...locked my leg to thirty-five pounds of Blackjack County chain...
Cheery image, naja? What kind of threshold do you cross with a blog post titled via Willie Nelson lyrics?
Imagine, if you will, a game of Tetris. In a rush or out of distraction, you leave a few gaps at the bottom of your brickwell. Instead of working especially hard to get down to those flawed lines and remove them, you just play around on top of them. You make some tetrises. You get distracted and a few more gaps sneak in. Only now the bricks are coming faster, and it takes furious concentration to get the more recent gaps cleared up, let alone the ones you’ve left at the bottom of the well. Add to this the fact that you’ve been playing Tetris for most of a decade, and you get a tidy (if not compact) analogy for the state of my graduate studies.
This is not—or at least isn’t planned to be—a rant about how behind I am on soul-killing research and writing, with a malevolent advisor breathing down my neck. Nor is it even really a rant about how complicated the mixture of family (including two small children) and school can get. It’s about how…vague…things have gotten for me.
Fall is my favorite time of year. “Most of all he loved the fall/The leaves yellow on the cottonwoods/Leaves floating in the trout streams/And above the hills, the high, blue, windless skies.” (Sorry, Mr. Hemingway, but I’m cutting out the last line because, to answer a quote with another quote “I’m not dead yet.”) (There. Do we all feel sufficiently knowing?) Ahem. (Ahem!) Fall is my favorite time of year. When I was a kid, part of that fun was the fun of going back to school. Yeah. I was one of those kids who liked school, which is a partial explanation why I’m still in school with my thirtieth birthday just around the corner. This year, I’m not technically going back to school. I’m forking over a chunk of money for a paltry credit that doesn’t require anything except that my advisor signs off on it at the end of the semester. Classes started last week, and they started without me either in front of or in a class. The first week of September wasn’t any different, in terms of daily obligations, than the last week of August. The only things that really clue me into school having started are Facebook status updates and a suspicious increase in yellow buses on the road.
Add to this the weather. Yes, we love to talk about weather in Minnesota, but we also happen to be eight days into a string of eighty-degree days—tied for the longest such string of the year. Aside from drought-choked trees turning yellow, there’s not much environmental clue that it’s fall. The days are getting short, but that doesn’t hit me quite like the first nip of cold air. I want some fifty-degree days and some sub-freezing nights. The colder weather lends a solidity that, in the fall, doesn’t lead to immobility. It’s good weather for being out and about, cool enough that you can exercise without bathing in your own sweat. The beautiful clutter of summer leaves falls away and bare branches make a mosaic of the sky. It’s good to be where you’re at, inside or out.
Even under a grey sky, there’s a clarity to fall weather. That’s what I’m waiting for.
P.S. If you’re interested in more family goings-on, go check out my wife's blog. I contribute occasionally, and there are lots of pictures and some videos.
Imagine, if you will, a game of Tetris. In a rush or out of distraction, you leave a few gaps at the bottom of your brickwell. Instead of working especially hard to get down to those flawed lines and remove them, you just play around on top of them. You make some tetrises. You get distracted and a few more gaps sneak in. Only now the bricks are coming faster, and it takes furious concentration to get the more recent gaps cleared up, let alone the ones you’ve left at the bottom of the well. Add to this the fact that you’ve been playing Tetris for most of a decade, and you get a tidy (if not compact) analogy for the state of my graduate studies.
This is not—or at least isn’t planned to be—a rant about how behind I am on soul-killing research and writing, with a malevolent advisor breathing down my neck. Nor is it even really a rant about how complicated the mixture of family (including two small children) and school can get. It’s about how…vague…things have gotten for me.
Fall is my favorite time of year. “Most of all he loved the fall/The leaves yellow on the cottonwoods/Leaves floating in the trout streams/And above the hills, the high, blue, windless skies.” (Sorry, Mr. Hemingway, but I’m cutting out the last line because, to answer a quote with another quote “I’m not dead yet.”) (There. Do we all feel sufficiently knowing?) Ahem. (Ahem!) Fall is my favorite time of year. When I was a kid, part of that fun was the fun of going back to school. Yeah. I was one of those kids who liked school, which is a partial explanation why I’m still in school with my thirtieth birthday just around the corner. This year, I’m not technically going back to school. I’m forking over a chunk of money for a paltry credit that doesn’t require anything except that my advisor signs off on it at the end of the semester. Classes started last week, and they started without me either in front of or in a class. The first week of September wasn’t any different, in terms of daily obligations, than the last week of August. The only things that really clue me into school having started are Facebook status updates and a suspicious increase in yellow buses on the road.
Add to this the weather. Yes, we love to talk about weather in Minnesota, but we also happen to be eight days into a string of eighty-degree days—tied for the longest such string of the year. Aside from drought-choked trees turning yellow, there’s not much environmental clue that it’s fall. The days are getting short, but that doesn’t hit me quite like the first nip of cold air. I want some fifty-degree days and some sub-freezing nights. The colder weather lends a solidity that, in the fall, doesn’t lead to immobility. It’s good weather for being out and about, cool enough that you can exercise without bathing in your own sweat. The beautiful clutter of summer leaves falls away and bare branches make a mosaic of the sky. It’s good to be where you’re at, inside or out.
Even under a grey sky, there’s a clarity to fall weather. That’s what I’m waiting for.
P.S. If you’re interested in more family goings-on, go check out my wife's blog. I contribute occasionally, and there are lots of pictures and some videos.
posted by J.D.J.P. at 10:54 AM
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