C'est tout

Yesterday, Friday the Thirteenth, Two Thousand Four, was a really beautiful day. And it marked the end of my eight years in Madison. Today I squash everything that isn't already gone into my beat-up-but-zippy Mazda and go to my little upstate town and don't come home. Or rather, I go home. The population will shortly become 7613. I've really loved it here, and I've never lived anywhere longer. I guess there was that year in England, but still, we'll call it eight years in Madison.

Yesterday also marked the end of my twenty-five straight years as a student. After dissertating for fully FIVE of those years, I walked my 282 pages (plus several boring forms and a 350-word abstract that's somehow supposed to condense it all into a page) up Bascom Hill to the graduate school and got everything stamped, approved, paid off, and signed. Here's a photo of me, flush with victory and exhausted, but jauntily sporting my Doctor Hat.



Note the two 8-foot stacks of UW-Madison dissertations behind me there. Such a lot of paper. Such a lot of Engaging Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry. Such a lot of silly crap. Finally I have room to try to conjure up some perspective. The question of whether or not we acknowledge rhetorics of place in the emergence of early modern authorship seems highly irrelevant.

So I'm a doctor now. And a doctor who still has to dust his blinds before moving out. You'd think they'd provide PhDs with someone to do that kind of thing for them. But you'd be wrong.