Cue exam montage.

So today I start my doctoral exams.

I'm looking a bit like the woman in the image, except she doesn't have enough books lying around her. I've got 72 hours of doing nothing but writing like mad ahead of me, and I'm going to be crazy and non-responsive to the internet -- hell, to most of the world -- most of that time.

That being said... I'm oddly grateful to be doing this. If you'd told me in 2000 that I'd be getting my doctorate in... well, anything, really, much less English, I'd have thought you were crazy. Now that I'm doing it, I'm pretty sure I'm crazy. But it's a good sort of crazy, I think, and it seems to suit me. I've turned into this person who half the time Yodas her way through things. Somehow I lost most of the ability to have someone tell me something they want that's crazy and agree with them. Now I'm on the path of, "you want that thing? So looking at this and that and the other, here's what it takes to get that thing. Do you still want it? Then do it." Which is very straightforward but not usually, it seems to me, how we view things in our life. It's hard to do, and there are inevitably downsides. It's a gamble, and you have to know you really want that thing to make it happen. But sometimes it does, and sometimes it's better than you had any right to expect.

Now if I can just pass these horrible, horrible exams. :)