It has been an interesting week. I put in more hours at my job this week than ever before, which had to do with the inauguration and a certain home makeover show being filmed in town.

Last week two people in different social settings came up to me and told me they had read something I wrote. Wow. People actually read what I write. That's hard to get used to.

The difference between the real world and academia: something I spend roughly 15 minutes writing gets read by a few hundred people, while something I spent a whole six months writing and researching gets put on a shelf, to be read by three people and quite possibly no one else.

There are things I'm happy about in my job and things I'm not happy with, but the most noteworthy thing that has come with the job is a feeling of power that I've never had before. And I like it. I suppose that was exactly why I took the job: I wanted a job writing about things that matter to people's lives. I thrived in the world of academia, but for all its ideals about inclusiveness, it's still a little too stuck in its ivory tower for me, still fairly irrelevant to what really goes on in the lives of average people.

I feel like I'm learning so much more about this community's heart and soul, its blood and guts, and I'm liking that, too. What makes El Paso/Juarez/Las Cruces tick? Crime and infrastructure and politics and personalities, there's a certain beauty in all of it. I'm done writing reports, but I'm still learning, just through different means.

I was always so afraid I wouldn't be able to succeed at a real job, and by "real" I mean a corporate, white-collar, fairly high-pressure office job. But it hasn't turned out to be true. It was rocky at first and I've made a ton of mistakes, but I finally see myself getting better at it and enjoying it, and that is fuel to keep me going forward.