When "One Day" Is Suddenly Tomorrow

The other day I was picking out socks to match my ladybug outfit and telling my mom what flavor of pudding I wanted in my lunch. Today I registered for the GRE General Test for admittance into graduate school. WHAT HAPPENED?! Not only do I seem to have lost my darling ecclectic sense of fashion, but my mother no longer makes my lunches. O yea, and I'm going to have to take out monstrous loans to pour into a terminal masters degree when everyone knows a terminal masters is a money pit. But one day I want to knock on a big oak door in some bustling urban office building and have a piece of paper, and hopefully a little knowledge, that qualifies me for a salary. Or the occassional free book at the very least.

This desire, at base really one to avoid winding up 24 and homeless, has translated into labyrinths of graduate school program profiles, loan inquiries, anguish over writing samples and asking for professor recommendations, contacting astute and menacing scholars to whom you must grovel for the priviledge of studying at their feet. Have I even mentioned the testing fees, application fees, travel expenses, give us your money and run fees that come attached to this necessary evil for all ambitious humanities students? (Not a single one of us has not had the sudden piquant thought, "Why didn't I just suck it up and major in Marketing?") Is this really what's going to make me happy? But we all know where this road leads and no public communicative space, virtual or otherwise, can accomodate that level of existential torture.

And not to complicate things, but in case you haven't been told, I also am planning on leaving the country. That's right, not only do I plan on filling out enough paperwork to make an accountant sweat a medium-sized South American river, I'll be doubling the number of forms in order to obtain all sorts of fun international visas and documents with a diverse array of letter-number combo names. I figure, if you're going to make your life complicated, might as well go ahead and make it really complicated. (=Z)

In between the intermittent (ok, let's be real, constant) panic attacks over leaving the warm, benign bubble of undergraduate life in Athens, GA for a giant, slithering, fuming jungle of hostility and failure that is everywhere else, I see brief visions of myself huddled in a library in one of the oldest cities of Europe, the ruggedly romantic Edinburgh. But this vague notion of fulfillment and joy needs a great deal of refining and, quite honestly, a heavy dose of lead to bring it back down to earth.

Therefore, in my effort to make "One Day" quite a real prospect, encompassing a name, a purpose, a location, an instituion, an invitation in my hand, I am setting out to do as the ancients have done before me by putting the fictive present into the past and thereby make it solid, make it sound.

From choosing a University/Program/Prospective International Adventure, to making the most of senior year, to coping with losing the last vestiges of childhood, to saying something that more-or-less resonates with someone else, I invite you to follow me, and preemptively apologize for the hairiness of my thought process and possible blatant contradictions of purpose on a day-to-day basis.

Adieu mes amis! Until next time,

The Saraday