Brief Retrospective

Kiddo's still asleep, although I doubt for much longer.  A few weeks ago she spontaneously abandoned her second nap of the day, so now we're down to one little respite from around 11am - 12 or 1pm (depending on how merciful she's being...) 

I was thinking about work, about how tough it's been carrying the burden of preparing the company for the big security audit (on top of teaching), and I found myself thinking back to grad school.  For six years I slept in until 8am almost every day and just kind of drifted from seminar to discussion section to the library and back home.  I worked faster but much less hard than almost all of my friends/colleagues in my programs.  I broke out in a terrified sweat every time I was forced to speak a few words of mangled French to anyone.  I wrote my dissertation at lightning speed and, looking back especially, the result was pretty half-assed. 

It's a relief to look back on it now and know 100% that it doesn't matter; I did end up a competent teacher, so if some twisted path leads me back that way in the future I feel all set to return there.  It will never matter, though, that my French sucks and I got bored trying to "master the literature" and just played video games most of the time.  In so many words, grad school amounted to a mostly-fun and very interesting way to spend my mid-late 20s.

Before I went to grad school, during Portland V. 1.0 for B and me, I resented it enormously when my job made me work harder than I thought was reasonable.  The company I ended up at was truly awful, but I also just hated that I was expected to do anything beyond my 8 hours a day for them.  Now, it's a lot easier to reconcile.  The thing is, I haven't done this before, worked really hard and made (some) money and bought a house and so on...it's kind of neat to try it out and I am beyond excited to finally get to move into the damn place in a few weeks.

As ever, no point to speak of here, just that despite the intense exhaustion and the kind of bleak feeling I have after weeks of this nonstop, I'm still happy about how things played out and the decisions I made.  So: yay for me.