Keep Passing The Open Windows

"'If you are careful,' Garp wrote, 'if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day; what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane.'"

How to Prepare for a Masters in El Nino

Taking pre-requisite classes is like going to the grocery store to buy only non-perishable foods. They're necessary in the long run, but they're also kind of unnecessary in the here and now. Who really needs THAT much tuna?

As a non-matriculating student, you're preparing for the natural disaster of education, which is to say: grad school. Much like tornadoes and earthquakes, luck favors the well-prepared. Of course, when those things actually do happen, you can't do much more than brace yourself for your roof to fly away. But preparing for the worst by stocking up with tuna and batteries makes you feel like you're at least headed in the right direction.

That's what I'm doing now. I'm buying metaphorical tuna. I hope I never need it, but I also know that I most definitely will. 

Non-Matriculation

Sometimes, it's more important to be on your way somewhere than it is to already be there.

Other times, just knowing how to get somewhere counts. 

But what matters most isn't where you are or even where you're going. 

What matters most is knowing with 100% certainty that you did not leave the stove top on while you were simultaneously getting ready for work, editing a paper, taking a quiz, and making lunch and dinner for the next four days. 

Ah, continuing education. Go matriculate yourself.