It seems a little bit nuts that break is over in a few hours. I’m not ready! I told Twitter as much yesterday:

fall break can’t be over yet. i haven’t gotten through any full seasons of anything on netflix.

— jj thoman (@jjdactyl) October 18, 2014

I feel a little bit like a failure, because I didn’t demolish any full series, I only ordered takeout once, and I only went out for beers one time- and was home by 9:00 that night. Even my GRE experience was kind of anticlimactic. After a week of stressing out about it, and taking practice exams, and blocking out piles of time to recover, the exam came and went with very little fanfare.

I will say, though, that now it all feels kind of real. Prior to this week, I was approaching the process of applying to graduate programs with an, “I have lots of time, and of course I’m going to get in!” attitude. I don’t know where it came from, and that kind of weird confidence isn’t actually productive; feeling like it was a given was making it really hard to get anything actually done. Now that one of the biggest parts of the process is over, and I feel good enough about how I did that I’m not going to bother taking the exam a second time, it feels like…

I’m hoping that the fact that I’ve quit my off-campus job is going to help me get through the next two months in one piece. I didn’t really realize how much time I was spending with my brain only half devoted to academia, because of that job. It’s hard to see a problem when you’re knee-deep in it. Now that I’m on the other side, I feel like a giant, epic weight has been lifted from my shoulders. I know it seems silly, that my retail job was so much extra stress, but it was. Now that stress is gone, and even though it’s a bummer that I won’t get a discount on soap anymore, it feels worth it for the sanity that I might have regained.

Come back to me in two weeks, when November is here and all of a sudden I only have a month to finish my applications. That sanity may or may not still be around.