Full Ramblomation: Operation "M Speak"

I'm currently in the office (Sloan 118), slogging through five-point-five hours of required office time. It's not such a bad thing, really - the combination of the monitor in this room, which is quite nearly the size of Jupiter, and the executive-like feel of saying to peers and parents that I'm currently "in my office hours" makes me feel like some kind of big-wig - but it is certainly eating into time which I could be using for . . . I dunno, something, I'm sure. Really I am doing just what I would be doing during any other stretch of time spent in my room, procrastinating. The only difference here is that I'm somewhat professional and have appointments, don-cha-know.
+More/-Less

Now, the real meat of this posting is coming from a current despair I've been wrestling with like a greased-up Mickey Rourke (disturbing imagery, ho!): the difficulties of maintaining interpersonal relationships (especially those of a romantic nature) while attending graduate school and while searching for a professional degree and subsequent teaching position.

As some of you may be aware (though most may not be), I am currently firmly planted in the realm of 'Taken,' or 'In a Relationship,' by Facebook standards. Alex and I have been dating for a smallish bit of time, but it has been quality nonetheless - no qualms on this end, at least, and I like to think the satisfaction is mutual. Put simply, she's pretty much the bee's knees, so to speak.

Where the apprehension arrives, then, is in a cosmically-influenced hindrance to our otherwise best-laid plans: she's a fair bit younger than me and will be graduating in 2012; I am on a track for May '10. In an over-arching sense, this is supremely minor. In a minutiae sense, however, this is abysmal. I will be applying for graduate schools in roughly two months, trying my hand at several places that are rather far removed from the roots I've planted here in humble Mount Pleasant: esteemed epicenters of literary scholarship like Cambridge, Oxford, Cornell, Brown, NYU, and several others, I'm sure. Thinking in the best terms possible, I will be accepted someplace - maybe not one of those, but someplace nonetheless. This creates a long-distance relationship which will be at best cumbersome and draining and at worst volatile and defunct. I do not see the latter happening, but I roll abysmally on my Scrying checks, as I am no Wizard.

Now, this is a minimal setback on the grand scheme of shit that could happen. If all goes well - that is, we stick together through the portion of our lives which will separate us greatly - then the issue moves to one which is somewhat more dire. I am pursuing a professional degree in English with intentions of teaching at the collegiate level - a pretty barren job market with its own pitfalls, but I'll dodge those bear traps as they come - while she plans on teaching at the middle school and high school level. Our dreams would entail becoming a sort of tandem duo akin to a straight left and a right hook. She would drag them into the field of English with some cursory looks at early American literature, maybe a bit of modernism, then I'd go for the jugular with surveys, theory courses, and the occasional study in an author. It would be fantastic.

It's also fantastical. The odds of me getting a job in this market are bad enough as it is; the odds of her getting a job are equally poor. Combine the two into a single probability statement and you get something roughly equivalent to the odds of pencil gaining sentience, realizing its own relatively low worth and its own expendability, writing a bestseller in which it relates its life as a product to be consumed, used up, and thrown away when it no longer performs its function.

shit, I need to write that story now on this god-like monitor.

RKS out

-a tale told by an idiot