Styrofoam

I swipe the last twenty dollars from my plastic Fisher-Price piggy bank. So much for savings. The air is cool, but the evening is sunny and pleasant as I pull away in my Camry. The trunk still has several suitcases left over from college, which ended eleven days ago. Sometimes I could confuse eleven days with an eternity.

The symposium is empty when we arrive, aside from granite slabs and chips of stone on the path between the millyard and the river. Wandering among the sculptures, we assent to return another day. Wait. Are those voices?

The Cuban keeps telling us that the artists are locked up inside the mill building. He is obviously an artist, wearing a painter's suit and what was probably once a baseball cap that lost it's brim. The Czeck brings two styrofoam cups balanced between the fingers of his left hand, the wine in his right. Our polite refusal is ignored, so we take the cups of wine and sit down in the loading bay. We all introduce ourselves.

I need to work on the way I describe my profession. Once social work is out of the bag, people like to change the subject as quickly as is possible. I try grad student instead. What are you studying? I respond, and the characteristic change of subject ensues. My friend talks about the cafe where she works, and the artists listen with interest and try to solicit donations.

There's a lull in conversation, so the Cuban proposes a wet t-shirt contest, just for my friend and me. We laugh. He gets up to bring over the mock-up of his sculpture, a woman's draped figure, and shows it to us. He's persistent, but so are we, so he abandons his proposal and returns to his spot around the table.

Soon after, our steward wobbles away on his bicycle and our brief party starts to wane. We walk back to the car, styrofoam cups in our hands, to the last lights of the sun.

Horizon Hunting, or why I'm a grad student

Horizon hunting. That's what I'd like to call my recent life. Reaching out beyond the present, constantly pursuing a future of unknowns. There was one year of college hanging on for its dear life, to be followed by who knew what. But, as that year became nine months and five months and two months, I began to grasp what the next phase might resemble.

There's something absolutely liberating about graduating with your bachelor's degree. You can check off the last milestone on the "to-do" list your parents drafted for you during your pre-natal state. Finally, you are an individual with a little bit of alphabet soup attached to your grown-up name. Being single and unattached during this phase makes anything truly possible, allowing you to completely re-start your life wherever you can imagine. I mean, once you figure out how to postpone paying your loans.

The blessed irony of my situation is that I took all of that potential, all of those opportunities, all of those venues...and I moved back home and enrolled in grad school. I recently got a message from a friend, "Come to Jordan for the next two years! We need English teachers!" Wasn't that the sort of outlandishly awesome thing I was supposed to do after graduating from college? Grad school, seriously?

Since looking at school in one year terms has become my style, I'm amassing this degree into...anyone, anyone? One year. Since you can't do much of anything with a bachelor's degree except for casework, the Council on Social Work Education has shown us all great sympathy with a little something we call Advanced Standing. You are hurled full-speed into the middle of a two year program, skipping all of the first year courses and probably insulting and irritating standard track students. But, who can resist half-price/half-time? I obviously couldn't.