Mastery Year 2: Interlude 7

 

Hi, all, Daniel-of-2018, here!

Next time I address you directly, I’ll be Daniel-of-2019. Curious how this convention of naming myself after the year—which is basically accidental, it just popped into my head a while back and I kept using it—makes it sound as though it is a different me every year. And I suppose I am different, though not very different. All the different mes have a family resemblance. Is this then, goodbye? Am I about to be replaced?

Anyway.

In recent years, I’ve flipped the schedule a bit, doing the eighth interlude after the holiday, but this year I’m doing it the other way and we’ll see how it goes. June and I spent Yule on campus, of course, then Christmas and New Years with her parents. Then we came home (campus) so she could go back to work, and I sat around feeling stupid.

After all, she had a job, and therefore a definite purpose, a reason for being where she was, whereas I occupied some nebulous middle ground between furlowed employee and student without classes. Exactly why was I on campus, paying room and board, instead of with my family?

It’s not that I literally had nothing to do, since I was still supposed to be working with Steve Bees and hammering out the details of my next years’ course of study, but none of it felt pressingly important and I missed my parents. So I went to stay with them for almost two weeks, most of which I spent missing my wife and worrying about how Steve Bees was doing.

So there will be about three or four weekly entries I’ll have to get creative about, just to give you fair warning.

It’s weird to think this is the last time I’m going to be heading into a new year of writing this blog. No, this story doesn’t go on forever. A year from now, I’ll be writing about getting ready to get my ring. After that? There are a few more things I’ll want to talk about, just to wrap up loose ends and bring my story up to the point where you came in on it. I don’t know yet whether that will take months or weeks or what, but I doubt it will take the whole year. And then the various identities I’ve taken on for the project the me of this year and the me of that year and everything else, will be at an end.

And I’ll just be me.