Back At It

I may as well admit it: I am alive. 

More than that, I am, by many mea­sures, well. My fam­i­ly and I are busi­ly engaged in set­tling into a house that will — bar­ring any change of plans — be our home for the next two years. I am cycling a not-incon­sid­er­able dis­tance to school and back each week­day, and now that the bath­room scale has been unpacked I see that for the first time in what seems a very long time, I may soon get myself under two bills: a nice psy­cho­log­i­cal boost when­ev­er that happens. 

I am a full-time stu­dent again this year, and now I can insert the word “grad­u­ate” into that state­ment. No equiv­o­ca­tion this time around: I am in grad school, fo’ realsies. This is actu­al­ly quite excit­ing, as life jour­ney stages go, and I love being in class with stu­dents who are all, in one way or anoth­er, head­ed in rough­ly the same direc­tion I am, or at least toward the same degree. It is, admit­ted­ly, a bit con­fus­ing enter­ing into an entire­ly new dis­ci­pline where even the cita­tion rules are dif­fer­ent, but I am feel­ing up to the chal­lenge. Even the gram­mat­i­cal details of Latin are com­ing back quick­ly and eas­i­ly so far, although it is ear­ly days yet, and lin­guis­tics is an area I am unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly reluc­tant to get cock­sure regarding.

And writ­ing? Sur­pris­ing­ly lit­tle in the way of orga­nized prose will be demand­ed of me in my cours­es, at least so far (there is a sem­i­nar paper of forty-odd pages to be writ­ten by Feb­ru­ary 2011, but I shall start on that anon, prob­a­bly not until ear­ly in the new year), so I am eager to get back to my own prosi­fy­ing in what I will hap­pi­ly pre­tend is my spare time. First on my dock­et: the con­clud­ing sev­en­teen sto­ries in my sum­mer 90in90 short fic­tion marathon. The planned break has been a bit longer than I had hoped, but it takes some doing to move a fam­i­ly of four into a home filled with oth­er people’s things, so I think I can be for­giv­en. At least, I am going to for­give myself, and not lose much sleep over whether you for­give me or not.

So look for the sto­ries to start rolling off the assem­bly line again for a cou­ple weeks, and then… And then? I will have words for you betimes, I assure you.

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