Good-bye to school, for now

Day 1 of freedom. I turned in the final draft of my seminar paper yesterday. I'm finally free of school obligations. Which is cool...but I'm also sort of sad about it. It's going to be a long summer. Too long, I think. It's going to take awhile to adjust from part-time worker/part-time student to part-time worker/part-time slacker.

I'll miss my classes. It's amazing how studying ancient philosophy or dissecting an old poem or reading about hegemony can shed light on the human experience. Seriously. And I've met some very interesting people--literature people, rhetoric people, people who are my age, people who are much older than me, people from other countries. I think my writing has improved, too (but I'll let you be the judge of that). I've had more practice at it, at least.

Thinking about the experiences I've had in the past two semesters, I feel like I made a really good decision to sign up for this program. I feel like I'm in the right place, like things are in alignment. I don't feel like I'm forcing myself to go on, trudging on towards graduation. At this point, school is more of a privilege than just "something to get through." I'm more appreciative of it. Despite the expense of it, I wouldn't trade the experiences of the past nine months for anything.

So it's a sad good-bye to school for the next few months since I opted not to go to summer school. I like to think that I'll be doing some exciting things now that I have all this free time, but in reality I'll probably end up staying home watching TV and doing more of "the usual."