A Rather Strange Day....

Why? Well for one, I went to the ENT today about my ear pain. I've been having this pain for a while and I was worried that it was effecting my hearing. My hearing is fine, in fact it is very very good. The ear pain is due to my clenching of my jaw.... I'm apparently given myself arthritis in my jaw, albeit temporary. The muscles that are spasming because of the teeth clenching stem up into the ear....causing the pain. It is also the cause of my perception of hearing loss in my left ear as the muscle that is effected is pulling the eardrum down a bit. The doctor was very helpful and answered all of my odd questions. Health tip......don't use q-tips to clean your ears. Apparently your ears have a natural self-cleaning system and using q-tips is the equilivent of wiping away your ear's natural immune system. So I am going to try to stop myself from using q-tips....especially because the doctor says that once I do that I'll be able to swim and not worry about ear pain. Of course.....I think that I am getting sorta annoyed that yet another doctor has told me that I need to de-stress....alright guys! I get the point!

The next strange thing that happened today is that I sorta got a promotion at the Center. One of our professors got a huge grant for a Turkish studies project, I know that he had been trying to get me as his assistant, and this morning I got an email from our soon-to-be new director appointing me as project assistant. This will move me to full time (I'm currently only 30 hours a week) and I am still to be in Outreach. Of course the salary increase won't happen until July and there are alot of details that will need to be worked out. I still have to work on part of the project now though.....but it is kinda flattering that I got this promotion. It will make the future of me in Outreach extra interesting.

And the final bit of strangeness....although it really isn't that strange, is that I am still working on my comps. In my appointment with Esther yesterday we talked about why I was freaking and alot of it has to do with my feelings of the exam being a bunch of busy work and that I'm not as empassioned about the subject as I used to be. I worked on them this afternoon in my office at work and made a huge amount of progress and when I am done with this post, I am going to work more on them. I've made a large pot of coffee and I am in a surprisingly good mood. Now I just need to take some anti-inflammatories for the spasming jaw and resulting ear pain and I'm golden!