Twenty Weeks

You enter graduate school and there’s a Ph.D. waiting for you, but it’s on the other side of a lot of study, dissertation writing and defending. You know you will someday be a partner in the law firm you joined yesterday, but there will be years of hard work, billable hours and cases to win.

I know there’s a cruise in just twenty weeks from today, but I have to go through what has been predicted as a long, very cold and snowy winter. It’s going to be a long twenty weeks.

Ten weeks is not going to be much of a consolation when I have to tramp over to the parking lot where my car is covered in snow and ice, where the heater will not do much of anything before I get where I am going.

It’s hard to be excited, as you slip and slide through one of those real lousy slippery storms and realize that your destination is maybe 85 degrees and sunny. They haven’t seen snow since, maybe, the Little Ice Age 10,000 years ago. Even then, the area is volcanic and might have been the Cro-Magnons’ vacation spot.

I guess it could be worse; Mars has dust storms that last three or four months, Venus is 900 degrees, Mercury is horribly hot on one side and horribly cold on the other, the Moon is romantic if you are making out on the beach but not so if you are living there.

I guess twenty weeks isn’t so bad.