Week one. It's hard to believe that I'm already a full-time graduate student. It's even harder to believe that I picked up everything in Charlotte, and moved back to Boone, and by myself, too. This semester is going to be a lot more work-heavy than the last three years that I've spent at Appalachian State University, but I'm excited and expectant.
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I've always wanted to start a blog, and I never really had a great reason to, until I started this graduate class. Now that I have a reason, I'm really excited to share things that I've read, and even things in life that I've experienced, with you all.
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This week, we started reading Textbook by Amy Krouse Rosenthal. This book is unlike anything I've ever read before. AKR designed this book to be an actual textbook- there are parts of the book where she asks readers to "text" a certain phrase to a phone number for a personalized text from the author.
As I was reading, AKR brought up a lot of instances of serendipity. Serendipity can be defined as an "occurrence of events in a happy or beneficial way". One of her serendipitous moments was when she was at a book reading. AKR had the sudden urge to give away her ring to someone who really wanted/needed it. When she finally decided to give it to a woman in the crowd, she asked the woman to give it away on her birthday, April 29th. The woman smiled, and told Rosenthal that April 29th was also her birthday.
This made me think- when was the last time I experienced serendipity?
I really tried to sit and think about this, but I've also had a lot of other things on my mind. Coming back for graduate school was a big decision for me, and I'm leaving a lot behind in Charlotte- my home, my family, my friends, and my city. Living on my own is expensive, obviously, and learning how to budget is a little overwhelming to me. As I began to drown in my waves of "what if"'s and "how will I"'s, I got a text from one of my friends student teaching in Boone. Her school was looking for reading tutors, and she gave my name to her principal. This. This was the moment of serendipity that I had been searching for.
Rosenthal, A. K. (2016). Textbook. New York City, NY: Penguin Random House.