Why I disappeared for a month

So I disappeared from pretty much everywhere for a month. I got married, and my sister and her dog visited from out of town, and every spare minute (hah!) other than that was taken up with trying to do the homework which didn't get done due to the getting married and out-of-state visitors bit. Oh, and my landlord called me after my sister left to complain in certain terms about the dog-presence. And we're still hunting down hairballs in the corners of the floor and so forth. Next weekend I'm going out of town for school. Sometimes I really question the wisdom of getting married and starting grad. school within a month of each other - my full attention cannot be anywhere, and that makes me cranky and irritable. Makes me want to hide somewhere with a stack of children's fantasy novels (Tamora Pierce's newest, Trickster Queen, is excellent btw) and not come out. I never loved the academic world, and now I miss getting to do my own research at my own pace. When I'm not in school I read a lot of neat stuff like Philip Foner's _History of the Labor Movement in the United States_ (after 3 years I'm just getting into vol. 2, it's like a 7 vol. work) or books on pre-revolutionary France's social culture. I resent having to leave that great stuff behind to read secondary sources in social science. And I've never been a big fan of reading from Journal articles. I'd rather hunt down one or two really significant books and read those than read twenty articles. I'll read the Golden Bough or the White Goddess, but reading soc. research articles really bores me.

In other words, I'm procrastinating my homework right now. Oh, and in all the chaos, I forgot to turn in an assignment I finished on time, and so I'm going to have to eat a significant portion of my grade and suck down a zero for an assignment I finished *five days early* because I got so stressed I forgot to hand it in. This is one of those things which is often referred to as ironic, but actually just sucks.

I got to see my best friend/roomie almejor at my wedding, but I really didn't get to talk to her. She made it though, and since she's in grad school, I thought that was pretty amazing. And other people. The thing about a wedding is that you don't get to see anyone long enough to really bond. Horrible. The food was good and the champagne flowed in copious quantities, and I looked quite nice. So that was good enough.

And I'm married now. One of these days when I've caught up with my homework and cleaned my house, I swear I'm gonna sit down for a whole afternoon and just try to wrap my head around that notion. There's something about being married that's different from being engaged, or living together. Maybe it's that conservative New-Englander in my head saying, "now I'm not living in sin", maybe it's that wanna-be samurai notion of promising your life to someone forever and ever. I don't know, but it's different. And I like it.