I just learned about the word "epoch" in my Victorian novel class. We're reading Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, a once-popular sensation novel of 1850s England. It's divided into three "epochs". So...a grad school epoch it is.
OH my, where to begin? Perhaps with a setting. Living room, parents' home in Nashville. Typing in the darkness on a Mac. Sitting at my sister's school table, a refurbished and rescued-from-the-dumb Vanderbilt library table (so cool!). Throbbing bass notes from the Mexican party up the street. I could really do without those throbbing bass notes at midnight on a Saturday. Having lived in Mexico does not mean I acclimated to their late-night revels.
I've been in school four weeks. A month. I've survived three straight weeks of isolated study, two panic attacks, a journal article summary, a terms test, teaching an undergrad short stories class, six entire books (including Jane Eyre, A Christmas Carol...and Freud), weaving back and forth between Clarksville and Nashville on the weeks and weekends. Moving to Clarksville. Trying to put down new roots with my classmates and church groups. Reading, reading, always reading. There will never be an end until December. Research class, Victorian class, psychoanalysis class. Attending a short story class to help teach. Managing an online world lit class. About to start writing a paper due in two weeks. It will never end until December...
But I'm happy. I don't have to dress up in pantyhose, skirts, and look like a Baptist schoolgirl. I don't have to pace the four-foot walls of a faded jungle-green cubicle. I don't have to repress a need for sunshine eight and a half hours a day. I can breathe and live and feel like a real person. I don't even have to get up before eight o'clock, any day of the week. I'm making friends--real ones, the kind that last beyond in-class lectures, presentations, and after-class chats. I can find a hundred places to go where I won't be disturbed. My room is a refuge. I have a down duvet on my bed, the kind I longed for from Germany to London this summer.
The one penultimate thing I have learned the past four weeks is that I have to change the way I study. I started thinking I could just talk to people after I finished studying. But...somehow, I was never done studying! I would go to my living room and shut the door and read, and read, and...read...and I would get more and more depressed as the to-do list crept further and further down the planner page, like soldiers marching to an unforeseen battle site. My soldiers are just going to have to keep marching, whether I can mark them off on the day assigned or not.
I love these weekends at home. I feel so safe here with my mom and dad. I feel so cultured here, where I can hop in the car and drive down to see a play at Centennial Park, attend a folk festival, or head to my favorite coffee shop. And of course my friends, my "core," are here. It's refreshing. But I'm starting to look forward to going back to Clarksville on Monday. Each week is starting to be a gold mine.
Oh no, I just remembered that I should be typing my essay on Jane Eyre right now. I haven't even formed a thesis. It's due in two weeks, but I must submit a draft or risk a low grade--which is unacceptable in grad school.
Farewell, dear reader, as Charlotte Brontë writes, until another midnight moment when the writing bug bites me.
