What it's like tonight.

Graduate school. Sometimes I feel like I'm paused and the world is going on somewhere without me.

Like when someone told me about the tsunami in Japan and I realized that if they hadn't, I wouldn't have known because I hadn't turned on the TV in two weeks. Or when I could only remember Christmas as so many days past when grades were due. And the expanse stretching before me where I see one and two day windows from now till next winter break and that's just this year and there are so many years left and they will probably only get harder.

I love what I am doing (love isn't even the right word...I am what I am doing) but I also have a "someday" feeling about it. Some days hunched on the library floor with a pile of books taller than I am or writing on the deck in the speckled morning sunshine feels like I'm part of some enormous eternal wood-panelled academic ether and it's warm and I'm doing something. Some days writing at my cluttered desk in a room where the light bulbs keep burning out and my eyes are heavy feels like the loneliest quiet and someday I'll be back.

These are the last two cherry blossoms left on our anniversary tree after the storms this morning.


I don't know. I'm awake three hours after everyone else in the house, still reading.