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The light blogging, reader, can be laid at the feet of any of several causes — frenetic/ecstatic work-madness; a real, honest-to-god social life (girl scout’s honor, it’s true); the charms of a certain beguiling Victorianist; laziness; the usual sense a graduate student gets of having nothing to say because her entire life can be summed up in one sentence: “I, uh, read a lot.”
Beyond the ecstatic bounds of everyday existence (happiness, reader: it’s possible), life lately has been mostly ruminating. Fantasies about my future life as a Ph.D. student in American City* occupy a large slice of my time, to be honest. It is a tremendous relief even to be able to entertain such fantasies, let alone to have in my grasp the promise of their realization — or of the realization of something like them.
What they do for me, these fantasies, is to put my life here at Brit Uni into context. Only when I got my first offer did I realize that part of the anxiety that was turning me into a giant ball of goo for so many months was the sense that, without the opportunity to take the next step in my academic career, my work here would have no purpose. This work delights me, inspires me, frustrates me, yes — this work is a total experience, and would be worthwhile for its own sake. Yet I had always, I now realize, the constant nagging fear that this M.A. might turn out to be just one more in a series of detours I’ve been making since I finished undergrad. What if I found myself, come March, applying for teaching jobs? Or, come September, (o horror) temping and scrambling anew to discover some direction for my life?
I’ve felt much the way I did my final year in undergrad — what is this for? Where am I going? When can I start something big, something ambitious, something serious? I wasn’t ready, then, for that something — and was mature enough at least to know that. Just two years later, I am ready — I am sure of it.
This is big, reader. This Ph.D. Combined with the idea of what comes after it, it’s bloody huge. That alone thrills me — the joy of embarcation. Or rather, the joy of having already embarked, and now at last setting a firm course. I discover, suddenly, how far I have already come — how much I’ve learned already, how much this study has shaped my thoughts, my habits, my intellectual and professional desires. How swiftly I have begun to hone myself. How dear to me are the relationships that I am forging. So swiftly! I’ve been here only five months, and already, so much has changed, or grown, or come out of absolutely bloody nowhere and knocked me flat with shock. And think! Think what six more years of this will do. A whole new person — a scholar, a professional — will come out of this. She is, indeed, already beginning to emerge.
I have a purpose, suddenly. It seems insane, I know, to pin such a grand thing as “purpose” on such a trivial thing as admittance to a graduate program. But that trivial thing gives shape to my current universe — what I am doing is not just a lark, after all, but a substantial project, a job, a professional endeavor.
One great constant in the life of a student is her sense of the insignificance, the insufficiency, of her own work — she has wild ambitions, and never the time, the energy, the resources, nor simply the intellectual wherewithal to realize them. Nothing, nothing is ever enough. The compensation for that frustration has just been delivered to me: this insufficiency becomes acceptable when it becomes part of a process, an apprenticeship, this continual building and rebuilding of self or selves.
Most importantly, this sense of purpose has cleared away the dross of uncertainty so that I can get down to the essence of my life here: the immediacy of present work. I love it, reader. I love this work intensely. And now, even now, I get to experience the extraordinary joy of beginning, slowly, to transform that love into a viable career.
What luck I have, reader. What tremendous fucking luck.
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*When everyone’s contractually agreed to be everyone else’s partner of whatever sort, the pseudonyms will become more descriptive, in keeping with my overall unstated blogging ethic of transparent pseudonymity.
If it were up to me, reader, there would be no such thing as grades. I see where honors like “distinction” or, well, “honors” can be valuable, and can reward exceptional talent or skill, but regular-term grades? Nonsense. Useless nonsense.
Now, Brit Uni’s system is by far the worst I’ve ever encountered.
Bullshit item #1: Term papers are submitted “anonymously” to two “anonymous” examiners. Anonymous? My ass. One examiner is the tutor for the course, the other can only be one of two people currently teaching in my department, in my period. The course tutor will know which paper is mine, because, um, s/he helped me to develop it. Hello. And there aren’t that many students on my M.A. In one case, there were only two of us in the class, and our styles are totally different. It will be easy to tell which paper belongs to whom. Aside from “anonymous” commentary sent back through official channels, examiners (and thus tutors) are not officially allowed to discuss a student’s work with her. [!!!!!!!!!!!!!!]
Bullshit item #2: The earliest (earliest) possible return date for marks and commentary is one month into the new term. Which is only two months long. Most students tell stories of having gotten their marks only at the end of the following term, and of never having gotten any comments at all. Now, how is this supposed to be useful? (Again. Very few students on this M.A. If my undergrad profs could turn around twenty or more twenty-page papers in a week, surely these folks can handle less than ten in a month?) At the risk of sounding like a snowflake, how the hell am I supposed to learn from last term’s experience if I don’t get feedback, or if I don’t get it in time to implement it in the next round of papers?
Bullshit item #3: These papers are treated more or less as unseen exams, with access to books. Faculty are not allowed to read drafts of their students’ papers, or to give feedback on anything more substantive than a “plan.” Students are not, in fact, allowed to have their drafts read by anyone who is not an official Uni writing-center worker. If one of my tutors or one of my classmates reads a draft of my paper, it is said to give me an “advantage.” Um, well. Yes. That’s correct. It would be pretty bloody fucking advantageous if I could have a conversation with my mentors and my cohort about my work. I might even, well, learn something. And write a better paper! Please explain to me what’s unfair about that.
The system, I’m guessing, was designed in part to protect students from faculty bias, and in part (mostly) to protect faculty from grade-grubbing students, and to reduce in general the risk of litigiousness that comes with any assessment arrangement. (The whole problem would be solved with many fewer person-hours and a lot less money and paper if you did away with grades entirely. Ahem.) I’m all for protection, and grub-prevention, but I think this is extreme.
The other side of that coin is that this not only impedes a student’s learning process, it also impairs her ability to develop a close relationship with her mentors through work. It forces her to operate more or less in a void. Worst of all, it puts the entire emphasis on product, and none at all on process. I couldn’t give two shits about grades, as long as they’re not awful enough to hurt me later. What I care very, very deeply about is… well, learning. Is that so ridiculous? What shows up on my transcript is so astonishingly much less valuable to me than even a half-hour’s conversation with one of my teachers. If that conversation could, just once, be about my written work, it would teach me more than I will ever learn from the number spat out by a big, unwieldy, “anonymous” bureaucratic assessment-machine.
This goes back to something that never ceases to bother me: the academy is a community, not a machine. Yet institutions, especially big ones, so often refuse to recognize that. A university should be based on human relationships, to the greatest extent possible. That sounds so idealistic. But really? All I want is to hand my work directly to the person who fostered it, and have her hand it directly back to me, with her near-illegible scribbled marginalia decorating it. That is human. It’s also, apparently, too much to ask.
Fall term papers: complete; submitted. Minimally sufficient in one case; totally disastrous in the other. The process of the former taught me a great deal, enough that I don’t mind the mediocre product; the lack of process, as well as the poor product, of the latter will stand as a lesson. (Namely, Do Not Ever Do That Again.)
Ph.D. applications: complete; submitted. I’m feeling optimistic, triumphant, and frantic, all at the same time (think 3rd movement of Beethoven’s sixth symphony).
New Year’s Resolution: to be more careful. Not to involve myself in debacles of the sort that the term papers devolved into. To pace myself, forgive myself little gaffes in the interest of not committing big ones. To approach my academic world with more professionalism, more maturity. More on this, likely, later.
New term: one week old. Fresh, exhilarated. Dealing with my reservations (and resolutions) as responsibly as I am able. Ideas percolating, forward momentum gathering. Too much fracking Shakespeare.
Dissertation: the idea has been conceived. I’ll not name it for fear of jinxing it before it develops into a full-fledged diss-fetus, but, you know. Zygote. (Which, in some circles, counts as a life, so I’m already halfway there!) With any luck, three hours from now it will have an advisor (a midwife? a grandparent? a baby-daddy? this metaphor is taking me in unfortunate directions).
Holiday, tremendous need of: mounting. Paris next weekend? Yes.
This is me vigorously pretending that I don’t have a million things to do today, that I am not behind on my research, that I don’t have to send out my first application tomorrow. Denial is delicious.
The fact is, reader, that sometimes I need these long mornings. Sometimes I need to get a decent night’s sleep, tell the alarm to fuck off, waddle around with my coffee, play loud girly music, read my blogs, try not to eat my own brain while I catch up on the news. Sit around in my jammies til noon. “Weakling!” cry the Gods of Academe. Fine. Whatever. Sometimes, it feels good to be a weakling.
I’m healing. I had a very long weekend of not accomplishing what I wanted to accomplish — and not accomplishing it by the most roundabout route possible. I was working, or at least it sure felt a whole hell of a lot like working, but I couldn’t be sure, because I had nothing to show for it.
Breathe, I told myself yesterday morning when I woke up panicking about that nothing-to-show. I’m sure you’ll find something worthwhile in that — hey! that pile of notes. See? You have something. Stop freaking out, eat something, and look at your notes.
Poor scraggly little ruffled thing though I was, I did get my shit together as I usually do, had coherent things to say in both of my classes, got more done on the application front than I expected to. Still, by the end of the day I was in a bare-nerve state to match any I’d ever achieved — and that’s saying something. I wasn’t so much on the verge of tears as unable to prevent my eyes from streaming. I didn’t so much feel like crap about myself as I was unable to tell for certain that I had a self. I felt like wailing out of sheer protest at the universe, but I just couldn’t be bothered to wail.
Then someone who is an important figure in my life gifted me with an incredible kindness. The sort that makes me feel cared-for and smart at the same time, cared-for because I’m smart, that makes me feel like I have a future ahead of me after all, the sort that feels at this time of the year like nothing so much as an act of grace.
So I’ve allowed myself to take the morning off, to smooth myself over. The best thing about this moment was that it meant that this person has faith in me — and more importantly, that I now have to live up to that faith. The bar has been set. I can see it. It’s one I owe it to myself to clear. That’s inspiring.
Most academic conversations about teaching are entirely centered on pedagogy this, classroom management that, course design the other thing. Occasionally the traits of a gifted rhetorician are acknowledged – sense of humor and adaptability primary among them. The image that emerges is of a Teacher divorced from time and space, and especially from body — an ideal emblem, or perhaps a set of templates.
Sometimes teachers conform eerily to that abstract emblem or those templates. We encounter Inspiring Teacher Movie types in real life. Or as in the case of one of my mentors, we get pure, streamlined pedagogy and cold critique hauntingly detached from the rest of the universe.
But much more often, what makes a perfectly ordinary teaching moment inspiring or delightful or compelling is a very basic trait, or an amalgam of very basic traits, that has nothing to do with pedagogy per se.
One of my professors here at Brit Uni — we’ll call him the Heretic — shows up every week with absolutely no sign that he’s prepared anything at all for the class. He brings no notes, most times no books. He sits down, takes a deep breath, plants his hands on the table and says, “Right.” And then we just start looking at whatever old volume is sitting in front of us, floating ideas into the ether until something catches. Then it gets animated. Just like any other conversation.
I learn a great deal from those conversations — it must be said, the Heretic is horribly erudite and he carries his erudition well. He’s also very critically savvy, and as heretical in his approaches to the study of literature as are the subjects of his research in their approaches to theology. An intellectual delight.
But sometimes the things I learn from him have nothing at all to do with that. The mechanical things I take notes on and the more transcendent things I am learning have very little in common.
Yesterday I noticed for the first time that the Heretic has an extraordinarily lovely voice, and that he reads aloud beautifully. He read to us from Florio’s Montaigne, a particular bit I had deemed on first glance irredeemably insane. But steeped in the rich modulations of the Heretic’s voice, it gathered sense and beauty. I suddenly understood it. I could not have experienced those words the way I did yesterday morning except through the totally incidental fact of my teacher’s voice.
This has happened before — Fierce Emerita at the Petri Dish had an incantatory way of reading aloud that drew me into the beauty of poems I was eager to cast aside. She spoke in long, wild sentences whose syntax was nevertheless always impeccably intact. You could hear her semi-colons and parentheses. The notes I took in her classes were maps of her sentences, some of which ran to more than a page. There is little that I can listen to for two hours without tiring, but the long, slow sentences of Fierce Emerita, in her soft, wise voice, those I often felt I could just move into and inhabit forever.
It can’t be taught or learned. It may be a matter of taste — some might find Heretic’s reading noisome or Emerita’s speech convoluted. But a trait like voice is sometimes the catalyst that brings a student closer to her mentor, or draws her round to a new vision, or simply refreshes her.
Perhaps another way of looking at it would be to say that, after all, there’s as much metaphysics to the classroom as there is metrics. My hope in fact is that there’s more.
This morning, reader, I passed a crucial threshold of this academic year.
I had my first official, large-scale meltdown. You know, the buckled-over, weak-kneed, good, hard sobbing fit accompanied by the slow, hard suffocation that can only be produced by stifling a wild, nearly uncontainable keening wail. The kind of implosion, occasioned by nothing in particular, that chokes and paralyzes, that throws everything out of proportion as the world expands and contracts with unbearable violence; the loss of sight and sense and the world-shattering fear that the breaking-down will never pass, that the floor or the walls or the book I hold hard against my chest will consume me and I will never emerge.
The inestimably good news about this, reader, is twofold:
1) It did pass, and is now officially over. It has to happen, now and then, and here, today, it did, and now it’s done. I can check it off the list, clear it from the desk, and make room for the next project.
2) I had the good grace to make it out of my program chair’s office and into a locked private space before any actual sobbing, bending-double, or teeth-gnashing could occur. This is a sign that I have, after all, grown up. A little.
And then I high-tailed it to London and took one of my signature endless walks in the perfect autumn afternoon, and in my gorgeous new winter coat and the grace of my gait and the wryness of my exhausted smile, I rediscovered the ground and the sky and the rhythm of my thoughts, and all was well.
Cleansed and calm, now, withdrawn into the safety of my nest of books and papers, into this gentle, fresh exhaustion, I’ll lie awake awhile, and then I’ll sleep, and tomorrow I will simply start again.
So, reader. I said that I have no doubts or reservations of any kind about my new university. This is still, mostly, true. However.
The library.
Reader, I am so unbearably spoiled. I knew that I had been blessed by libraries, but I didn’t know how blessed, how spoiled. The libraries that taught me what libraries are include: the Petri Dish’s substantial collections beautifully housed, Georgetown University’s ugly, depressing but well-stocked system, the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library’s Humanities branch. I spent more time than I needed to in one particularly Victorian reading room in Beloved Library during undergrad, or wandering the stacks, my fingers trailing over rows of spines, or curled up under Tolstoy, tucked away where no one could find me and my books and my papers. And that is where the self who decided to trip off across the ocean to nourish the Scholar Within was born.
Libraries, in short, are important to me, as they are to probably everyone who reads this, and probably in much the same ways. The space, as much as the content, of a library shapes my experience of work. I have been spoiled, spoiled, spoiled.
Yesterday, I had my first serious poke around Brit Uni’s library. What an incredibly, horribly depressing place. The light inside is the same colour as the light inside Penn Station. The walls are a greyish-brown concrete. The windows are small and ill-placed, the ceilings heavy and ponderous (also concrete). A sense of darkness huddles over every space. I can’t imagine doing work there — except, perhaps, for the chain-yourself-to-a-desk-because-this-has-to-get-done-NOW-no-excuses kind of work to which poor spaces are sometimes suited. Just as well, because it closes at nine. (What on earth do the undergrads do about that?)
And its collections are… well, sparse. It boasts a respectable number of volumes, but most of these are multiple copies of single books used in classes. The books are poorly looked-after, scribbled over and over and over, their spines cracking and bending. Many of them are paperback, and therefore disintegrating. Many Big Works of scholarship in the areas I’m familiar with (early modern and modernism) are not represented. Forget any of the Medium-to-Not-So-Big works. What is there tends to the radical, which pleases me — but seriously, kids. Are we really all traipsing off to the British Library every time we have a vague research need that can’t be satisfied by the internet?
“Yes, mouse,” will come the tired, impatient-growing reply, “we are. And you are effing spoiled rotten.”
I will note, however, that as far as I can tell the pre-modernists are conspiring exceedingly well to funnel as much cash as they can into special collections — as noted, this library holds a surprisingly spectacular array of early books, for which a brand-new, extremely shiny reading room has just been installed. For this, I am deeply grateful, and such a thing is not, ever, to be discounted.
What my experience of dismay comes down to, of course, is money, and the place of higher education within the socio-economic structure of this country (of most of Europe, for that matter). I never realized just how wealthy the Petri Dish is as an institution — a wealth that could only be accumulated in a culture that prizes higher education for its elitism, not, as in Europe, for its populist potential. The P.D. and Brit Uni are roughly equivalent in terms of “quality,” well-regardedness, general pedagogical philosophies, overriding political tone, and Archetypal Student. Except that (well, white, Northeastern, educated) Americans feel that an education that doesn’t cost a fortune isn’t worthwhile, while Britons are still scandalized by the fact that they have to pay anything at all for what was once free. And so the P.D. is shiny and bright, and its resource cup spilleth over, while Brit Uni is a little scruffy around the edges, and gives a sense of a bit of a scramble to maintain what it has.
I was aware of these differences, but they didn’t come home to me until I saw that library. It made me realize that I come not only from a wealthy family but from a whole culture of wealth — wealth of the big, material, institutional kind, and the expectations it fosters. I wonder what this has done to my brain. Am I intellectually “soft,” for having been raised on the educational feather-bed of a Northeastern SLAC? Has the fact that I have been accustomed to buying, not borrowing, my course books made me somehow weak? Why is it so embarrassing to discover that I am so deeply spoiled in ways to which I never devoted sufficient consideration?
(And, uh, that thing about tigers and stripes? Yeah, my next step today is to seek out a cheap copy of Renaissance bloody Self-Fashioning, because I refuse to use the one that has jargon spewed all over it in electric pink ink. We won’t even mention the state of the Shakespeare.)
Before I left for City by the Sea, I was terribly anxious. I didn’t really want to admit it, or face it, but I was terribly anxious. I was anxious because the last time I left to cross the ocean, things worked out terribly. I was miserable for months and came home feeling defeated. The anxiety that descended on me during the past year just never really got around to dissipating, only quelled for a while now and then.
But now, reader… now! It’s been nothing but bliss, nothing, nothing but bliss for ten days and I honestly foresee nothing but pure, genuine happiness from here on out. By “happiness,” I don’t mean that I believe that this elated, blissful state can endure — I mean, mostly, the feeling of rightness, of suitedness, of being exactly where I belong and making the most of it. Ask for me, for example, come term paper time, and you will almost certainly find me a grave woman. There will be desperate moments, stressful moments, and — I’m cringing already — embarassing moments. But I cannot imagine being anything but happy here.
There is the comforting fact that the grad students I’ve met all, to a one, enthusiastically confirm my suspicions that Brit Uni is a nurturing, collaborative, supportive, energizing, challenging place to be. I have yet to hear or see anything that gives me even the slightest doubt that this institution is exactly the place for me.
There is the further comforting fact of the welcoming kindness of the faculty I’ve met. They seem to – gasp – actually want to know me, and they seem to be glad I’m here. They are excited about their students and proud of them. It’s plain as day that they’re good teachers. (They also happen to do damned good work.)
There is the library’s splendid (especially given its size) collection of Old Stuff, which more than makes up for the not-so-splendid Bombshelter School architecture of the place.
And there is City by the Sea, this glorious place, so gloriously by the sea, filled with weirdos and poky corners and wonderfully alive. The best weather available in Britain. Sweet little tea shops. Organic food co-ops. A very active, very visible Radical Element. A critical mass of used book shops. Queers all over the damned place. An early music festival starting in October. The sea. The sea. The sea. I felt immediately at home here in a way that Toulouse never gave me, that New York is constantly dangling just beyond my reach.
Really, reader, a girl can’t ask for more than this.
I now know why people often find it so instructive (among other less superlative qualities) to attend academic conferences. The recent one at Brit Uni, on Early Modern Stuff and Things, gave me a great deal to think about, and not only in terms of the field or the content of the papers presented.
One of the wonderful things about this conference — which reflects a wonderful thing about Brit Uni’s early modern bits — is that it was genuinely interdisciplinary. Historians and literary scholars, comparativists and… nationalists?, chattering productively and incorporating each other’s domains to give the wee neophyte spectator (yours truly) a real sense of scope, of what breaking down disciplinary boundaries can actually produce. I listened to whole historical papers without ever realizing they were presented by historians, so literary were their reading practices; I was astonished by the archival footwork and periodized story-telling accomplished by papers on verse forms. One gets the sense that academic study of this period is, at long last, and slowly, slowly, slowly, shedding its disciplinary corsets and moving toward what Timothy Burke, sundry at the Valve, and others have been flippantly calling “everything studies.”
In spite of this slow-gathering momentum, which seems to facilitate expansion out of disciplinary hidey-holes and into a broader collective effort at grasping “the past,” what it is and what it means, there remain some aspects of academic behavior that are very puzzling to an idealistic wee mouse. Now, I’ve done enough careful listening (thanks, Petri Dish faculty, for imparting knowledge you didn’t know you were imparting — in the words of Stephen Sondheim, children will listen), blog-reading, sardonic-academic-novel-reading, and attended enough talks to know that certain phenomena I observed at this conference are not unique to it.
I am totally freaked out by the persistence of academics’ tendency toward individualism and narcissism. I can’t possibly be the only one. Reader, I know it sounds so naïve, so eager-young-studenty, but this thing we are engaged in, this Scholarship, this Academy, is it not, well… that is, isn’t it a collective effort? Are we not, in the end, when the bureaucratic hoops of fire have been jumped through, the markets negotiated, and the administrative kinks worked out or put to bed, all working together to seek understanding of, a language to describe, a way of interpreting the worlds we inhabit? I think we are — and yes, god damn it, I include myself in this. I may be wee, I may be inexperienced, I may be in all things a neophyte, but I may also have something to bring to the table — and even if I don’t, I am an apprentice to this trade and you, Professor X, can’t survive, can’t perpetuate yourself, without me.
Self-defenses aside, I continue to be bowled over by the vigor with which academics guard their terrain, guard it as their personal property. I understand that work is precious, that if one loves her own ideas she is not to be faulted for it, if another feels he needs to defend his own agenda against the inevitable onslaught of oblivion, then defend it he must. However, a few points.
1. It is not an indignity to cite — copiously, if appropriate — the work of those who have gone before and paved the road for you, even if their particular area is not exactly parallel to yours. (“Everyone knows that…” is not a legitimate citation, by the way. It is true, however, that most or all of your audience is familiar with the source of your methods/theoretical foundation/purpose/etc, and you embarrass yourself by not acknowledging that source.) Kudos to Grandmotherly Big Name for presenting a genuinely collaborative paper.
2. Neither is it illegitimate to present a paper that asks genuine questions, which genuinely seek answers and are not merely grand statements in disguise (thanks to a Hilarious Historianess for presenting just this sort of paper last week). You do well, not ill, by your own work if you openly ask for comment on one bit or another of your paper or project — the most successful paper sessions I attended last week contained a good bit of this; the least successful ones were composed of ideology polemically presented, masquerading as thoughtful papers. Ironically, students and junior sorts are the worst offenders in this regard.
3. Do not be perplexed by me, or by any other neophyte you may encounter. Do not give us the “Well isn’t that cute” look, nor the “What are you doing here?” look, nor the “And just how do you know that?” look. We are the next generation, and we are trying to learn from you. You are teachers, whether you like it or not, and you are just as much so at the tea break between paper sessions as you are in a classroom. We try not to be in your way, and we will do our best not to make you go beyond the call of duty. But say hello, why not? If you and we are both sitting alone, why not join us, just once, just once remove the burden of socio-professional awkwardness from our shoulders. You are secure in your positions, we are not. You will not be damaged by being seen to take a youngling, however briefly, under your wing, to put her at ease with inane chatter regarding the quality of the tea. If we do something stupid, feel free to smack us down, put us in our places — but be direct about it. Don’t just pretend we don’t exist, and when we insist on existing, don’t be so obviously put out by it. Please. Oh, and should we actually do something intelligent? Should we — just hypothetically — ask the thoughtful question that gets the otherwise dead discussion finally rolling? Please, please try not to look quite so astonished.
4. Oh, and if you really are only here to present your paper? At least make the gesture of attending, say, one other session. To do otherwise is rude.
I have more to say about the issue of collaboration in the academy, but those were the bugbears of this past conference — which, by all accounts, was a much friendlier, cosier, more comfortable one than most. I witnessed almost no open antagonism, no one to my knowledge fell asleep at any inappropriate time, nor were there to be found (undue) drunkenness or lasciviousness. Nearly everyone admitted having learned a great deal, and seemed actually to mean it. Nevertheless: what is up with the narcissism?
Posts have been slowing down around here mainly because I’ve been a) gainfully employed and b) a total nervous wreck about waiting for a letter to arrive from a certain place.
Well, excuse (b) just became officially invalid.
Your mouse has just been invited to become a Master of Arts candidate by British University!
And it’s a beautiful day, which she will be spending in her favorite American city, which she will enjoy all the more for thoughts of her newly-impending re-expatriation.
