one of those moments

January sucks and this one sucks particularly bad.  Every January, I have to re-time my clients at each job they do to measure their progress.  That means a whole lot of work for me.  It's also my first winter term and classes are a bit more challenging than they were last term.  To top it all off, I'm fighting nasty cough.

All of this was beginning to bog me down.  I thought I could just turn all emotions off and just plow through the month (and the quarter) with my head held low and persevere.  Yet, today, I had a few moments of sunshine.

I got to watch Spiderman 3 with some of the ATE clients and my favorite guy, M.S., in particular.  This guy is usually a reminder of how much I mean to the clients at work.  I was hardly in yesterday due to timings and today I had a last-minute training so I came in just an hour and a half before M.S. was due to leave.  He was in tears, wondering where I had been.  I got him to quickly turn it around and we actually had a decent conversation afterwards.  Usually, our conversations are about me being a hot-headed woman or him saying he's going to cut my throat.  But today was different.  Then I brought out Spiderman 3 which I got from the library specifically for him (he loves Peter Parker).  He sat right next to me and tried to hide every time the phone rang because he thought it was his ride to go home.  He asked if he could spend the night here and he asked if I was going to spend the night.  It's hard to describe that level of trust and confidence he was placing in me and how damn rewarding it felt.  Anyway, it was the highlight of my year so far and that's even with Spiderman 3, the most inferior of the three Spiderman movies.

What else?
I had my second research class.  After struggling with my readings this past weekend, I finally got what it was saying today.  It felt good to realize that it wasn't me, it was the way the text was written.  The teacher is also very good at conveying the information and making it obtainable.  He also has the most expressive hand gestures.  At one point, he did this funky gesture when saying "radical."  I loved it so much I imitated it in my chair without thinking about it.  He gave me a real quizzical look and I felt like apologizing but that's really hard to apologize for without making it more of an issue.

I attended a work training on Rules and Rights.  It was supposed to last two hours.  However, after 45 minutes, the instructor said, "Well, I thought there would be a lot more audience participation.  That's pretty much all I have."  We spent the next 45 minutes in an agonizing Q&A.  There was a lady beating an easy topic into the ground with a defeatist attitude.  It was a relatively minor problem and this lady would not accept any solution offered by the teacher.  "I've tried that," "My supervisors won't change their schedule," "She won't listen", etc.  This lady had tried nothing and she was all out of ideas.  After enduring as much as we could, we left early.

Still, it was a good day.