When I was a young man in my early teens I lived in a small town in rural Wisconsin, Brillion. I suffered there from extreme boredom and I longed for challenges and new experiences that just weren’t available to me. Thankfully I had some great teachers who gave me extra projects outside the scope of my classes and allowed me to stretch. For two summers my mother was kind enough to take me up to the University of Oshkosh where they had summer science courses for kids like me. I took an astronomy class one summer and earth science, I guess you’d call it geology, the next. I was thinking now as I got my morning shower about how I used to want to expand my experiential horizons in any direction I could. I would turn the heat way up or way down to see how hot or cold I could stand it. In Shinto religious practice this sort of behavior is called gyo and either involves a hot spring or a mountain steam. I wasn’t being a masochist. I was trying in a small way to see what I was capable of. To grow we need to set the bar higher for ourselves. To envision something which might be beyond our grasp.

After I wrote yesterday’s blog I went to a street fair in Maplewood put on by the Schlafley Brewing Company. The music and beer were great. The art was great, and then the universe gave me a gift in the form of Missy. Missy is not someone I see or talk to regularly, but our academic and professional lives are intertwined in ways that someone in the next life will need to explain to me. We met in college and shared friends, considered dating early on, but I was way to much of a flirt and a jerk and all of those things that I continue to be. I had applied to teach English in Korea and backed out when the Korean economy tanked in 1997. Sometime around then she went to Korea. She came back and entered the graduate program in English at Truman State a year before I did.

When I began teaching we shared an office. Upon graduation she received a yearlong full position as an instructor in the program, a year later I had the position and got her office, the year after me Jen had it and got my office (with Chet Breed). Missy moved to St. Louis and took a position at Meramec Community College. When I started at Meramec we not only shared an office, we shared a desk. In my blog yesterday I mentioned finding out that my supervisor Rich had died, I found out from Missy at her wedding to our fellow grad student Brian, with whom I bought the bus that you occasionally see on this blog. It was his idea.

So yesterday I make this promise to myself to take the universe’s next invitation and get back in the game. The universe responds through the cunning use of ordered chaos to serve Missy up and have her say, “I’m looking at graduate programs so that I can get the Ph.D. done before we have kids.”

I have been resisting returning for the Ph.D. on the following grounds: I can get a job now (that I wasn’t sure I wanted on the rare cancer from stress tip) with the degree I have already. Graduate school will cost billions of dollars. I already am in debt for my limited use brainpan to the tune of sixty thousand or so, which eats up a little less than half my monthly income. I will never make a salary as a teacher that would allow me to pay those debts off in a single lifetime.

What say you universe to these fine rationalizations and doubts?
Last night I was playing poker with the gang (I sure get around don’t I) and we get to this round of Texas hold-um where the cards that the table shares are an ace, a four, and a three. I have the ace in my hand for pair. Tyler and I are the only ones left in the game and he raises the pot three dollars. I try to read the look in his eye and my confidence breaks. I figure he has it and I fold. He bluffed me free and clear. He had nothing and bought the pot on confidence alone. Fuck the money, I’m all in cause I got an ace in the hole.

Ok universe here’s the thing, it is clear that I am intellectually half-baked. I have some good flavors brewing, but I am not done. I did not stay in the oven long enough to really know my ass from my elbow and if I really want to test the limits of this body I don’t need to teach, I need to get back in there and cook. Are you listening Jen? Chicago? Madison or St. Louis for that matter? Let’s go get minted. I am something I haven’t been in a very long time. I am excited. I’m going to go get a Ph.D.

(But first I need to fix my car.)