but i saw you leave and crawl into a bed of broken windows

A Friday narrative of what I’m thinking about

After what will amount to exactly one year and 14 days in the “real world” of full-time professional employment, I’m returning to Studentsville, Population: Me and Everybody Else Who Doesn’t Like Working. Kind of an oversimplification, but also kind of true? I mean, I would say that I knew I wanted to go back to school beyond the shadow of a doubt in ohh, say, September? And as much as I like to be confident in my stick-to-itness and general real life competencies, I am kind of terrible at working. Some people such as parents would probably say, “Welp, get used to it. This is the Real World” and they’re not talking about degenerate reality television but the commonly-propagated belief that you will probably hate your job and you’ll eventually learn to get over it and that’s no reason to drop out of the race. But I wasn’t bad at school, and like I said, I’m a pretty lame employee – and for the sake of my ego, I’d like to think it’s not because I’m lazy but because I’m supposed to be learning and reading and not wearing business casual clothes. And really, this is all a supplementary argument to the more accurate explanation that I really, really miss academia and think that is where I can ultimately do the most good and where I want to pursue my actual life’s vocation. But as of this summer, I am officially a graduate student – which means free gym membership, student movie prices [as if I ever stopped using my old undergrad i.d. card anyway…], sneakers and jeans, and no health insurance.

What with this whole big life change happening this summer, I’m also currently immersed in the heady and intimidating world of apartment searching in a major metropolitan region. A great deal of time is spent scouring craigslist and worrying about ending up in a mice hole full of mice and ghosts and no washer/dryer. The rest of my time devoted to this endeavor is spent dreaming about how exciting it will be to live in Philly—as opposed to Harrisburg, which is really a lovely place to live but does not have things like venues and a zoo and Urban Outfitters and a healthy population of handsome scholarly graduate students who want to go to venues and zoos and Urban Outfitters.

It’s Cazh Fri, and I’m wearing my sweet octopus shirt made by this guy. Don’t know if you had heard, but colossal squids have been a hot topic lately, as one of the world’s only intact specimens was thawed and dissected for the first time last month in New Zealand. Because this guy is really into giant and/or colossal squids, I sent her the link to the dissection project’s blog.In the age of blog lingo kind of becoming validated as its own linguistic style, it’s surprisingly interesting to get this style report from squid dissectors. Something else I learned is that there is surprising number of blogs about squids:
http://www.squidblog.com/
http://squid.us/
http://www.squidsquid.com/