Rip the earth in two with your mind

Randoms re: the last few months:

- Having nearly a month break between semesters, during which I spent my time concentrating on my old job and hanging in Chicago with all my old buds, my first few months of grad school have begun to seem less like "the first step in the process of establishing my ultimate career" and more like "a fun jaunt into Reading Land -- OK, what's next?" This regressive shift in perspective would be a little worrisome to me, except for the fact that this coming semester is sure to beat that sentiment out of me faster than you can say I'm taking a graduate-level Shakespeare class with a lauded Shakespeare scholar and I haven't read a Shakespeare play since high school.

- My sister got engaged last week(!!!!). Immediately after it happened, a script was triggered in my head, telling me that such a momentous familial life event should make me feel old and/or adult-like. In the past 2.5 years, however, I've attended the weddings of three close friends, all of whom are younger than me -- so I can say with some certainty that weddings of people approximately my age are no longer surprising enough to make me feel old.

- That realization just now, though, does make me feel a little old.

- Flying into Boston's Logan Airport can be a little terrifying to the uninitiated. Check out Google Maps sometime and you'll notice that the runways/landing strips all terminate at the shore of a bay. Anyone who has traveled by plane knows that, when landing, the airplane comes [what appears to be] dangerously close to the ground [or in this case, water] well before it's actually ready to land. When flying into Logan, this means that a newbie window-seater may be compelled to stare with bulging eyes out the window, watching the water in the bay get so close to the underbelly of the plane that she can see flickering light reflected off individual waves, until she becomes absolutely convinced that the plane is about to water-land and that she should probably start praying and/or looking for a buoyant-looking passenger to use as a floatation device, when at the very last second the runway magically appears under the wheels of the airplane just as it touches the Earth's surface.

- When in Boston, I miss driving. When in Chicago, I miss the weirdly adorable Boston custom of saying "thank you" to the green line T conductor when exiting a subway car.

- I haven't yet figured out whether being an academic means that I have to pretend to not be excited/fan-girly when I meet substantially more famous or impressive academics. I hope not. Over the past semester I listened to and/or talked to a bestselling author, a Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist, a world-famous philosopher, and an Oscar-winning filmmaker, and I'm completely jazzed to be able to say that.

- Over the past couple years it has become extremely evident to me that, as a consumer, if something goes wrong, whatever the circumstances, complaining enough to Management and being a big enough thorn will result in free things being handed to you. After collecting all the gumption and audacity I could muster, over the past year I have discovered that I possess too much empathy for sales clerks and customer service representatives to ever be a lucratively squeaky wheel.

- I'm not going to lie -- I'm proud of myself for moving to Boston. I feel oddly satisfied about the fact that, without much assistance, I picked up my more-or-less happy and self-sufficient life and transplanted myself 1,000 miles away, in order to lead a comparably happy and self-sufficient life. At the same time, I feel like I have an outstanding sacrificial warrant to the gods of telecommunications, who have allowed me to maintain close relationships with GR, seester, parents, and friends by way of phone calls, e-mails, and Skype. Making a cross-country move would have been exponentially more scary without the benefits of 21st century technology, and the part of me that acknowledges Amish people feels compelled to think about that every once in a while.