An Update, Of Sorts

Hello, blog, how've you been? Perhaps I should be changing your name to "Abandonment Issues," then?

I've been keeping mum on the blog, partly because of my regularly-scheduled winter hibernation, but mostly because some Big Stuff is up in the air, and I'm feeling superstitious about talking before it's all a done deal.

On the other hand, I'm a blabbermouth, and I don't want to wait that long.

So...

I've decided to go back to school for a PhD. (Yes, I'm aware that it's not that simple; I still have to convince an admissions committee that I'm not a complete moron. However, I have no doubt of my ability to get in somewhere, the question is whether I can get in where I want to. Wherever that is.)

The biggest problem right now is getting letters of recommendation: I've been out of school for a while now, and I've lost touch with my old professors. Even if I got back in contact, the odds that they would remember me well enough to write a solid recommendation are pretty slim, especially since all of my old school papers have disappeared.

The thing to do, it seemed to me, was to get new professors, and be extra impressive and charming. So that's what I'm doing. On top of a full-time job and a toddler, I'm now taking a class on my lunch break.

This quarter I'm taking Jewish-German Writers, which has mostly served to remind me how much I hate working with literature in translation. I never know whether the things I think I'm seeing in the text are actually there, and it drives me nuts. good to know, but it's going to be slow going finding what I want to study if I just chip away at the possibilities one class at a time*. So, that narrows it to literature in English, and I don't much care for the medieval period, so ... (carry the 2... divide by eleventeen...) that's one continent and one large-island-cluster-with-imperial-tendencies over the course of 500 years or so.

I may need to get a bit more specific.

As for the class, it's going pretty well. At first I was intimidated, and everyone on campus seemed very, very young. Then it occurred to me that if I'm an old lady, I must have intelligent things to say, and these darn kids should listen up and be grateful, dammit! Then I got my first quiz back with "Outstanding!!" written on it, and I admit I got a little cocky. Second quiz? Also an A. And then it came time to write the midterm. Bear in mind, this was my first real piece of academic writing in *mumblety* years, so perhaps I'm allowed some leeway, but I was also overconfident about it, and didn't give it as much attention as I should have. I got it back on Monday with a B+, which was disappointing, since I know I could have done better.

So I forge on. There's a final to write, after all, and I'm starting to remember how this whole thing works. At least I know that the appropriate parts of my brain haven't atrophied.

There's a lot more to talk about, but if I don't post this now, it will languish in my draft folder with all the others, so I'll come back to discuss more in a future post.

* Actually, I have some ideas of what I want to focus on, but I'm not saying just yet. I have to retain some aura of mystery, after all.