Moving On

Four years ago I decided that I'd had enough of the workaday world and wanted to hide in graduate school. My undergraduate degree is in theatre and I knew that I did not want to go back into that world, even just for study, so I was at loose ends. Prior to my hard-moment decision I had toyed with the idea of grad school for three years and always found a reason to put off any action. Then one day at work I simply had enough, turned in my notice and never looked back. But I still didn't know what I wanted to study.

There were logisitical things that had to be figured out first: I had just closed on my first condo, hadn't even made my first mortgage payment, and now I was unemployed, but sometimes pivotal life decisions are not made with an eye toward fiscal responsibility. On my way home on that fateful day, I stopped into the restaurant where I'd worked ten years earlier and asked to be put on the schedule. I walked out with a full roster of shifts. Then I went home and immediately enrolled in bartending school. My reasoning was that bartending was the easiest way to make the most cash. My adventures in individual alcohol distribution meetings is grist for another post. It was nearly a year before I sat down in my first course at DePaul, aimed at a masters degree in writing.

That course was the study of multicultural rhetoric. The first reading assignment was a hundred pages of modern rhetorical theory. I had to read the introduction to one of the articles three times, and I was never sure I fully understood it. During that class, more than once I sat at my computer cursing the professor. It was exhausting, but I survived.

The posts below pertain to this in that they are the first significant indication that my study is paying off. I've posted the responses from one reader because they were germain to the topic. I have received others enouraging comments that I've chosen not to post, received from outside the comment arena of this blog. A year ago I wasn't sure I'd ever be able to write anything more signficant than a check. Now I have some hope.

And I'm right back where I started with a hundred pages of modern rhetorical theory to digest and synthesize into a three-page paper, and a review of primary source materials for a research paper that my professor seems to think could be publishable.

So, I better get crackin'.