The Education Continues

It's one of those rare Friday nights here in our apartment where we are actually free for the night. Just Joy and me and the dog. Every once in a while, we do something exciting: we move the sofa and coffee table, take the mattress off our bed, carry it down the hall, and put it right in front of the TV. We spend the night making some popcorn while piled in pillows and pick some movie that Joy will end up falling asleep to anyway. It's great fun. We took the idea from Over the Rhine's "Let's Spend the Day in Bed," and it really is just glorious. Toss the dog a treat, rub each others feet...

I write all this because it's one of the many things Joy and I have enjoyed in our humble apartment. While this last semester has been a little bit of a roller coaster while considering our plans once I graduate from Trinity International University, we now know what the next step is going to be. I was accepted into the doctoral program in clinical psychology at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

I had really come to think the possibility of doctoral education was out of the picture for the immediate future, but after a few phone interviews and a visit to the campus last weekend, the door has opened and we're walking through. Yes, it will be many more years of school. (People always ask and I dread telling them just how long, but it's five or six years. Thankfully, they're paying all tuition and giving me a stipend as well). While Joy and I have really loved living here in Arlington Heights and have come to make Country Glen Apartments a home we enjoy, we're very excited for this next step and move. There are indeed many details to take care of, but there's energy in those details and excitement in the plans.

Since our lease is finished at the end of May, we'll be living with Joy's parents for the months of June and July and then moving to Ohio at the beginning of August. I'm a little intimidated by the school, and all of the graduate students I met in the program commented on how overwhelming it can be, particularly the first year. In fact, one of the students had gotten her J.D. before starting the Ph.D. program, and I had tremors go through my body when she told me that law school was a piece of cake compared to the program she was in at Miami. Yikes. (Drew and Blom, I told her you would not be happy with that assessment.) As I met with several of the professors, there were multiple times that I understood the actual words coming from their mouths regarding their research, but when I tried to put those individual words together into coherent sentences, my mind was a fog. Nonetheless, the excitement remains, and it's certainly one step closer to my long-term goal (okay, very long-term goal) of getting my Ph.D. We'll see if it actually happens.

So for now we are trying to enjoy looking to the future while relishing in the present. We have one and a half months left here, and by jove, we're going to enjoy it. After all, I need to enjoy these days before the misery sets in come fall and I'm surrounded by books and research I don't understand. Plus, we don't know where we'll be living, and it just might not be as easier to bring the mattress into the living room.