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.