on the first day of school

Today was the first day of school, and unlike previous years, I'm no longer wearing two hats, no longer straddling the line between student and instructor that defines one's time in graduate school. It's too new to know exactly what all the differences entail, but I'm certainly grateful that there are no theses or term papers or heavy theoretical readings on slate between now and December. Applications for doctoral programs, on the other hand, are a different story altogether...

But, at least for now, this is beside the point.

The point is that the first day was a fine day, and I managed to make it through all three classes without the slightest case of the nerves or dread or any of the other common maladies that one typically associates with the start of a new job. A lot of this, I believe, has to do with the fact that my new colleagues are, to a person, helpful and friendly.

While this in and of itself isn't particularly surprising, it did strike me how accustomed I had become to the underlying tensions that were part and parcel to graduate school. My colleagues (and I suppose myself as well) were constantly pulled between our own interests (graduation, outside work, maintaining a social life) and those of the university (teaching undergrads, administrative deadlines, etc.). The end result was that everyone was in a different place, responding to different demands in different ways to varying degrees of success.

("Degrees"... You see what I did there?)

That wasn't so much the case yesterday, though. The adjunct office really is an office, with professors preparing for classes or engaged in other productive activity rather than badmouthing their students, or lamenting the bureaucracy of higher education, or blaring reruns of Friends on Youtube (horror of horrors). The ways in which graduate students find relaxation is a many-headed beast:

Hercules fighting the hydra

Now I have more quotidian concerns, like the comparison of my morning and afternoon commutes, or what I plan to cook for supper. It feels a little strange, and it fits nicely with the current tamas I've been experiencing. Overcoming inertia, as Newton would attest, is just as difficult as slowing down momentum, and each day since returning to Florida I've been trying to motivate myself to do a little bit more, run one more errand, take care of one more loose end...

Some of them, like the satchel full of unsorted paperwork, have been dangling for two years or more. Others, like unpacking the car and buying groceries, are as fresh as the morning dew back home in North Carolina. New or old, all of them must be addressed. The music helps...