Advanced Degree Blues

This is either the last lap or the gauntlet, depending on how you define it, for Security Husband. Last semester with a packed courseload, and write his thesis to boot. He's busy, doing things to strings of numbers that look like nonsense to me. Arcane science. Soon, as he commented at dinner the other night, he will have his master's... and that will entitle him to claim to know everything about anything. We laughed.

But underpinning that is the spectre of lost time, experience spent a different way. You can't judge your own timeline by what your loved ones or friends accomplish. This leads to frustration. But occasionally you watch your changing face in the mirror, pull out another hair gone silver, and you wonder... sometimes more hormonally charged or bitterly than normal.

Our plans have been violently shaken, and it remains to be seen whether our goals will slip as well. Graduate schools are slow to respond. We hold up March as the revelatory time, when some path will solidify in front of us, and we can stop fussing with the unchartable possibilities and start in on some real planning.

For no creature shall keep my kotatsu away from me. It comes back with us.