Yay! Back to school! (snort!)

Fate has smiled on me. Dimpled cherubs call down to me with their verdict: "Thou shalt work!" I complete a circuit of ballet leaps on my slick wooden floor and make extravagant promises to Pants about what we'll do with my future scratch. But the cherubs are not finished. They hover ever lower, suppressing giggles while flashing cheeky angel ass from beneath their weightless loin cloths, and just when they reach head height, they whisper the newest news: "Thou shalt enter graduate school, too. For FREE!"

I can't remember if I was excited for first grade or not-- the photo's kind of unclear on that. I'm standing on the porch with my yellow Muppets lunch box, wearing a white jersey dress with a rainbow ribbon belt (apparently I supported the gay rights even then), my hair in a ponytail and my bangs combed neat and straight over my eyebrows. My chin is tucked and I'm smiling, but it looks more like a smile of embarrassment because my mother is bent down next to me in her faded yellow bathrobe, hands on her knees, bed-head curls tumbling everywhere, and a giant, theatrical wocka-wocka smile on her face.

Re-imagining that morning is the closest I can get to an analogous feeling to starting grad school. It's been six years since I finished college, and I never stopped wanting to get an advanced degree, but my reasons have changed kind of like a stream clears the further it gets from a silt deposit, or dead, bloated deer carcass. At first I wanted to go back to avoid the (entirely necessary) shit-eating phase of entry-level work. Then I wanted to go back to do penance for the mistake of getting a liberal arts degree-- make me a butcher, a baker a candlestick maker (read: a lawyer)! Then I wanted to go back and throw caution and earning potential to the wind and become a whacked out studio artist compiling huge murals out of dried beans or something, because why the hell not? I've always loved art! And then I just gave up and admitted that I wanted to go back to English, to writing, to the thing that's hurt the most and been the most disappointing and challenging, to the thing I can't help but do because it's how I make sense of things.

The stream's not entirely clear now, but at least I know what I want to study. Other factors: I want to finish an advanced degree before we have children (cringe at the June Cleaver traditionalism) so I can give my full focus to school, and so that if I take some time off from working, the credential will shore up my resume (cringe at the Working Girl smarminess). (Wow, did you catch that? I've managed to cringe at both ends of the spectrum of womanhood in one sentence! My parenthetical self-consciousness knows no bounds!) I've also got to admit that it'll be a delicious role reversal to tell Pants, "Sorry, I can't do [insert fun thing]-- I've got to study." Ha-ha! But now I'm important too! Look at all my books! Look at the scholarly way I pinch the bridge of my nose in concentration-- this is all so fascinating, and yet, the burden of my knowledge...

Clearly, I've been preparing for this role.

Things converge even further-- I'm entering an MFA program, which, prior to this opportunity falling into my lap, seemed ridiculously self serving. I'd been content to pursue an MA in Composition Theory, which would take less time and still allow me to teach community college and do my creepy story-vulture thing where I take secret notes on the personal dramas and mannerisms of my students. But then I got the job working for this MFA program and like the Communist Domino Theory, one thing just led inexorably to another and before I knew it, they were wiping out deadlines, waiving fees, skipping committees, parting seas and inviting me to tiptoe across the exposed briny floor into GRAD SCHOOL. Be still, my nerdy heart.

Classes start the week after next and Pants has already been teasing me and threatening to buy me a Batman lunch box and a trapper keeper. I've been trying to drop delicate hints that what I could really use is a laptop bag and a coffee thermos. And Lasik surgery, because I've discovered from one week of graphic design software that I have the piercing visual acuity of a fruit bat...