katieesq

An anecdote:

When my family and I first moved to Naperville in 1992, I remember this conversation between my mother, father, and me in the back of "La Bamba," my mother's affectionately named Ford Escort.

"Mom? You know all those names, like BA, and PhD? What do those mean?"

"Well, when you go to college you can get a BA. And if you go to college for longer, you can get an MA, a masters. And if you go to college for a reeeeeally long time, you can get a PhD.

I pondered this for a moment.

"Okay. I think I want to get a PhD then."

My parents chuckled, amused with my naivete, and said something like, "let's wait until you get older and see." A PhD was laughably out of reach for a child of theirs. People like us didn't get degrees like that. We couldn't afford them. People like us got good jobs as bank clerks for 25 years and then retired to small brick houses with our equally small pensions. I might as well have said I was going to be a famous actress or President of the United States - either ambition would have seemed just as fanciful.

Now that I'm on my way to my PhD, I can't say I feel extraordinarily accomplished. I don't even feel different. Maybe I'm in denial, but the memories of late nights with my laptop churning out personal statement drafts seem far, far away, and acceptance letters don't seem so hard to come by. Logically, I know they are hard to come by. But now that I've come by them, they don't seem so precious or rare. Besides, I haven't even started the hard part yet.

In other news, I finished reading The Bell Jar, which will be ticked off the long list of books I shamefully have not read. I wish I read it when I was 16 years old. I would have eaten it up, absorbed it, chewed up all the clever turns of phrase and weeping moments of loneliness and agony. I would have taken its message of sexual freedom and ran. But now, The Bell Jar is, for me, the literary revisitation of a road already traveled. It's sad, how so many things are transient like this, and if we miss out on them, they might never affect us as perhaps they should have.

I have been saving a lot of money lately for school, but I'm ambivalent about it. Nobody ever remembers money. It's something that we collect, though it's not unique. Shouldn't we trade in that money for something that we could remember much more? My scratched up copy of Sufjan Stevens's Illinois is worth much more than the $16 dollars I spent on it. What if I had decided to be prudent at the record store that day? If I hadn't bought Pablo a few months ago, who would perch on my books while I read in bed?

All this whimsy is very easy to go on about when you aren't broke, however.

I've only been broke one time in my life. I was probably about 10, and I went to Six Flags with a friend's family. I spent all my money, down to the change, in their rigged carnival. I got a stuffed skunk, and I was pleased as punch. I came home to the stern, surreptitious lecture from my father - "See? That's what happens when you spend all your money." Nothing bad had happened, but the lecture made me feel woefully irresponsible. Parents have a tendency to make children feel that way. I've never been broke since, though I can't say the same for my lecturing father. It's funny how life works like that.


It's time to go mop the floors (a main staple of my infinitely exciting 20-something life), but before I go, have you been to www.wordle.net? It's this nifty little program that creates a word cloud from any body of text or webpage. Why, here's the wordle for this blog entry:

Now go have fun and make your own.

P.S. I still haven't booked my flight and hotel for prom, so if anyone has hotel recommendations (or knows of places to avoid) please let me know. Restaurant recommendations and sites to see would also be much appreciated.