A Much-Needed Update

I'd like to apologize for being absent so long--more than a month, which I think may be a personal record for me since I started this blog in 2008. It's just that I've been busy. I am, after all, getting ready for grad school.

The photo you see above is one I snapped on the campus of Mountain University, and it is there that I will report later today for my first class in a teacher-certification program that will take me approximately two years to complete. What I'll embark on this afternoon is an undergraduate prerequisite (I won't formally begin graduate studies until the fall), but it is something I need to do for this program and so in a sense it's the program's first step. I'm so excited for this.

My six years here have seen a lot of dreaming, the kind of really audacious ambition that only a very young person can have, and I suppose it's a mark of my emerging adulthood that the aspirations I have now focus not on pop stardom or music renown but on a stable career and a liveable income. There is, to be sure, something sad about that; I am a boy of twenty-one no longer and will never again be that shining youth. Yet the things I want for myself all result in my happiness, and they come without the immense pressure of having to change the world in the process of achieving them. It's a good thing.

And I have some audacity left in me. I grew up in an abusive hellhole run by two homophobic anti-intellectuals, and yet I have the nerve to think that I might one day be a history professor who leads a fulfilling love life. Your BB won't settle. And I still sing sometimes. My voice has a lot more rasp to it now, as if it's weary of the world, but I still sing.

So today begins the whirlwind. I'll wrap up my prerequisites this summer, then, financial aid in hand, will commence graduate work in the fall and will move onto the campus of Mountain University. Bye bye, David and Marie. It's been swell.

As for the long-term plan? I'll complete the teaching program in 2016 and then will secure a position teaching high school history. While working, I'll go back to school yet again, this time to obtain a bachelor's degree in history. That done, I'll apply for fellowships to pursue a master's degree and a doctorate in history, almost certainly with a focus on the antebellum South and the planter class in particular. And then it's off to the college job market and, hopefully, tenure. Call that one a ten-year goal. Hell, maybe a fifteen-year goal. But it'll be so awesome when I finally reach it.

Thank you guys for being so understanding and supportive all this time. The last few years have been rough--hell, I tried to kill myself--but I finally feel like I'm stepping in something like the right direction. I'd really like for you to witness that.