I heart grad school

Last week, a professor of mine said something like "there will be few other times in your life when all you're asked to do is read, think and write." That really changed my outlook on graduate school. Being single, young and having uber loving-supportive-ATM-like parents, I guess I'm relatively responsibility-free. So....a liberal arts graduate education in which I'm assigned to read and think about stuff I would probably read and think about anyway is truly a luxury. Sometimes when I'm stressed out about some paper on Marxist feminism or a group meeting on droughts in Ethiopia, I realize that I could be stressed about far less interesting things. An imminent oil change, for example, or an overdue expense report. I often wish I had the discipline to keep a hard copy, itinerary-like journal of my day so that I could look back on it in fifteen years and think "wow...I can't believe I used to put 'have a drink with Erin' on my list of things to do for Wednesday night."

In conclusion (I suppose), I LOVE graduate school. Sure there are occasional ulcer-inducing days of stress, meals that compensate in starch and fat what they lack in nutrition, and moments where your intellectual self esteem is crushed into a fine dust, but all in all, it's a lot of fun. I realize that this condemns me to life of nerd-dom, but I'll own it. That's why I'm in the library about to read some articles about Islamic fundamentalism in Bangladesh on 7pm on a Friday night....