At any rate, it’s been an eventful few months for us. For quite a while now I’d been planning on applying to PhD programs in linguistics (and would hopefully be accepted to at least one). As I was applying, though, something changed. I’m not quite sure what happened, but suddenly I was losing my enthusiasm for more schooling and was growing increasingly doubtful that I actually wanted to be a professor.

I mean, I love the subject and love learning about and talking about it, but teaching is something else altogether. It means lesson plans and grading and standing in front of a class of students who may or may not like me or the subject. It means doing research and lots of writing and trying to get tenure—and this is assuming I could get a decent teaching job in the first place instead of just bouncing around from one adjunct position to another.

And more school? I don’t know. Suddenly I was feeling very burned out with school and just wanted to be done. I don’t want to drag my whole family through a few more years of this, moving across the country and living in cramped apartments, racking up who knows how much debt. Lego’s going to start kindergarten this fall. I remember how hard it was for me to move out of state and then move again and change schools and then move again, all between the ages of 7 and 9. It’s hard to make friends and adjust to new places. I don’t want to put my kids through that if I can avoid it.

So I finished applying to schools, and I was only accepted to one—Northern Arizona University. It sounded like a solid program and a really great fit for my interests, but I just couldn’t see myself going anymore. And while I was deliberating what to tell them and leaning towards telling them no, I came across a job listing here in Utah that would be perfect for me. I’m very well qualified, and from all I’ve heard it’s a great place to work. I realized that even if I don’t get this particular job, it’s what I really want. I sent back the form to NAU telling them I wouldn’t be attending.

I’ve applied and have gone through the first two rounds of testing but haven’t interviewed yet. My current boss wished me luck and says they’d be crazy not to hire me, which means a lot because I know he’d love to keep me here if he could. I’m hoping and praying it works out, even though it would probably mean moving very quickly, and we’d have to figure out whether or not to buy a house or keep renting for the time being.

Who knows? Maybe someday I’ll decide to go back for that PhD and will end up teaching after all. But right now I feel like I want to put down roots somewhere and actually begin a real career in earnest while enjoying my time with my family. Which reminds me, if you haven’t heard, we’re expecting boy #3 mid-July.

One way or another, this summer is going to bring a lot of changes. I’m not sure yet where everything will end up, but I feel like it’ll end up where it should.

And yeah, I’m sure I will be fine. I’ve only got two classes semester, so that’s one paper and one final. I’ve done pretty well on all my German tests so far, so my biggest concern right now is the fact that the final is scheduled for 7:00 Monday morning. Seriously, that’s obscenely early.

I’m not too stressed about the paper, either. The results of my survey seem inconclusive so far, but that’s still something to write about. Plus, it’s a subject near and dear to my heart, so it shouldn’t be too hard.

Still, I think I could use some Nutella and Ritz right about now.

Or maybe you don’t think about those things at all. Maybe it’s just me.

School’s going pretty well. I’m three semesters into my master’s, and I should have two more semesters after this one. (It’s supposed to be a two-year program, but with foreign language prerequisites it takes a little longer.) The end is rapidly approaching, and I still don’t really know what my plans are afterwards. I’m still not sure if I want to make a career out of academia or if I’d rather stay in the publishing world. Unfortunately, my previous experiences in the real world of editing jobs was pretty depressing, so I’m not exactly eager to give it a second go. But on the other hand, I feel rather ambivalent about the prospect of making lesson plans, grading papers, and publishing or perishing—assuming I can land a tenure-track position in the first place.

The decision is complicated by the fact that I’m enjoying both school and work at the moment. I’m editing and designing books (or at least book guts—I haven’t really done covers yet), which is a lot of fun. Plus, everyone there seems to think I’m nearly omniscient, which is great for stroking my already-too-large ego. And as for school, what’s not to love about learning cool stuff and putting off making big decisions about one’s career?

Angst about my future aside, life is pretty good. I have a wonderful wife and two awesome little boys. And I’m sure that in the end, everything will work out alright.

I continued to feel pretty miserable for the next few days, with killer body aches and congestion bad enough to make me want to drill holes in my forehead to relieve the pressure. I was popping Mucinex and Ibuprofen like they were candy to try to get some relief.

I went home early from work on Monday, skipped all my afternoon classes on Tuesday, and went home early again on Wednesday after missing my morning class. I’m finally feeling almost kind of sort of back to normal today, even though I’d still rather be home taking a nap.

I hate being sick for long periods of time. After a few days I start to feel like a worthless lump of flesh, and I can’t stop thinking about how far behind I’m falling. And all the while, of course, I’m getting emails from the university and seeing flyers around campus urging everyone who’s sick to stay home so they don’t give it to everyone else.

Of course, everyone knows that this is the right thing to do, but it seems to be an awfully hard thing to do. Granted, the university has encouraged instructors to be flexible with those students who are ill, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s very difficult to catch up after missing a week of school. The last thing you want to do when recovering from the flu is push yourself extra hard to make up for the last week.

And work is even worse. I’m essentially the sole income for a family of four, and I work part-time earning student wages. I have no paid time off when I’m sick, so if I stay home for an entire week to rest and recuperate, my paycheck is going to suck. I’m already broke enough as it is; getting the flu is a minor financial disaster.

So here I am, caught between a rock and a hard place. Do I drag myself to work, where my productivity will suffer and I may very well infect the entire office, but at least I’ll still get paid, or do I lie on the couch for a week straight while homework and midterms pile up and my bank account runs dry?

Well, unfortunately, money is a powerful motivator. I just hope that anyone I infected will forgive me.

• Finished the semester with my first real 4.0 (not counting last summer when I took an intro course that I didn’t actually need and got an A).
• Replaced the front driver-side window motor and the window glass on the Beagle. The window motor was dead, and the Teagle has tinted windows, so I figured I might as well swap them all out. I’ll do the rest of the windows over the next few weeks.
• Fixed the burned-out lights in the Beagle’s dash. Hooray for having a soldering iron!
• Fixed some buggy HTML in my blog’s sidebar. Firefox and Chrome still displayed it right, but stupid Internet Explorer choked on it.
• Watched Duplo learn how to walk.

Edit: Okay, apparently I don’t actually know how to embed videos, even though I’ve done it before. I’ll try to figure it out and then update this post later.

I’m also taking advanced first-year German (which covers both 101 and 102 in a single semester), and I’m already liking it more than any other language I’ve taken (which really isn’t that many—a few years of French, a semester of Welsh, and two weeks with a “Teach Yourself Scottish Gaelic” book and tape). I thought French was fairly easy to learn because of all the cognates, but it’s got nothing on German. It especially helps that I’ve taken both Old and Middle English, so I already recognize and understand quite a bit (well, considering that it’s only my second week, that is).

I’m also sleeping better than I have in quite a while. I finally broke down and went to the doctor after one night where I was awake until about five in the morning. The doctor gave me prescriptions for a couple different antidepressants—one to knock me out at night and one to counteract the grogginess caused by the first. It took a little getting used to, but it seems to be working pretty well. I’m usually asleep a little after 11:00, and I’ve had a few nights where I’ve been awake until about 1:00, but it’s not every other night anymore.

All in all, I’m feeling a lot better about things (though that could be the antidepressants talking), except for that whole wrecked car and general lack of money. I’m thinking that maybe this whole grad school thing will be good after all, especially since now’s a bad time to be working as a corporate production editor anyway—just a few weeks ago I got word that my old job is being outsourced to the Philippines. Ouch. Let’s just hope that grad school shields me somewhat from the oncoming economic crapstorm.

But the end is in sight. Mostly all that I have left is to write a paper and finish a few other little things, and then it’s over. It’s Christmas. We’re going on vacation. And then, of course, it’s back into the thick of things when the new semester starts. But I desperately need a break right now (and so does Brinestone), so I’m not going to think too much about that next semester. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, right? Right now I’ve got a paper to write on descriptivism in usage guides.

The idea of graduate school was pretty exciting when it was abstract. Now that reality has hit, it’s not nearly as fun as I’d imagined. It’s something like the transition from elementary school to middle school or from high school to college—suddenly you realize that you’ve made a large step towards being an adult, and the expectations are a lot higher.

It probably wouldn’t be so bad if I’d learned to be a more disciplined student when I was younger, but I mostly coasted through high school and, to a large degree, college as well. I somehow escaped doing lots of research and writing as an undergrad, and I’m paying for it now. The beginning of your graduate program really isn’t the time to be familiarizing yourself with library research.

That said, I think I’ll survive the semester, and I might even end up enjoying the whole endeavor once I get the hang of things. I just hope I don’t drop dead from stress and exhaustion before I get to that point.