Sophomore year approaches

Next Tuesday will be my first day of school for my sophomore year at university.  You would think I would be less nervous.  See, I'm going to be thirty-one next month.  I have years of life experience that I can draw on.  I'm auto-didactic enough to be well-read in a variety of areas.  I've held jobs with enormous value and pressure (if never enormous prestige and salary).  Hell, I've even taught training classes before, sometimes to people with actual authority over me.  Why should I be nervous?

Beats me, but I am.  I always get nervous before starting anything new.  And although college itself isn't new this year, the classes are.  I'm finally getting into some of the meat of my new discipline (philosophy), and it's going to be time to put up or shut up.  That's a bit nerve wracking, I think.  Plus, one of my classes is being taught by the chair of the department.  I really want to impress him (or least not impress him as being foolish).  But hey, no pressure, right?

I watch the kids on campus and I just know that they all think their troubles will be over once they're real live adults.  If only they knew.  I think most of us are just pretending anyway.  I've been married.  I've had real jobs in corporate America.  I've held my own with bills and creditors and budget planning and all the stuff you're supposed to do when you grow up.  I hated it.  I hated the marriage, I hated the job, I hated trying to stretch the pathetic salary far enough to keep the electricity on and still have a little fun.

So here I am back in school, trying to make something of myself.  Specifically, I'm trying to make a philosopher out of myself.  Why?  Because I've lived in the real world and I never want to go back.  Academia has some resemblances to the real world (responsibilities, bills, etc.).  But it also offers a link to the part of the world that is totally different, a place where no one laughs if you start sentences with, "Okay, so imagine that we're all robots..."  Plus, even in the current American climate of undervaluing and underpaying academics, it's still a step up from where I was.

I don't currently have a job.  It's the first intentional stretch of unemployment that I've had since I was seventeen.  This is to allow me to focus all of my energy on my studies.  Homework, I've discovered, has somehow gotten a bit harder in the last decade or so.  Or maybe my brain got less absorbent.  In either case, I need the time.  My boyfriend (36), who is heading rapidly towards his Ph.D. in philosophy, is kind enough to stretch his paycheck to cover the both of us (and our four cats).  We're almost always broke (though never cold or hungry), and occasionally have to rely on grants and loans from parents or friends.  But what the hell, right?  I'm getting a second chance to do something that will, I think, make me very happy.  And I get to do it with the best boyfriend a woman could wish for.

Yeah, I'm nervous.  My stomach's going to be twisting until after the second day of classes, most likely.  But I don't care.  Bring it on.  They say you only get one chance in life, but that's bullshit.  Sometimes you get a second go-round.  And I intend to make the most of mine.