Inaugural post

Despite my reservations about hooking myself up to yet another electronic gimmick, I've opened this blog to track my observations about campus life.

I'm a 46 year old grad student in a PhD program at the same school where I got my B.S. degree over 25 years ago. After my graduation in '85 I was a Marine Corps Officer for 20 years. I came back here to College Station, TX to work at a state agency, never thinking I'd go back to graduate school (I got an M.A. in Human Resources along the way in my Marine Corps time). After switching jobs to one where I worked from home, I thought I'd take a class on campus on something that interested me. It's a long story, but that morphed into full-time grad student and graduate assistant teaching Spanish.

I call this blog campus gypsy because I really don't have a permanent place on campus. I've been assigned a one-person cubicle in a building where I neither teach nor attend classes. The department's idea is that I am to share this one-seat cubicle with a guy who has used it by himself for over a year. Yeah. Now, you don't share a one-seat cubicle any more than you share a porta-potty. You take turns. And I'd rather not encroach on a guy's established space. So I have office hours for my students on the patio outside the library. It's nice out there most of the time, I don't mind it and the students know how to find it. The grad student lab where we're supposed to be able to work is . . . I'll just say . . . not real nice, so I don't spend much time in there.

So I roam like a gypsy with my netbook and my I-pod and I'm more than OK with that. I've had jobs with real nice offices and one thing I've learned is that if someone provides you an office they expect you to be in there. All the time. And that ain't me anymore.

It's a little strange to be on campus again - the same place where I ran around from age 17-22. Most of my roamings are around the Academic building and the oldest parts of campus - basically the same buildings I slept through classes as an undergrad. I can't pass a building or patch of grass on campus without thinking about something stupid or collegiately heroic I did there in my youth.

Being on a college campus is like standing next to a raging whitewater river of youth. You hear the roar of the water and you feel its force and you marvel at the rapids crashing against the boulders and banks. You can even feel a little spray from the river. But you can't jump in. Not even a toe. Your time in there has passed. But you feel optimistic and full of new life just for having been at the river. And that's what I like best about coming back to school.