Quickly

I've worked hard before, but never with so much determined focus.  The degree to which the car distracted me was made clear by how much I've been able to buckle down, even though I frequently take longer to read things than I would like to, longer to chimp out a paper than I feel I need to.  The next couple of weeks will see a mountain of work that I've already scaled significant parts of, and I'll be grateful to see Friday, December 17th, at which time all of my finals will be done, and (with luck) my economics paper will be nearly finished, if not already completed.

I've made peace with the financial stress of school, but in so doing it has revealed another unexpected feeling: I am reluctantly spending loaned money and feel much better with the idea that I actually created some of my still-small surplus by selling the car.  I didn't actually create any wealth; I merely converted the durable good into income at a price less than its market value, feeling that the extra $1000 that might have resulted from higher pricing or a delay would not have been worth repeated trips to Buffalo (which I didn't and don't have time for) or the prospect of a snowstorm undoing the proper testing of the car (which still hasn't hit - a twenty-minute snow flurry yesterday is all that's really happened yet this year and even that melted away to reveal the still-green grass).  I was able to trust my gut, and again have it work - even letting the father of the buyer take the car for a spin while I waited in their home, talking on the phone to his son, who agreed to buy the car sight unseen on his father's recommendation.  The driver could have vanished, but he didn't, just like so many people that we trust could betray it, but don't.  It's a big small thing.

I woke up seven hours ago and with this writing exception, all that I've done is research for a group accounting project, get my portion of a paper completed for a group information-systems project, and have begun plowing through readings for tomorrow's classes, with a quick resume review needed as I have a strategy session at 5:30pm tomorrow for that.  I've never stared at a computer screen so much in my life, but I'm doing much more than staring: though the research, the note-taking that has resulted in an incredible pile of used scratch paper in the "den", I've had great focus, so much so that when I looked to my right and out the window a few minutes ago, I was again reminded that yes, I'm in a new city in a new country.

The view has become very familiar, but I think I'll always be an outsider, or rather, will never forget where I came from.  And that's a very, very good thing.