In One End and Out the Other

Both of the above pictures are from our recent trip to the Caribbean. That is me eating jerk chicken in Jamaica and a mango in Grand Cayman.

I post these only because I was looking at an old image of myself from when I was last in school. In many respects I don’t really like the way I look here.   I am unkempt and a bit overweight. And in many respects I am not happy in this picture.   Sure, I am sitting writing in front of a pile of books, but in public I am curt and dispassionate about what was going on around me.

The last year has been so much about forgetting my time in school. I haven’t really written anything beyond a simple blog post, and for a while I wasn’t writing in my notebook. I spent the spring and summer this year, after I finally got a job, reading random science fiction and whatever else I happened to stumble across and add to my library ILL queue.

I was so unhappy with the last year of my Master’s degree–mostly because of the fact that there were no courses in my last year because of a mass exodus of new professors hired to teach more theoretical courses. So I really ran away from the faculty. I turned in my papers and refused to think about what was before was an important part of my personality:  my scholarly side.

This summer, however, I began to feel listless. One day I took an intoxicated trip to Christie Pitts park, and something drove me to bring my final term papers from my Master’s. And they are very good, even if I don’t necessarily believe the ideas in them.

Three times in my degree teachers encouraged me to publish, complete research, or apply for a PhD. Mainly because of my original failure to attend graduate school in Philosophy (although I was accepted to one school), I really was overly critical about my own skills and attitude towards study.

Reading those papers, however, made me realize what I actually love to do. Not since my undergraduate have I actually had a chance to talk to people who read Habermas for fun. I look up Theses, for pleasure, on my own time. I have many friends but I still feel very much alone because I don’t get a chance to share this with people.

So, I’ve decided, I think, that I have to go back to school. I really have to take what I have learned over the last year about myself and apply it. I have no formal plans, and I don’t want any. I am not going to do this with ambition or a plan on where I am going to end up. I want to do it for me for the pure love of reading and writing what I enjoy. To prove this for myself I have decided to audit a class, and do the work, without concern for money being spent or the mark I will get in the end. I am just doing it for me.

So watch out, I am coming to get you with a new found strength and vigour. And just a little more fun than I had before. Because I sincerely feel like a different person.