Unmoored

I cleaned out my locker at school today. (Yes, we have lockers. Yes, it's kind of like high school. There are bake sales and everything.)

My RWI (Reporting & Writing I) class—the core class at the J-school—had one last meeting today. RWI is a fall class, but our beloved professor, Sandy Padwe, has a tradition of gathering his students together for a final class a few days before graduation. It's a really nice tradition. Afterward, we took a class photo and a bunch of us went to lunch.

Later in the day, there was a boat cruise. Student and Teacher of the Year awards were presented, yearbooks were signed (I already said it's kind of like high school), and people walked around asking each other what they'd be doing after graduation. Most people don't have jobs, which makes it kind of interesting. There's no stigma at all attached to saying that you're going to take a vacation and then start job-hunting—it's the people who actually have jobs who are kind of awkward and apologetic about it.

Tomorrow is Journalism Day (catchy, huh?), when all of the official graduation prizes are awarded and the official speakers give their speeches. On Wednesday, there's the University graduation and then the J-school graduation, where I will be helping Professor Padwe give out diplomas to my RWI classmates.

I'm not sad at all about the fact that I'm not graduating this week—I made my peace with that months ago. But I am feeling out of sorts now that the school year is over. Everything is very in medias res, and I'm going to be in this weird kind of limbo for the next eight months, until I return to school full-time in January. It's not that I don't have plans or things to do—I've got plenty of both. It's just that my life is going to be very unstructured for a while, and I'm not used to that.

We'll see how it goes.