One final at 11:00, and then I'm done for the 2013-2014 school year.

How sweet. How delectable. How absolutely wonderful. Just an hour and a half of pure agony left and then I can truly feel free.

Almost everyone I know will have graduated from the program by the end of the 2014 fall semester. It will just be me and one other fellow whom I just met this spring, the both of us working on a thesis in the spring of 2015 if things go as planned. Which they may not.

However, I'm not thinking about this. I'm thinking about painting--well, technically drawing, then painting. Working on some house projects. Writing on long neglected projects.

For the summer I have a reading list to help me figure out where I need to go to get this thesis started. I have something very specific in mind. I don't know if I can learn what I need to learn by reading, but maybe I can. Combine it with a course on sentence construction that I desperately want to take and we might have a little something cooking.

Sometime, I have to face the fact that I have comps to take. And that will be a massive undertaking on my part, as I am definitely not as well read as I need to be. But I’m not going to worry about that this summer, even though I should. I want total freedom to do as I please.

This year I had to take classes outside of workshop, as you do for any degree, and I just really hated it. That’s honest. It was interesting stuff, but not interesting enough to justify the hours spent in memorizing facts for tests and writing papers that I just don’t care about. Chalk it up to my age and the fact I’m not like the rest of these kids, hoping to make some kind of living out of it through teaching. I have a delicate balance to maintain between developing my style and running my life—all which trumps jumping through hoops as proof I’ve learned something.

In writing there is only so much you can teach, the rest is developing and polishing up what you’ve got.

Tags: school