Plus �a change

Sigh. Last night at the Great Dane ten or so of us f�ted Kristen, who's off to her new teaching job in Utah. In a few days we'll do the same for Mike and Elizabeth, who are departing for new academic horizons in South Carolina. I'm excited for them, but all this change has me a little down. I felt the same way last year, when other important friends took academic jobs elsewhere. And now there aren't many left here from the old crowd.

Moving on is part of academic life, of course, and even though I left my own academic pursuits behind ages ago, I did keep the friends. The socializing is what always liked best about grad school. Seeing the friends go stings a bit.

In the face of this change I can't help but take stock of my own life. After all, my academic friends have leapt really significant hurdles, and they have paperwork and fashion accessories to prove it. Truth be told, this is one of the things about grad school that always appealed to me: well-defined goals, like preliminary exams, dissertation, job, tenure. To me life seems like a big, scary, undifferentiated mass, and having milestones like that to break it up must be reassuring.

But since I have no major institutional affiliations, I'm left to set and attain my own goals, which is terrifying. I look at my life and see no grand scheme, only some articles I wrote here, some gigs I played there, some songs I wrote somewhere else.

I see other things, of course. I see friends I made, friends I miss. I see some trips I took and enjoyed and still have dreams about. I see a man I love a lot who loves me back, and I see the comfortable life we have put together in this town.

And somewhere in the middle of all this is me, sitting in my underwear and typing on a computer. Hey, it's a pretty good life, come to think of it, milestones or no milestones.

I needed a pep talk. I think I just gave myself one.