If you are married, or have been married, you know that it can be hard to have a happy relationship all the time.  Sure, you will have your good days, and sometimes you will have bad ones.  That is life, right?

Well, that is what I thought until I read some Dr. Phil advice on the Internet that changed my thinking.  You see, he suggested that we needed to take responsibility for our unhappy relationships and do something about it.

I realized that I had always blamed the other person for the state of our relationship, but in reality, it is my fault.  After learning this hard fact of life (it took me awhile to accept it), and made an effort to have have a good relationship, my life, and marriage became better.  In fact, you could almost argue that the happiness is back.

I knew it was going to be a bad day right from the start. I got to class and realized that I had left the research papers that I needed sitting on the kitchen counter. I thought I could talk my way out of it, but the teacher said that she had warned us that there would be no excuses for having a late paper and she would no longer accept it, so therefore, I got a big zero for the assignment. I knew that I was really going to have to put all of my efforts into the next two book reports if I had a hope of even passing the class now.

The day got even better. When I got to the cafeteria at lunchtime, a group of goofballs ran into me while running out of the door and spilled chocolate milk all over my sweater. It was the sweater that I had “borrowed” from my mom’s closet and I had planned to return it as soon as I got home from school.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was after school when I went into the library to start some research for a term paper that I had coming up. The door got jammed and I was locked in the library. I could not get out until someone found me over an hour later.

I went home and had a huge meltdown. I grabbed a box of Oreo cookies and ate the whole thing in front of the TV. I feel much better now.

It is a very busy year for our family.  My son and his wife have just given birth to the most amazing baby boy that I have ever seen since the birth of my own son.  My son himself, is trying to juggle his new family and his work on his dissertation.  I think he is finding it a lot harder than he expected it to be.

In a few short months, my daughter-in-law will also be working on her thesis.  I am looking very much forward to this as grandma gets to take care of baby Jake while his mommy and daddy are very busy doing their research.

I certainly feel sorry for them and don’t envy them at all for all the essay writing that they are going to have to do in the next few years.  They are both very brilliant people and I know that they will do well, and I am just so very glad that they live near me and don’t have to put Jake in day care.

College life in the essay writing go hand-in-hand.  There is a delicate balance between the two and if you ignore one or the other chances are your college experience will not be as good as you would expect.  Without essay writing you will not pass your classes, and without having some sort of social life in college you’ll never make it through in one piece.

One of the biggest things I learned is that I should schedule my coursework as it comes in so that I still have time to engage in social activities.  This is especially true for essays as your mark tends to be higher if you allocate more time to writing as a over a longer period.  That way, you’re not in a rush and your paper looks well thought out and complete.

Trust me when I say that this balance is key as I had repeat my first year college because I just couldn’t figure that out.  So for those of you just starting out heed my advice and save yourself a lost year of your life.

My college experience was filled with good times, bad times, and stressful times.  I would have to say that it was one of the most wonderful and horrible experiences of my entire life.  Though I did manage to get a degree, it wasn’t until my fourth year that I figured out the three pieces to the college puzzle.

Now these pieces are not a description of the three things that make your college life wonderful.  Rather, it is the three things that tend to encapsulate what you will be doing a college while you’re there.

The first piece would be the coursework that you do while in college.  I would include attending classes, reading your textbook, and doing assignments in this category.  Usually, you’ll find yourself doing these tasks each and every day and quite frankly it will be the majority what to do at college.

The second piece would be all the essays that you write.  Whether it be the term papers that you are writing for your English class, psychology class, sociology class, etc. you’ll find you are writing pretty much all the time.  The result is either you end up loving to write or just hate it.  Thankfully, with many degrees you do not have to write essays in the last couple years of your college career.

The third piece of a college life would be socializing.  This can be the clubs, teams, events that you attend and participate in.  I would have to say, for me this was the most fun of the three major things that you do in college.  But, you have to be careful that you don’t spend all your time socializing and ignore the other two things that you should be doing.

So my college days are over, there are many days when I wish I could go back and relive those times again.

In college I made a lot of new friends.  Sure, some of them just ended up being acquaintances, but I did end up with a number of close friends.  Quite often we would work on assignments together, study together, and socialize together.

It was from these people I learned many important lessons about life.  We were all from different backgrounds and I was able to learn about their life experiences.  It was an eye opening experience, as I had never really been many places in my life.

But one of the greatest lessons I learned was that of hard work.  You see, Brad decided that instead of writing his own essays for his classes, he would buy essays instead.  Now, in some respects, that would be a really cool idea, but it made me think that you could just buy a degree from a fake school, right?

Back to topic.  I watched Brad search for a custom research paper for his engineering class.  I also watched him buy a custom term paper for his psychology class.  Things were really going good for him until he was caught on an English essay.

And that was the end of his college career.  He was expelled.

I learned a valuable lesson that day - if you take a shortcut, it will catch up to you.  Needless to say, all the papers I wrote in college were my own  and I make sure that I never cut corners.

I have never liked school. In fact, I have always hated it. I never did very well, even when I worked really hard at it. The only reason I stuck it out in school was for the sports. I did really well in physical education and I was wanted for all sports teams in school. I absolutely love to play golf, so when I was offered a spot at a South Carolina golf school, I decided I needed to rethink this hatred of school.

I went to golf school and it was the most amazing experience of my life. I learned a lot and improved my game substantially. I was even offered a job to come back as an instructor. I was not ready for that kind of school commitment, but told them that it was something I would consider for my future.

I traveled for a bit and when I was ready to settle down, I decided that I should become an instructor at the Academy of Golf. It is ironic that, for someone who hated school with a passion, I was now a teacher. But, come to think of it, I could have been a physical education teacher and loved that as well.

My buddy, Jeremy, came over last night. It was nice because we have not had a good chance to visit in a long time. He has been extremely busy with school, and I have been busy trying to plan my wedding to the greatest man ever. Jeremy asked if I would please read an essay that he had written for his Political Studies class and let him know what I thought of it.

Being a high school teacher, I have read hundreds of term papers, so he wanted my take on his. I told him that the expectations between high school and university students were very different, but I would be happy to give it a go. That was all he wanted, so he brought it over. I read through it and I told him that I thought it was absolutely brilliant.

He was always very nervous when it came to writing research papers. I remember him being the exact same way when we were in high school. I reassured him that he had nothing to worry about, even though it was worth forty percent of his final grade. That made him happy and then we had the pleasure of visiting long into the night. I really missed him.

I happen to own a lot of jewelry. It is not because I buy a lot of jewelry, but because my parents are divorced and my dad would buy me gifts to make up for the time that he never spent with me. I know that he tried, but he went through a very selfish stage where no one really mattered to him but himself. In fact, the first visit that he missed was the one that earned me my diamond stud earrings.

The funny thing about this is that I was only six years old at the time. Who, in their right mind, buys diamonds for a six years old? My mom, being the responsible adult, would of course, not allow me to wear the, which I am thankful for now because I know that I wouldn’t still have them if I had worn them back then. And plus, my boyfriend thinks it’s hot when I wear them.

Dad has bought me two JoJo watches and they are absolutely my favorite thing. He has grown out of his selfish phase and tends to make it around to his visitations a lot more than he used to. I don’t really hold it against him, because I know that he really tries and seriously does not know any better. He is being the best dad that he can be and I love him for that.

I remember last summer when I was preparing to start working on my dissertation. I found that it was almost as hard figuring out what I was going to do it on as it was doing the actual work involved. I was a wreck for a long time. Just ask my husband. I am pretty sure that I was not an easy person to live with at the time.

Considering I never imagined myself working on thesis writing, I knew I had come a long way in my schooling. I had done a lot better than I had thought I might, as my high school grades barely got me into college. I buckled down and started studying. I decided if I was paying so much for my education, I had better start taking it seriously.

And now, here I am, starting to work on my dissertation. I want it to be spectacular. I am going to dedicate it to all those people who said that I couldn’t do it. Apparently, there were quite a number of people who said that I was not college material. Thanks for the encouragement. But, I only had to prove it to myself. In the grand scheme of things, no one else really mattered.