered myself for some difficult work, because I get overambitious sometimes. I have a group project where we needed to pick a few hundred files out of a set of a few thousand. They were sorted into folders and the easy way to do this was to just pick one of the folders with an appropriate number of emails in it. But, I opened my big mouth and said "I bet a Python program could pull us a sub-set in a more interesting way." I had been warned that in my professional life, opening my mouth about things like that would certainly mean I was volunteering for the task, and that was the case in the group as well. I am not great with Python. My school has one mandatory class which teaches the basics, and that is all I know. The other group members hated that class though, and swore that they wouldn't even know how to start. I am happy to report that I cobbled together a successful program to do what we wanted. I know it could be better, but it does what it needs to with minimal effort on our part, and I managed to write it using only old assignments I had saved and things I found on the web. I was sure I was going to have to show up to a professor's office hours and ask them to fix it.