SPRING BREAK!!!

I really, really needed the break. Work has its stresses and its demands, and I can handle that. I haven't been in the working world all that long, but I've already adopted the perspective of a career person. Going back to school, while not nearly as difficult to balance with work as I feared it may be, does something strange to my internal wiring. It wasn't very long ago that I was a student. I thought like a student. I talked like a student. I totally still look young enough to be a student (In fact, I occasionally catch people doing a double-take when they notice my wedding ring, as if to ask, "Could that be legal?"). I still remember what it felt like: the looming insecurities, the small victories, the occasional panic attacks. But that's not me anymore. My priorities, motivations, aspirations, they've all shifted to adapt to this new way of life that exists beyond Academia.

A lot of people go back to school, but most of them can stay away for more than two years. People who return in their 30s and 40s are firmly entrenched in their adult perspectives. Most of them don't really remember what it was like to be a student, just like I don't remember what it was like to be a toddler. They come at it with a confidence and bearing that usually makes them look like know-it-alls. It annoyed me when I'd have classes with older students (especially when they'd try to be all chummy with the professors), but their behavioral patterns were so across-the-board, I eventually came to the conclusion that it was just how they naturally went about everything. They were confident. They'd been supporting their families for 20 years, by God. They read books for fun now. And so what if they looked at us young folks with disdain. It's not the best attitude to have, but it's a perfectly natural one. They had hardly anything in common with us.

I've concluded that those people have it easier than I do. When I walk into the school, I smell it, and all those memories about being a student that are still waiting in line to be replaced by grown-up stuff come back to front and center. So it leaves me, for the rest of the day (including my work day), feeling like I'm either pretending to be a kid or pretending to be an adult. Mostly, I find it an amusing social experiment on my favorite guinea pig: me. But it has a cumulative effect of weirdness and identity confusion from which I could use a sabbatical.