I am no longer a grad student.

A week ago, I withdrew from my program and dropped my incomplete classes from last year.  And it was good.  Every time I sat at my computer, attempting to write a paper, my brain turned to mush.  I'd try to force it, resulting in word salad incoherence, and high-school level English oversimplifications, gross generalizations, unfounded claims,and a general sense of impossibility.  I attribute this to my own ambivalence about the direction I'd taken in academia (literature), compounded by a stressful pregnancy (itself exacerbated by the financial and bureaucratic pressures it spawned wrt my grad program), a premature baby who spent 5 weeks in the NICU, the continued adjustments following his arrival home, the decision to stay in school for spring because of the fellowship (despite my complete unfitness for school, not enrolling could have required repayment for the first two quarters, something I forgot until today), and the sheer weight of 3 short papers, one 10 pp. paper, two 20 pp. paper, and a paper for which I would have needed a 10-15 pp. draft, followed by a 20-25 pp. final, only to be further expanded and refined into a master's thesis.

And I still had primary care of my baby, though my husband and my mother did help to varying degrees, as well as primary cooking duty, food shopping, and laundry-sorting/planning.

Just recounting that exhausted me.  If it were just ambivalence, a less-complicated pregnancy and a full-term baby, it would still be hard, but the whole miserable process (and so much of that misery was related to grad school in one way or another) tainted the work, whether it was Richardson, Langland, Milton, English Renaissance sonnets or prosody.  All of it just brought back the grinding pain, the sense of mentally and emotionally drowning, that dreadful oppressive duty...

I came close to completing two of them.  Of the six, two.

I'm not sure what I'm doing with this blog.  Mommy blog?  Not like there aren't a ton of those in the world.  Book blog?  Have one started over on WordPress.  Health blog?  At least that would be unique in my plethora of online venue-presences, and yet there's so many of them, too.  I'm not catholic enough in my gaming to do that sort of writing, and not productive enough to feel justified in creating a knitting blog.  I can't stay engaged in following politics without getting fatigued with rage and frustration, and there's so many people who do it better with experientially qualified insight anyhow.  Everybody and their mother does damned near anything online, which, in addition to squelching the last sense of uniqueness from most people, it also taints creativity in certain ways by enforcing sameness.  I may not believe that the world is "flat," but I do believe that the internet flattens things.  I feel like a Luddite more and more each day.  Maybe I'll make a neo-Luddite blog.

That's probably something I can get behind.  Bitch about one more thing that's diminishing our souls, day by day.  Or reflect on the chasm between some activity we consider normal or mundane, and the reality in the not-too-distant past.  Add in the ills of society and its individuals... I would probably need to do research.  Make one post a week, well-researched.  That's all.  It would be a start.