My body has achieved that point of greatness in which I can now narrowly outpace a chubby prairie dog on my bike, assuming I slept well, had a light breakfast, there is no wind, and I didn’t over-exert myself going up a steep hill. I think I’m nearing my peak, the zenith of my fitness, the point at which I have physically self-actualized. In other words, it doesn’t feel like I’m dying when I go up the stairs to my office anymore. For the first time in a little over 6 years, I can say I’m not on a steady mortal decline.


I’ve spoken to a few people who are about to start grad school, and both my college freshmen and my high school sophomores asked me what it was like because, I don’t know, maybe they want to start saving money now so they can spend as much as they need on cheap food and expensive liquor when the time comes. Grad school and college in general was an unhealthy but necessary part of my life. I’m pretty sure it’s that way for everyone. I took care of grades but didn’t really care that my body was basically decaying like a jack-o-lantern left out long after Halloween. I caved in on myself, and the candle inside got moldy, and some kids dragged me out into the street and smashed me with their malicious child feet.
The next time a student asks me what grad school was like, I’m going to tell them the truth: I lost 25 pounds in 2 months once I didn’t have so much work that it felt like I was being punished for wanting a degree. School makes it so hard to think about anything else, so it’s really, hard to treat yourself like a person. I have eaten more shitty peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the last two years than I did all through my childhood of getting free lunch at school. It’s easy to convince yourself that getting 5 hours of sleep a night is a lot if you’ve only been getting 2 or 3 lately, and that’s the kind of arithmetic bullshit I lived by.
I don’t feel like I’m dying anymore. It feels more like I’m rejoining society after having been locked in an office for a sad long while. The next few years are just going to me going outside and being astonished that birds exist beyond the hours adjacent to 5 am because that’s when I’d hear them the most. I’ve been getting to campus about an hour and a half before I teach because that’s when I used to lesson plan and do homework, but now I’m relaxed and have planned the class in advance, so I just take a walk, chat with colleagues, look at flowers and dogs and grass and people. I sat on a bench and glared at a tour. I wouldn’t have been able to burn my way into the optimistic souls of those young people if not for having this sudden free time.
I was a bad student, and I was a student for a long time. Those bad habits became bad rituals and those became just a shitty way of living. If I’d continued on for a Phd, I’d end up on the news a few years down the line as the first fully realized human-goblin hybrid, having slowly transformed while wasting away in the dark, eating buckets of cheap instant noodles and gallons of expensive tea. I’m not unique in that I had shitty habits in college. I’m actually comfortably part of a trend. However, to all the people like me, the ones in school or out of it, get out of the shitty habits fast. Cook an onion or something. Look at a leaf. Pet a cat you meet outside. Eating bad food and getting no sleep didn’t help me so much as it saved up fuel for my inevitable crash and burn.
You can pet a cat you met outside? Yikes! They always run away from me, must be able to smell my dogs. A true and scary story though I thought I was walking up to the neighbors cat in my yard one night, could see glowing eyes, the cat was not going to run away this time and I was reaching out to pet it when I realized it was a raccoon from the stream at the end of my block. Scared the crap out of me, I gave one of those little girl screams.
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Petting outside cats is my life’s mission. I’ve had some success with it, but there are definitely cats that just run away. Seeing a raccoon that you thought was a nice, calm cat sounds like a terrifying experience that might have ended in disaster or with you getting to pet a raccoon, which would be amazing because they look so soft.
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P.S. Still enjoying reading your daily missives now that you have entered the adult world, just kidding, your a fun read.
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Ha! thank you
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I just starved in grad school, and when I met my wife, all that she had in her pantry was Gatorade mix that she ate with a spoon. One more comment–prairie dogs are actually fast.
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I either starved or ate trash. Gatorade with a spoon sounds uniquely awful but strangely appealing.
I actually looked up how fast prairie dogs run to get an idea for this post–35 mph apparently–but I like to think I might be quicker than one that’s just completely out of shape
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Well, now I have an idea of what Grad school is like
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It’s definitely pretty difficult. Some might even say it is awful and only worth it if you are guaranteed to use that degree
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