so the gods have seen fit to deliver me, for better or for worse, from employment purgatory. in the midst of the verbiagocalypse that was post-finals week (which was somehow, amazingly, even more insane than this time last year), i was made and accepted an offer to enter WSU's Ph.D English Literature program (the fact that i'm capitalizing it stresses the importance).
there was some amazing confluence of coincidence involved, for sure. a number of candidates who were pretty obviously more accomplished and straight-up cooler than me had to decide that WSU wasn't for them. and that happened. so here i am. i'll be coming back in the fall to pick up graduate studying, essentially doing far more work for far less money than this year, but working towards a degree which i will hopefully receive by the time my 30th birthday rolls around and coming out of the process in (comparitively) little financial debt.
that's the good news. the bad news is that, on average, this year in pullman has been pretty much the most depressing year of my life in about a decade, and now i just signed on to do it four more times (at least). so i'm going to have to find a way to rectify that situation for the better. step one, which is already near-complete, is to move to a nicer, more walkable apartment (despite the fact that it's in prefab hell...it's really on the border of prefab hell...maybe i can write a paper using theories of boundaries and borders about my apartment). it's slightly more expensive, but incredibly cleaner. my plan is to go way the fuck into debt furnishing it with weird art and oddly shaped furniture and shit, so i can live in a place that looks like the inside of my brain looks, as opposed to looking like i threw a box full of all my shit on the floor and it exploded in the middle of a living room from section 8 housing (aka the place i've lived for three years). step two is to get a PA and start getting a regular gig schedule going. this will facilitate step three, which is to write more and write more music. step four is to actually start cooking food again. this one may be completely impossible considering how much time cooking daily takes vs. how much time being a Ph.D student daily takes. step five is to just not be a fucking loser. i've been working on this since i was five. progress is slow, but steady. i expect it to humblingly continue. step six is to fix the part of my brain that deals with (and sucks at) dealing with/considering/thinking about romantic relationships. the reason this is at the bottom of the list is because i have absolutely no answers or ideas on how to improve it and probably never will, but i'll keep trying because it seems stupid not to.
anyway, i just wanted to let y'all know (those who didn't already know) what was up. it's going to be a crazy few months, but things should settle down (in the sense that all my work will be at least predictable and hard as opposed to unpredictable and hard) around august. also, i might hedge my bets and fly home for a month or two instead of driving :( i hope this doesn't make me sound old, but it seems like a bad time to be pushing my luck with Shadow and 4,000 mile drives. especially because i have a few 500-1,000 mile drives i want to be able to do in the near future.
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