Goodbye 2003
The grades are in, the airport transportation has been arranged, and the preparations for next week’s journey back east have mostly been made. Tomorrow is for pre-holiday things, like finding presents for as many relatives as possible. Luckily I come from an extended family with a long tradition of not stressing too much about the holidays. It’s going to be a great relief to be back among them, not worrying about anything except whether I’ll get stuck with the Q at the end of one of our Scrabble games. True, I’ve got next term’s syllabus to slap together, but that’s not going to take too long, since it’s based on my current syllabi. And then I’m going to New York to visit R., which is always my favorite way to end the year.
This was my last semester as a graduate student (although I was only still a student in the most technical of senses). I’m going into 2004 with Ph.D. in hand. It feels like I should have some kind of pithy one-sentence summary, but the truth is that I’ve been having a bit of end-of-semester, or more likely end-of-grad-school, letdown: a combination of "So that’s it, then?" and "What now?". And it’s late and I’m tired (but also wide awake) after spending the entire evening at the movie theater watching The Return of the King. (But at least Tolkien lets one put things in perspective: graduate school may leave one changed permanently, but at least it doesn’t require scaling the slopes of Mount Doom. Well, not literally, anyway.)
And now it’s past my bedtime. Expect minimal blogging over the next couple of weeks; I’ll be off enjoying my winter vacation.
Have a good vacation!
Have fun!
(And I think the post-PhD let-down is normal. It felt terribly anticlimactic in my own case; the orals made a much deeper impression than my defense.)
Hol well, Dr HO