schools for suckers, or perhaps I'm just jealous

It is turning out to be another gorgeous, sunny, chilly day, and just like most Saturdays, I'm stuck in the library, gazing out through the wall of windows across from the reference desk, watching the students spread across the quad with their books and their sodas and their mp3 players. At least it's finals week now, so a considerable number of them are stuck here in the library with me.

In a lot of ways I miss school. I miss homework. It was nice to have to schedule my leisure activities around the other things I was doing. It was nice to have study sessions that lasted late into the night. I even liked finals week: I like writing papers and having deadlines. Now I feel rather shiftless a lot of the time. I watch more tv than I did at school. I feel like I get less done.

Maybe I just need a better job. It is true that now I have a better kitchen and more independence, and the ability to laugh at all those poor suckers tying themselves into knots trying to cram five more vocabulary words into their heads, or fill the other half of their sketchbooks, or frantically try to remember all the details of that experiment from three months ago to bring their lab notebook up to snuff.

I've been back from France now for a year. It's still kind of strange.