20150402.0710

I managed to get through yesterday without falling afoul of any pranks, which pleases me. I perpetrated none, which I am certain pleases others. In all honesty, the allure of such things is greatly reduced for me anymore, and it has been for some time. When the falling-away started, I am not entirely sure; my memory is not quite as good as it needs to be for me to recall that detail, and cessations that happen as falling-away rather than deliberate choice do not attract much attention. Still, I think the last time I did any kind of pranking was while I was in graduate school; during a phone call to my parents, I told them that I had gotten my now-Mrs. pregnant (we were only dating at the time, not even engaged). It provoked a much different reaction than my announcement of the actual event. (Admittedly, they got a different notice than the blog post: "Hey, Dad, I have a new name for you...Grandpa.") Since then, though, I *might* have offered an off-handed comment to my students--but even that has not happened for a while and did not happen yesterday.

Writing of graduate school reminds me that it has been close to ten years since I started post-graduate education, that it has been something like ten years since I learned I would be accepted into a graduate program and allowed into higher academic study of the humanities. It was not something for which I was truly prepared, and it was not something about which I was adequately informed--although the latter is as much my fault as anyone else's. Events have fallen out relatively well since then, of course; I feel that the work of earning my doctorate benefited me greatly, and I am quite pleased to have the family I have as a result of going into graduate work. Even so, there are things I would have done differently, had I the thing to do again. I would have worked to publish more of my papers earlier, for one...

It has been some ten years, now, too, that I have kept a written journal; I recall beginning it at the end of my undergraduate student teaching days, although I did not date-stamp most of the entries I made in the earlier volumes of the journal. I have not been as diligent in writing it as I ought to have been--and I am still not. Nor do I necessarily do much to review the journals I have written, although I do occasionally look back at my travel-journal from 2012. Still, the set of journals is precious to me, and I think to keep it for a long time, even if the disarray of volumes in it annoys me; I would like the set of journals to look like one piece of work, since they are a single piece of work, if one attended to with insufficient rigor. Like my research, perhaps I will get the journals in order and under diligent pursuit, and in another ten years, I can look back on things with less regret.