I do not believe anybody on earth has a worse time than an Emperor penguin.

I was wracked with anxiety for about an hour last night, thinking about my student loans/savings goals. I've been saving really aggressively since August, but I'm so, so tired of carrying these loans. I figured out (thank you, unbury.us) if I apply about half of what I've been saving, plus the payment for the loan I just paid off by cutting my savings in half, I can be through with this by April of next year. April, April, April. I can do this. I just have to not freak out.

Hopefully this will assuage the feeling of being stuck in place that I've had the past few months. I love my job, but it's been pretty bad. We're adding a new staff person and tackling some new initiatives, so I'm looking forward to that. The fact that fundraising is so cyclical might be the issue. I have the schedule down, I feel like I'm on top of it, so now it's just, "Oh, that again." I'm not going to cut and run.

Today I started reading The Worst Journey in the World, about an expedition to the South Pole. The author has a really wry voice, which I appreciate; in his introductory paragraph, he says,

Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised [...] As men will compare the hardships of France, Palestine, or Mesopotamia, so it would be interesting to contrast the rival claims of the Antarctic as a medium of discomfort. A member of Campbell's party tells me that the trenches of Ypres were a comparative picnic. But until somebody can evolve a standard of endurance I am unable to see how it can be done. Take it all in all, I do not believe anybody on earth has a worse time than an Emperor penguin.