Fear and fear itself

Man, I start Grad School in a month.

I am starting to freak out a little bit. I mean, it's been almost two years since I have been in school, and now I have to get back in the ring again. Courses. Exams. Papers. They are all waiting for me.

Fuck.

I have been living the good life for two years. I'm salaried. I'm not expected to produce anything at this level, let alone publish. My lab is really well funded so I can do pretty much whatever I want, and it's beautiful. Beautiful! And now I'm going to have to put on a backpack? For reals? Fuck that! Fuck pencils and spiral-bound notebooks, man! I want to continue to be lazy!

One of the students who showed me around when I was interviewing at my school said that trying to grasp all the material in one particular intro course was "like drinking from a fire hose." I am jumping for fucking joy here. I can barely get my ass out of bed before 8am and now I'm going to have to digest information at that hour, after the one hour commute? I'm thinking no.

No coffee can awaken me to that extreme at such a perilously early time point.

Don't get me wrong, I am totally fucking stoked to finally be getting my ass in to grad school after all this time. It's just that I've been on summer vacation for a long ass time. The days are getting shorter and shit. I was never good at coming to terms with the end of summer vacation. On more than one instance, I spent the very last day trying to read each and every one of my summer reading books. It didn't go well.

Needless to say, I still harbor a hatred for Steinbeck.

I have a few weeks left, all of which will be spent frantically trying to get some kind of closure on my project. Amazingly, it is going very well, and I've produced some kickass data this summer. Unfortunately, there is no fucking way I'm going to get it anywhere near journal submission before I leave. This means that this fall, in addition to taking courses and doing a lab rotation, I will most likely be spending my weekends here in my lab trying to get my shit finished.

I need a life.