The return of responsibility

Well, school began today. I have four classes, three of which meet on Monday and Wednesday, one of which meets on Tuesday and Thursday. One of my M/W classes has decided to play spoiler, requiring sessions on Friday's too. Thus, though the hours aren't really unbearable, I am expected at class every day of the week. Plus, on M/W, I have one class scheduled much later than my other two, meaning I have to make two roundtrips on each of those days, or else wait out the long hours in the law library.

I have yet to find a place to live in Santa Clara, though my stalled search may prove serendipitous. Although I had already completed all the required paper work before the beginning of the term, the financial aid office has displayed a frustrating degree of incompetence. Thus, while I await the disbursal of my aid package, I am thoroughly and regrettably broke.

The first day of class went easy enough, boiling down to the same resuscitation of administrative minutiae and introductions delivered with varying degrees of friendliness at the start of every year. I am starting out the new term already behind, as the aforementioned fiduciary difficulties have precluded the purchase of textbooks and other materials, but as I have been promised my aid tomorrow, I have high hopes that the condition is temporary.

Though it has been gone for only one day, I already find myself missing the causal laziness of summer. I make no pretentions at any great aspirations beyond the preservation of my free time, which I treasure above any worldly possession. I have viewed the return of scholastic responsibility with a regret. I await my inevitable entry into the professional world with the same kind of dread, but magnified as it is by the fact that it will be a prison from which there are only three escapes. Death and old age, in decreasing order of preference, each hold their own problems, and the lottery is a statistical improbability to the extent where reliance upon it borders on delusion.

The only thing I fear more than school is work, and it is a matter of unspeakable personal tragedy that I will be able to escape neither.