Yeah, I'm There

There's this commercial that was on a year ago, or so--I'm sure you know of it. It started off with this woman, speaking into the camera: "You know that place, where you haven't had a day off since the third grade?"

The punch line--Yeah, I'm there.

I am, by the way. That's what it feels like, sometimes. It didn't take long for that whole "Graduate school isn't that busy" thing to wash away.

Not that I'm not complaining (that much...). There is still much more time for personal things, time for making new friends and watching a mixture of amazing and terrible TV with "old" friends. But I'm starting to see the ways in which graduate school is challenging in its own right. It's the fluidity of things, the idea that you could--ostensibly--take a year to learn a technique. That you can do a certain surgery 200 times before its reproducible. That something like pipette tips can tank a month of work and hundreds of dollars in supplies.

It can be exhausting, really.

I am exhausted.

Sometimes, I acutely feel the weariness of nineteen consecutive years of schooling. Yeah, I'm there.