Daily Newsie

For those of you not “in the know,” The Fiance’ and I are mulling a transatlantic move possibly as soon as next year, when my master’s degree is safe in my grubby little hand. He has always wanted to live in London, and I can’t say I hate the idea of living in a rowhouse with windowboxes in some quaint village called Richmond-Upon-Thames with a British dog who barks with an accent and is named Sir Reginald Twaddingsley Featherbotham the Third. However, upon closer inspection of the websites of a handful of London universities (one of which has a residence hall named Batavia Mews, which I love), there is nary a PhD in communication in sight. In fact, there is hardly a PhD at all, unless you want to study something scientific and therefore horridly boring and difficult. I may be looking in the wrong place — thank heavens these pages are in English — so I’m not panicking yet, but there may be full-blown panic later if I can’t figure out a way to somehow continue my education. As frustrating as graduate school is, I’m not done learning and I have the feeling I won’t be for quite some time.

Speaking of graduate school, I’ve been eating a lot of junk food to make up for the fact that I got a bad grade on my family communication midterm. I was just starting to enjoy that class, too. OK, so the grade isn’t horrible, but it isn’t an A and it dragged the class average down and I’m just going to go out back and die. The receipt of that grade sufficiently knocked down my ego after I received a fabulous grade on my liveblogged literature review — from my favorite professor, no less! — and her unsolicited assurances that I did a bang-up job. Maybe I should have knocked out my midterm in eight hours rather than spending several nights poring over my textbooks — or maybe I should have liveblogged it. I bet you’re all upset you missed that one.

I do enjoy being a graduate student, if only for the fact that now I have a reason to stay in on Saturday night rather than pure laziness. Seriously — if I wasn’t studying, The Fiance’ and I would be sitting here back-to-back at our respective computers, him blowing up aliens or some such and me blogging or ordering around my Sims. As soon as the semester is over, I’m instituting a one-day-a-week ban on video games so we can actually go out and do something, like use the custom bowling balls we bought ourselves as a Christmas present and which are currently gathering dust in the living room because then the semester started. We’re moving sort-of downtown to a new apartment complex (two bedrooms, a dishwasher and a private balcony!) next weekend and I can’t wait to be able to walk to places like the grocery store, downtown, and the ice cream parlor.

Especially the ice cream parlor. You never know when a bad grade will pop up next.