Summer Breaks

One year from today, speaking of today not necessarily as June 8th but as the day of UW's commencement, I will be graduating with my second master's degree. I will be done with school--possibly for the rest of my life but at least for a while--and I will actually have a useful degree and plenty of practical experience to get me a decent job. A real job. I look forward to a paycheck that stretches farther than the rent for a dinky apartment and other bare necessities and to days when I can come home and leave work at work.

The thing that stresses me most about school is the perpetually looming assignment, the feeling that whatever free time I have is not truly free time because there's always reading or writing or research that I'm putting off. Perhaps this is why most students take a break during the summer. Here is how my summers have played out since starting college:

• The summer after my freshman year I worked full-time and took a missionary prep class.
• The next two summers I was a missionary in Madrid; while the locals took month-long vacations in Andalucia and Barcelona, we wandered the streets looking for investigators in 100-degree weather.
  
• The next summer I took a full load of classes while working full-time to save up enough money to get married.
  
• The summer after that I just worked full-time.
  
• The summer after that I had graduated, so again I was just working, so I guess this list isn't going to be as impressively masochistic as I thought it would be.
  
• But the summer after that I was back in school, and I did take classes. And worked, of course.
  
• And then I graduated again. And that summer, as I recall, I only worked somewhere between half- and three-quarters-time.
• But the next summer I worked like fifty hours a week between two jobs, so we can count that as a breakless summer too.

Which brings us to this summer. I will be working ten hours a week at the library, doing another ten hours of cataloging internship at the library, possibly picking up another ten-hour job, taking eight credits of distance courses, and spending two days a week with my kids. To be honest, I'm looking forward to it. After the last three quarters of eleven- to thirteen-credit loads and nearly forty-hour work weeks, this will be nice. And most of what I'll be doing--the cataloging internship and the Daddy days particularly--will be fun. And who knows what kind of schedule my post-graduate life will bring?

So I think I'll enjoy my summer while it lasts. The future will come when it comes.