Dear Grad School

Dear Grad School,
This is no love poem, no ode or sonnet.
You are. Sucking out my soul. Like some demon vampire (but without sparkly skin or everlasting love), you ask more and more of me and leave me a withered shell, a wandering zombie, with puce crescents under puffy eyes and ulcers waiting menacingly in the shadows with acronyms aplenty. BICS, CALP, SEI, LEP, SIOP-- your dastardly thugs, all tattooed across my consciousness. You consume me until I can only blather on about pedagogy; Vygotsky haunts me, Piaget j-walks across my brain.

Ahh,I was a fool to think that by year five, I would have it all! That I would be ready to conquer you with my Medusa-like glare and Amazon precision. Even more foolish-- that I could do it in a year! Ha! I hear your laugh-- that mustache twirls as you tie me to the dual train tracks, the crossroads of higher pay and higher education. But at a price!

But-- what is that I see? A light, so far away, beckoning. Three and ten more weeks, and I will have you. In my clutches. You, nothing but a piece of paper which could smolder under my gaze and flutter like peppered moths into a blackened sky.

You will be mine.