I'm pretty busy with the final weeks of college, but I can't stop thinking about what it's going to be like to be done. School seems to bring out the worst of my inflexible, all-or-nothing, color within the lines tendencies. Do well, and life is beautiful. Go astray once, and it seems as though there's no point to even trying to get back within the lines; you've already blown it, why not just sink further into degradation and sloth? I exaggerate for effect. On the other hand, it's not all that exaggerated. I need to find some balance. School is the one area in which I can never seem to get the hang of it.

It's been a strange semester. It's been a strange experience going back for a college degree, period. It's like a series of sprints, and I've always hated sprinting. Rush to class night after night, participate in discussions, take notes like mad, read thick, fact-filled books, get tested every week or write a series of papers, spew entire contents of accumulated knowledge for final, rest. Do it again. And so on for six semesters at Wuthering Heights Community College, and three semesters before that at MTSU. Insert enormous amounts of self-pity, occasional wails of despair, regular bouts of seething in anger, more or less constant clutching of forehead (and subsequent comical disarray of hair) as crucial part of concentration process, stir in a fierce, implacable determination to get nothing less than A's, and you have my life as a student.

I am so sick of academia, so entirely fed up with jumping through hoops to prove I have a brain. And yes, this is my problem, thanks. I get that part.

The reasons I kept going back to college were to prove to myself that I'm genuinely smart, and to find out if I could finish a long-term, complex project. I wasn't sure. Dozens of friends and relatives tried to tell me it was true, but I didn't believe it in my heart because I didn't have a diploma. That was the holy grail. To get it I'd have to be both smart and doggedly persistent. And you know what? It worked. I truly believe I am smart. I am convinced of it because I took Math, Algebra, U.S. History, Romantic Poetry and Literature, Literary Criticism, Playwriting, Oceanography, Human Biology, Cultural Anthropology, Formal Logic and Rhetoric, California Ethnic History, and Piano, and I did extremely well in all of them while working full time and maintaining a happy home life.

Now that's balance.

But all that aside, soon I will be looking for a way to pursue creative endeavors with the full time job and the happy home life. It's going to be wonderful having my time to myself again. With school you're on someone else's schedule. I hate being on a schedule. On the other hand, I acknowledge what a superior motivational tool it is. So how good will I be at scheduling myself when it comes to creative work? I don't know. I could abandon all pretense of writing for publication and just let myself bash out a chapter here and there on the book whenever I'm in the mood. Or I could set a schedule and say it doesn't matter whether you do it in seven days or seven hours, you must write 7,000 words a week. That's perfectly reasonable, but I'd hate it because I'd fall behind, instantly abandon hope, and lay around on the sofa eating Cheetos and reading mysteries for the rest of the year. No, I think I'm through with fixed schedules, but I can't simply drift, either. There must be a (ooh, theme entry) balance between scheduled and unscheduled creativity.

So I hereby proclaim 2003 the year dedicated to my time travel agency romance. If I finish sooner, terrific. If I'm three-fourths of the way there at the year mark, no problem, I get an extension. If I don't come close to finishing it then I will stop working on it and go on to something else in 2004. No penalty. No hard feelings. Not only that, I hereby declare I can do more than write if I feel like it. I can take painting lessons. I can start carving rubber stamps again. I'm not going to say, "Forsooth, no way, I must abjure all other arts and distractions for I am Writing!" Because it's supposed to be fun. That's my reward for finishing college. Now I know: I can stick to any schedule thrown at me while improving my mind at the same time. I have demonstrated once and for all that I am neither stupid nor lazy.

Knowing that, I can finally allow myself to be creative in any form I choose, purely and simply because it's fun. No justification required.

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