Anyhow, classes start up again on Tuesday and that always prompts a bit of melancholy-esque reflections for me.  Yes, I tend to reflect on my life/year right before the fall semester.  Yes, that’s bloody insane, I know.  New Years has no import to me – the beginning of the fall semester is actually the beginning of my new year.  It’s strange, but I have always felt that way.  (My birthday, for those interested, occurred just after the end of the school year up until I started university, which ends before May, and, thus, my birthday now ends up near the middle of the break.)

This year could have been the last year in which I have a proper end and beginning.  While my credit count says that I’m entering my second semester of my third year, I have enrolled in eight semesters – four years.  No, I am not entering my ‘fifth’ year of study – I’m entering my fourth.  No, I didn’t take three or four classes in the fall/winter semesters and picked up the slack in the summer.  I’m a co-op student; when I worked, I was gaining credits.  Well, one credit a work term.  (A completely useless number – the U of R uses the three-credits-per-class system (since there are three lecture hours a week per class) and there are four work terms required.  I’m going to end up graduating with a minimum of one extra credit.)  So, needless to say, if I had just gone off to acquire a standard B.Sc., I would be out in the work world in eight short months.

Cue panic.

I’ve been in school since I was five – sixteen years – and I’ve never been someone who hated school.  On the contrary, I love it.  I love learning things and I doubt that will ever change.  Entering the work world is something I desperately do not wish to do – yes, I’ll be making far more money than I am now and, yes, that is what everyone is supposed to do with their lives.  But, well, I really do not wish to.  Working holds no great appeal to me beyond being a way to acquire money.  And I love money, don’t get me wrong, and I hoard it and protect it and take great lengths to ensure that I’ll never be without it.  Yet, at the same time, I’d be perfectly content to be practically destitute but attending classes and learning.  (In a paradoxical relationship, I could not be a starving artist.  Don’t ask me to explain – I don’t understand it either.)

Leaving school and working terrifies me.  Not because I’m too chickenshit to move out and get on with my life (I have already proved myself capable of doing so what with my third of a year spent working in Winnipeg) but because I’m terrified shitless of starting work and never going back to school to gain the degrees I so desperately want in history, fine art and, yes, even though undergrad English bores me, English lit.

In short, I feel like leaving school is the end of my life, not the beginning.  And that is a ridiculous concept and idea to entertain at 21 years of age.

Ah well.

I still have, at minimum, three more semesters of school left.  And, what with my chasing after two degrees at once, I’m not even sure when I will graduate.

And that, needless to say, pleases me.

Tomorrow?

Tomorrow I buy notebooks and school supplies and relish the fact that this isn’t the last time I do so.