The Grad School Diaries: A Long December

Regular visitors of this space will recall the set of 30 short essays chronicling the first year of my time at Michigan State, which I called the Graduate School Diaries; astute readers may have noticed that the collection ended abruptly just before the start of my second year in the program and has been on hiatus since last May. It’s not that I’ve gone off of the project – obviously, since I’ve continued writing these slice-of-life moments during the period that hasn’t made it onto the blog yet. It’s that the sixteen months just concluded have been so difficult that I can’t even come up with a bad metaphor for how difficult they have been, or figure out how to write about them in some way that isn’t just a meaningless recitation of doom and woe – which is kind of the point of this entry, in fact. The truth is that everyone – and every family – will experience what are, by their lights, difficult times; to the truly fortunate this may be limited problems that you or I would consider trivial inconveniences, while some people in this world are experiencing torments that anyone who actually has a computer and an Internet connection probably can’t even imagine…


One of the reasons I started writing this autobiographic sub-series was to try to gain some perspective on the very strange landscape I find myself navigating. Because the fact is, things that are considered deadly serious in Academia might be considered trivia anywhere else (and vice versa, if we’re honest with ourselves) and writing everything down and sharing it with the world makes it more concrete, not just for me but for most people. Some of what has happened to me in the past sixteen months is good and some is bad; some is life-changing serious, and some of it is jumped-up trivia; some of it is beautiful and life-affirming, and some of it is simply absurd. I don’t claim to know much about anything, and the more I learn, it seems, the more I realize that I don’t understand, but the one thing I know for sure is that I was meant to tell stories; to bring the world to life in words and phrases, to make sense out of the chaos with my (extremely modest) art. There’s even Management theory (well, Organizational Theory, anyway) to support the idea. So here we go again…


In the words of the song, it has been a long December, but there is reason to believe that maybe this year will be better than the last. The last sixteen months have taken me and every other member of my household to our limits (and occasionally beyond), but this bright and beautiful New Year’s Day finds all of us alive and well, and living together in Michigan. I don’t know what this year will bring; not what I will be doing for a living, or who my fellow voyagers will be, or even where the next cycle of months with take me, but I feel curiously at peace. It might just be true that the point of life is the journey, and not the destination; and if that is true, then it has been an interesting trip recently – and I get the feeling it’s about to get even weirder…


Want to come along? It might be fun…