Contemplation -- Roads Diverging

This week has gone by in a blur of pink packets and yellow folders.  Today is the last day of the Reading.  It's hard to believe that.  It seems like I was loading the car only yesterday, and tomorrow I'll be driving that horrible drive again.

The people at my table have been wonderful this year.  It's been so nice to have them to share the little snippets of joy dropped unexpectedly into my lap either deliberately or unintentionally by the student writers.  It's also been nice to be able to make literary references, no matter how obscure, and have people get them.  I never feel like a weirdo here.  These are "my people."

And such profoundly intelligent and motivated people.  Most of them, about half of the readers, are college professors or graduate students on their way to being PhDs.  I'm sitting between someone who came out of the classroom and into a doctoral program and someone who went straight through.  I can't say that they don't make me start thinking about it again, especially the guy who taught for a while and went back.  They make it seem so natural, like it is the progression of things, as if it what all "creatures like me" should do.

I'd be lying if I said there is some part of me that doesn't want it, too, hasn't wanted to be Dr. Me since I was very young, just for the pure satisfaction of the knowledge, just for the satisfaction of knowing that I had taken myself to the end of what is possible in my field.  As I've gotten older, though, I've learned that I will class myself right out of a job in my chosen profession that way, will enter a whole new realm of petty politicking and the "publish or perish" mentality that I'm not so sure I'm comfortable with, will, in all likelihood, have to leave behind my sweet students.

Add to that the fact that to do a PhD I truly believe you need a burning interest in one area, one essential question, and I do not have that.  I have a few pieces of literature that I love, a few that I wouldn't mind knowing more about, but it's not like it was with linguistics.  There were things with linguistics that I could have disappeared into for a lifetime and never been seen or heard from again, pure research questions of acquisition that would have been fun to sink my teeth into.  I still believe my advisor was right when she told me at that time that I was too young to go straight through for my PhD, though.  I did need classroom experience. That has never been a wrong choice.  Look where it's led.  I can't regret that.

Ultimately, I might pursue it still if it were available to me more easily.  The simple truth is, there is no way for me to get the classes I need without moving.  Our local branch of a major school offers some courses at the 8000 level, but not enough for me to do a whole degree.  I have school loans now that I can barely pay.  What kind of hell would I be in for if I were to move and start into another degree and heap another loan on top of that?

No, I'm on the road I chose so long ago.  I must walk it.  I won't have any regrets about it at this point.  Sometimes, I guess, I just wonder what it would have been like in the other lane.