Decision: One Normal Year

I have had a rough semes­ter, and it’s rather neatly of my own doing. I’ve been stretch­ing out my burn-out for too long, and then this semes­ter I began a grad­u­ate pro­gram. I had very good rea­sons for doing so, but the result has been rather ridicu­lously har­row­ing. In my first term (two 8-week terms per semes­ter 19-week semes­ter with a 1-week break in between) my books arrived in the third week. I never really did catch up out of sheer neg­li­gence. I spent the very last week and a half work­ing almost con­stantly in order to fit eight weeks of 6 grad­u­ate credit hours into a hand­ful of days. I didn’t brush my hair for some­thing like six or seven days, and I crawled away with Cs.

I never again want to be grate­ful for the receipt of Cs. Perhaps dis­turbingly, I’m less both­ered by the hair.

In that fol­low­ing week, the break between terms, I came to a con­clu­sion: I will not apply to grad­u­ate school for 2009.

I went to bed on that Thursday, the 23rd, hav­ing processed the fact that I was not happy and would not be happy any time soon if I don’t alter course. I woke up on Friday the 24th hav­ing decided some­when in my sleep that I’d not apply for next year, not even to the U.K. as I’d planned. Friday was exceed­ingly peace­ful. By the time I’d gone to bed that night I’d bud­geted plans for var­i­ous regions in the States, scouted the apart­ment mar­ket in sev­eral cities, selected fur­ni­ture from IKEA, decided on a deep-concealment firearm, inves­ti­gated the job mar­ket in teach­ing, pub­lish­ing, and gen­eral office-ness, and devel­oped a ridicu­lous excite­ment about the inten­tion to live a nor­mal and bor­ing life for one aca­d­e­mic year.

Reality set in on Sunday, of course: I still have 2.5 semes­ters left in my cur­rent M.A. pro­gram. I enjoy most of the mate­r­ial… it’s the doing of it which I despise. That’s much of what has me con­cerned, ulti­mately. I could be dig­ging through the cor­re­spon­dence of late eighteenth-century America and would still feel bur­dened by the neces­sity of it.

Thus, a vaca­tion from my cho­sen voca­tion. I’ll stay here in Bolivia through August of 2009. I’ll spend the sum­mer months study­ing for the LSAT. I’ll return to the States and take the LSAT and make my appli­ca­tions. I’ll then spend the next year in what­ever “nor­mal” job or three I can find.

The task at hand, how­ever, is to wrap up all of my assorted loose ends and excel in this last year before a much-needed gap.