07/01/2004: "Fish out of chalk dust"

As of about 10:20 this morning, I guess I'm a college graduate. One might think that after 7 years of undergraduate studies I would be ebullient at the moment. But really, not so much. I don't want to be done with school. School is what I do. I believe I sighed a time or two as I walked away from campus this morning. I mean, I've been at that school for a long time. It seems like most people look at finishing school (completing school I mean, not Finishing School) as finally being able to get on with their real lives. I can't help but look at it in the opposite way, that not being a student is almost an interruption in my real life. Of course it's not as though I wasn't planning on going to grad school and getting my master's, but now I'm thinking maybe doctorate. I don't like the concept of not being immersed in academia. It's been four hours now and I'm already feeling weird about it. I think I have chalk dust in my blood or something. Ah who knows, it's probably best that I take some time off, I've got a stack of slavic science fiction nearly as tall as I am that I haven't had time to even touch in the last year, for just one example. And I seriously need to do some writing of my own. Nevertheless, I think that after a year or two of hiatus getting back to school is going to be a bit of a relief.