When I cam home from work Thursday the air hung heavy and sweet. The sweet smell fills your lungs you can almost taste it. The citrus are blooming, these delicate white and yellow flowers cover the trees in the neighborhood perfuming the air with its thick sweet scent. 

Smell brings back memories, or maybe it is that many of our memories are defined by smell. I can remember still the smell of pancakes filling my childhood home, on a twisted lane lined with trees, on the occasional Sunday morning. It is a perfect smell and it reminds me of all things wonderful and comfortable. The sweet smell of a rubber store, reminds me of the hospital and the gas mask of anesthesia they used to use on me before I figured out they could do it with an IV. Sometimes here in the southwest the air will have the smell of fresh salty sea air. I don’t know how but if you close your eyes and breathe in the air you would think you were at the ocean. It is a beautiful smell, I miss that fresh ocean air. 

The week continues to be difficult. I continue to struggle with my teacher in my nonprofit leadership class. I continue to examine myself, wishing and hoping for a solution, a harmonious working relationship. But alas I think she has given up on me. I know I have done things wrong, I know I could have handled things better, but the fact is I didn’t. I feel a whole snarl of emotions tangled up inside of me: frustration, hurt, desire to do better, and confusion. I look to my teachers for guidance for help, for gentle correction, for so much and I guess it isn’t fair. Some just will not be that, some are just there for the job, or some just don’t want to be friends, they don’t want to care that much, maybe they have been hurt, maybe it is something else. These events shatter my confidence the pieces of myself lie in shards before me reflecting back at me, my broken self, like pieces of a mirror. The team project didn’t help the whole experience of this class much either. We were all off kilter right from the start. As I review the actions of our team moment by moment I can see so many places I/we took a wrong turn. I spent hours on illustrations for the presentation and yet instead of helping these seem to have lost us points, although yet I don’t know a grade because we are supposed to do some rebuttal thing. Then instead of having the support of the team backing up my hard work they hung me out to dry! I am not sure if it is something in the alignment of the stars, the time of year or what but it seems that this set of relationships have been doomed to fail. I find myself faltering in the darkness trying and failing and trying and failing again. I have given up, resigned myself to what is. Pulled back my passion back and locked it away again safely secure and out of view. It is now just about doing the work and praying for these next two and half weeks to go by. Praying that next time will be better. With the he completion of this class I will be one-third of the way through the program, I only hope that I can do it.

 I have reviewed more options and I think I will be switching out of the nonprofit track to the general business track, in the end it may serve me better.

 The allergies that have been trying to get me sick for the last several days finally have. Friday, Saturday, and today I have been sick, I can breath and my head feels like its in a vice, my vision almost blurring from all of it. I feel the worst today, just in time for work tomorrow, and a new week of school! I started this post about smell, and now I can’t smell, the irony of it all.