Organization is not my strength
I can hit a mean low corner shot in racquetball. I can brainstorm solutions to problems. I can read and write and I can probably still play the flute, although I was never very good.
I cannot organize stuff. Okay, to be really very honest, I can probably organize stuff but I hate it. And right now, I have stuff that needs to be organized! I have all these pieces of paper–five years of teaching college comp stuff, and something desperately sad like NINE, yes, NINE years of student stuff (I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that I’ve been a student since 1998, though I have managed to earn three degrees). I have all these file cabinets full of pieces of paper that aren’t particularly important, I don’t really think, but I loathe the idea of really going through them. Do you know that when I graduate with my Phd, assuming I manage to accomplish that task, I’ll probably have been going to school for thirteen or fourteen years after graduating from high school. That makes me feel a bit ridiculous!
Wow that was a bit of a tangent. In any case, how in the world should I organize all this stuff?
My current in-between place
Right now I am in an in-between place. Well, I guess we’re all in some kind of in-between place, between birth and death, etc. My current, specific in-between place is between one big football school whose colors are red and white and another big football school whose colors are red and white. I graduated in May from the University of Oklahoma with my M.A. and am starting a Ph.D. at Ohio State in a month’s time.
My summer job (working at the writing center at OU) is done today, and what looms before me is an exact month with one responsibility: to move to Ohio by August 27. Admittedly, this should make me very excited. Who wouldn’t want a month off? But it’s what is at the end of this month that is freaking me out. I remember the first classes I took as an M.A. student quite clearly, and it was with great relief that the professors expected much more of entering Ph.D. students than entering M.A. students. Now I’m the entering Ph.D. student! And yes I know so much more now than I did three years ago. My master’s program in composition and rhetoric at Oklahoma has been wonderful. I’ve had many opportunities and made some great friendships that are going to be very hard to leave!
How do I face one month of freedom with so much unknown change on the other side?
