Also, My Back Is Killing Me

Today, September 25, marks a month since I drove to the campus of my former university, ready to begin a career as a newly-minted "graduate student" and hopefully take my place among the great scholars who have contributed to intelligent discussions of Shakespeare, Milton, and Michael Bay. Granted, a month ago it was just orientation (classes started the next week), but I figure it's worth marking the occasion.

I started off sick to my stomach as I walked to the building, and for the first couple of weeks I seriously questioned what the hell I thought I was doing. I'd forgotten how nerve-wracking it can be to find yourself in a new situation, friendless and anonymous until the first awkward movements towards getting to know your peers (classmates or co-workers) are over and you can get down to the nitty-gritty of mocking things together (like, in my classmates' case, certain dead French philosophers who may or may not have been full of shit). It had been four years at my previous place of employment, four long years where I'd built up a certain amount of goodwill and simple "being-stuck-together-ness" with my work friends, and now that was gone (though I still try to keep in touch via Facebook, it's just not the same).

A month in, and I can say this: it's a lot more challenging than I thought it'd be, but in a good way. I likely will never read Derrida for fun (hell, I don't think Derrida read Derrida for fun), but I did get around to reading Roland Barthes' Mythologies and I think I understood most of it. I'm a month in and feeling like, if I don't end up being the world's best grad student or anything ridiculous like that, I can at least aim for doing good enough to land some kind of rewarding job after.

I have been wrapped up in grad school, almost to the point of forgetting that there's other things beside it. I have classes Monday through Wednesday, at night, and once I swing by Taco Bell I'm heading home (though I might cut back on the TB; last night I had a dream where an alligator bit off my right arm, or maybe I dreamed that I was writing a short story where that happened to the main character; paging Dr. Freud!). I still try to read for fun, though nothing that distracts me for too long from my main objective of Trying to Read Foucault And Understand Him (almost a lost cause). I kinda wonder if I'm getting late-in-life ADD, because I like to read with the TV at home but sometimes it hurts more than it helps. Which is why, a lot of times, I head to the on-campus library to get bulk reading done (your lit theory, your short story from a classmate in Fiction class, etc.). My grandmother said something yesterday about how I can't spend my whole life reading; she doesn't know how appealing that sounds some days.

At any rate, I like what I'm doing, it's a lot more responsibility than I've had for four years or so. I wouldn't mind making the dean's list, but right now I'm just trying my best. You do the best with what you got, so what I got right now is being put to use. Also, my back is killing me, because my Lit Theory book could flatten a small country off the face of the earth. But then I've had back problems for years.