I should write stuff more

So. I have been a graduate student for one and a half semesters. I have not written anything about any of it. Perhaps it is time I started to chronicle my adventures here at UW. They say it is a good idea to keep a dream journal (who says that?), so maybe it is a good idea to put down some of the stuff that has happened in this grad school dream.

I should clarify. When I say "grad school dream", I don't mean it like "oh man I am living the dream this is amazing". Don't get me wrong, I'm happy, and I enjoy what I am doing. But you don't go to grad school for the fun of it, you go to get your degree. That "living the dream" crap comes after. What I mean when I say "grad school dream" is that grad school shares that unique quality of dreaming that nothing seems out of the ordinary. In a dream, you can be sitting on top of a plane the size of a child's big wheel on your way home from spring break and not be bothered by that at all.  Similarly, if a 2000 lb giant flesh eating squirrel exploded through the wall of the average grad student's office, his reaction would probably be to go looking for a saddle he could put on the thing so he didn't have to take the bus to work anymore. This is the reaction of a person in a dream, or a grad student just being a grad student. Any normal person, you know, the type who went and got a real job and makes money and stuff, would of course realize that keeping a 2000 lb squirrel in a small studio apartment in downtown Madison is not at all practical. Plus you'd have to feed it.

Anyway, I spent half of last summer in pretty much the best possible version of "still living with his parents". For one, it was very temporary. Furthermore, my parents moved to a beach. Jackpot. I would go running along the shores of lake Michigan and do my push ups and such on the beach every morning. Hard to beat for a summer. That information isn't all that relevant to my story of being a grad student. I just wanted to make you jealous.

I got to Madison early, a month and a half before the start of the semester. Nothing happened. Anyone who tells you different, anything about "white wizards" is a dirty liar.

So I am a graduate student. I have been for something like half of a year, and I am starting to understand what it is. Well, maybe that is a lie. But I have some ideas at least. Like I know I wasn't surprised when Skippy the 2000 lb squirrel burst through my wall.