Day 259: The Postscript

After awhile you supposedly end up resembling your pet, I think it’s happened. She looks how I feel.

I just want to sleep for fifty years, is that so much to ask for? The deadline is gone whence it came! That does not mean it wasn’t a fight to the end or that there is a weird stillness permeating the house like a calm after a storm. What is it about things ending so abruptly that throws a person into a spiral of confusion?

Now that I’m done with the term I suddenly am not rushing to get 50 things done at once. I may actually get the day to myself today. I genuinely may not do anything productive for the entire day… why is that so scary?

I learned early on in my graduate studies that you should take a break often. Normally I take weekends, it’s a hard rule for me and it’s been in place unbroken since I implemented it back in the middle of my Masters work. Unfortunately, with the pandemic and basically this term in general that rule was tossed out the window of a moving car, it didn’t survive.

It’s not even the weekend, I feel like I’m living dangerously. In any case, I doubt I will be very productive for the next week or so while I recuperate from this term. There is still work to do, the paper will need editing, plots will inevitably need to be remade, small children will need to be sacrificed. We may have accidentally ripped a hole in the fabric of time freeing the eldritch horrors and we didn’t have IRB approval, so you know we are in trouble for that. I mean, so much work.

But for now, there is a calm and I’m going to enjoy it for as long as it lasts. Because we know it won’t last. That doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy it while it’s here though. For those of you wrapping up another successful term, congratulations, we did it!