LOL, Oh Grad School

It’s after 10 pm, and as I begin a huge assignment that’s due tomorrow, I have just come across a paper that I wrote for a class in the first two weeks of the grad program I am suddenly two weeks from completing. It’s sort of sad but funny to see just how far I have not come.

Rekindling the (Writing) Flame

In describing my relationship to writing, there are too many possible ways to begin; we share a passionate yet tumultuous history. I suppose I should skip the part where my first grade teacher allowed me to sit out during class lessons, encouraging me instead to cultivate my poetry and short stories. That I won first place in a local contest with the story of a princess who befriends her hero rather than marrying him doesn’t belong in a graduate level paper concerning academic writing. Yet I’d like to linger there a bit longer, savoring the memory of young love, when writing was fun, relaxed, and fulfilling, our bond not yet strained by the weight of high expectations, personal shortcomings, or outsiders seeking to control the terms of our relationship. Suffice to say somewhere along the way, those obstacles—those normal aspects of the education system—emerged, things cooled down, and the relationship became on-again, off-again, at times more serious than others but also never truly over. There’s been blogging, two years of consulting at the writing center, and a devastating failed honors thesis. Today, as a graduate student, I realize that it’s time we work out our differences and commit for the long run. That, or call it quits.